The advent and generalization of digital computing machines in the twentieth century spelled a wholesale revolution in communication technologies. As with every technological revolution, this one came irreducibly co-involved with transformations in the economic sphere. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this meant financialization, which comprised an exponential expansion in the size and power of finance, a reversal in preeminence between the “real” and the financial economy, and the saturation of an increasing proportion of social processes with financial logics and evaluative criteria. None of these developments would have been possible without digital computers. This dissertation, Cash Flows: A Media Archeology of Financial Engineering, 1958-1987, details the involution between late-twentieth century finance and digital media, demonstrating that to understand finance, we must understand the digital, and to understand the digital, we must understand finance.Financialization and the computerization of finance can be accounted for, I show, under the rubric of financial engineering, a distinct mode of financial operation that emerged beginning in 1958. Financial engineering combines a novel conceptual scheme with novel technologies. The conceptual scheme, no-arbitrage, takes over for earlier neoclassical understandings of economic and financial operation based on equilibrium; it shifts the responsibility for the maintenance of “true” prices from the counterbalancing forces of spontaneous rational actors to the concerted efforts of financial theorists. Concomitantly, I show, it uses digital computers to transform financial theory from a post facto, empirical, and descriptive venture to an ex ante, speculative, and constructive one. Financial theory becomes a real-time data processing operation.Drawing on media theory and the philosophy of technology and updating the foundational account of human-machine interaction offered by the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, Cash Flows offers a way to understand how media transformation drove financialization, what financialization tells us about media transformation, and what consequences we should expect from the continued generalization of digital technologies. The revolution of the digital, as I detail, involves a profound change in the relationship between machines and symbols. Rather than simply reproducing symbols—a capacity machines had possessed since at least the fifteenth century—digital machines operationalized them. As Cash Flows argues, the fundamental factor in last century’s financial transformation was the newfound ability of machines to transform symbols into actions. Digital computers enabled finance to machinically operationalize social and subjective processes humans carry out as a matter of course. Concomitantly, then, the saturation an increasing proportion of social processes by digital media is equally finance’s conquest of the social. All the consequences we see within the finance narrowly defined—from the construction of totalizing interconnection between elements that had previously been understood as belonging to separate spheres; to the transformation of psychic and social flows into value-generating data streams; to the enlistment of the human as a co-processor of digital data; to more frequent, more widely ranging, and more severe crises amplified by feedback loops between humans and machines—are equally the social consequences of digitization.
