Girl Talk at The Venue June 21
Hi everyone, I know most of you are finishing up your projects like I am, but I thought I would point out that Girl Talk will be at The Venue June 21. Good luck with your projects everyone!

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Girl Talk at The Venue June 21
Hi everyone, I know most of you are finishing up your projects like I am, but I thought I would point out that Girl Talk will be at The Venue June 21. Good luck with your projects everyone!

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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I love that you posted that pic of the fertility statue! A huge statue like this was up for sale at an auction of ancient things in Hellboy 2. I was going to post such a picture but saw you already had. The age of such statues is amazing! It is about as simple,fundamental, and symbolic as you can...
I agree it's incredible how ancient the "Venus" carvings are, and how mysterious. Their age and anonymity make them open to interpretation. The interpretation of "Dr. Parsani" is radically different from that of the two anthropologists.
What does "complicity with anonymous materials" mean? Cyclonopedia spins out wild quasi-historic, mythological, political, religious and psychological commentaries on several "anonymous materials," especially oil, air, soil, and water. These materials, too, are ancient and open to interpretation.
Coincidentally, while thinking about this topic I received an email promoting Subaru's "Work Play Love Tour," and I was struck by its slogan: "Air is Therapy. Play Ignites Work. Dirt Cleanses Mind." This seems in complete opposition to "Dr. Parsani's" notions of air, soil, inside, outside, and productivity. The campaign encourages consumers to get in their Subaru, a machine made of metal and petroleum that also burns petroleum, and get "outside" to enjoy a presumably therapeutic experience with air and soil. This experience will rejuvenate their "inside" and make them more productive.
The campaign's website features the goofy photo above, in which one guy looks like he is getting ready for a Middle-East dust storm.
Photo courtesy Subaru of America, Inc.
Finally put down Cyclonopedia for the last time. I feel pretty confident in saying that I’m never going to be picking it back up again. I was thinking about all of the past readings we’ve been doing in this class, looking for some kind of frame to put the book in so as to make a good blog post,...
Yes, that's what's frustrating about Cyclonopedia - the lack of frame. I was always looking for a frame, and some kind of context for interpreting the writings of "Dr. Parsani," because the first few pages of the book seem to go to a good deal of trouble to portray Dr. Parsani as a madman, but then the frame goes away and we are left in direct contact with the madman's words. In other books and movies that portray a mad character, the narrative will usually work to put that madness into some kind of "safe" context - it will be distanced or repudiated in some way.
For example, while channel surfing a few days ago I came across the movie As Good As It Gets, in which Jack Nicholson plays Melvin, a misanthrope suffering from OCD, who insults everyone he meets in the most repugnant ways possible. Audiences are free to laugh (if uncomfortably) at Melvin's horrible insults, because the character has a mental illness - he can't help his behavior. During the course of the film Melvin falls in love with a waitress, Carol (played by Helen Hunt), and he decides to start taking his OCD medication and start behaving better. In one of the movie's key scenes, Melvin tells Carol, "You make me want to be a better man."
I kept waiting for a moment like that in Cyclonopedia, a moment when the madness would be turned around, repudiated, put into context or made safe, but that moment didn't come, at least not as far as I could tell. Did I miss it?
The Meaning of Venus
I've enjoyed reading Cyclonopedia, in the way one might enjoy a weirdly entertaining horror movie (by the way, thanks to everyone who posted the fun clips from Phantoms), and I do think it's brilliant at times. This quote from "freelance critic" Jonathan McCalmont sums up what I think is interesting about the book:
"Cyclonopedia . . .embodies an academic culture where impenetrability, the playful use of data from other disciplines and indifference to objective truth are not hidden secrets but standard operating procedure. However, what is even more enjoyable about this book as a piece of guerrilla methodology is that Negarestani is not chiding the cultural studies for its wayward values… he is positively celebrating them. Cyclonopedia presents Theory as a form of artistic creation where words and images combine in obscure and unexpected manners in order to produce works of obscure but terrifying beauty."
At times, however, I've been arrested by what I view as a strong current of misogyny in Cyclonopedia,in which productivity is equated with contamination, and contamination is specifically embodied as feminine. This complex of associations runs throughout all we've read of the book so far, but it's especially apparent in the sections entitled "The Dead Mother of All Contagions" and "Mistmare."
Maybe the "authenticity" theme is played out in this Tumblr group, but I'm going to add to it anyway, because after we talked about "authentic" Mexican food in class I kept seeing this puzzling ad during a TV show I was watching.
The ad (the one entitled "Men") for Jose Cuervo's 1800 (1800 as in the year) tequila talks about a time in the nebulous, authentic past when "real men" drank "real tequila," and bemoans the present when effeminate men drink "poser" tequila (Patron), but it's done in such a transparently manipulative way that I wondered if it was supposed to be ironic.
The ad does seem to be picking up on a characteristic of at least a few Patron drinkers - some people like Patron just because it's expensive and comes in a pretty bottle with a green ribbon. These people probably wouldn't drink Patron unless their friends know that they're drinking it and that it's pricey.
Another 1800 ad, the one entitled "Commercials," is definitely tongue in cheek, because it acknowledges with a wink that a lot of TV commercials are nonsense and sell the image rather than the product. Jose Cuervo didn't stick with this approach, though, and the other ads in the series seem like their message (you are not a real man if you drink Patron) can be taken straight or as irony.
This post from the blog "Psychomercials" analyzes the 1800 tequila ads in a little more depth.
I think a more successful series of ads is the "Most Interesting Man in the World" series from Dos Equis. These are entertaining and obviously outrageous.

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Latour and Glee
I have found the Latour reading to be extremely interesting, and to provide useful ways of thinking about processes of boundary formation, group identity and personal identity that seem to figure hugely in most people's lives. I find Latour's idea of focusing "the relative share of mediators over intermediaries" (p. 61) in any situation to be a very useful concept. Latour says that "ANT pictures a world made of concantenations of mediatorswhere each point can be said to fully act," yet he acknowledges there is no communication without intermediation, and that no action can be seen as fully independent.
I could illustrate some of these processes with serious and controversial examples, because it's extremely dangerous when people rely to much on intermediated, received ideas, and place too much importance on boundary formation. The Trayvon Martin tragedy illustrates some of these dangers, as we discussed in class. People are killed every day because they have violated group boundaries, or because they are seen as hated vehicles for intermediated, received ideas about "others."
A more lighthearted example is a problem my high school age daughter is having in her choir group at school. She is considering dropping out because she is tired of the outrageous behavior of her classmates, and their obsession with interpersonal drama. She says the situation has gotten much worse during her three years of high school. I wondered if any of the kids were being influenced by the TV show "Glee," which seems to send the message "Choir kids are quirky!" "Choir kids love drama!"
Admittedly, this is a chicken-and-egg question, because choir kids have had a reputation for diva behavior long before "Glee" was on the air, but the behavior might be reinforced by the show in a weird feedback loop. "Glee" is a show that uses lots of different stereotypes while seeming to promote individual authenticity, in a way that I don't find all that successful.
Here’s a story of potential interest from the recent Wired magazine:
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors…..
MORE HERE
I live about 5 miles away from this facility, which Wired asserts is "deep in the Utah desert" (it's on the cover). Funny, I thought I lived on the Wasatch Front, population more than 2 million. Also, the Big Love, Utah-is-creepy framing of the article is beyond irrelevant. Oh, Wired. Makes me wonder what other details in the article have been exaggerated for effect.
That being said, I think the project itself is has huge implications. 99.9 percent of NSA's enormous database will be junk, but personal junk, human lives turned into bits and bytes that can be sorted, manipulated and mined, for purposes that will not always be innocent. NSA will need lots of characters who are like the Rabbit in Rainbows End:
"Knowledge is piled metaphorical light-years deep. Given that, the truly golden skill is the one I possess - to bring together the knowledge and abilities that make solutions . . . I am world class at 'bringing-together-to-get-answers.'"
One thing I find confusing in the article is that NSA was very involved in the development and implementation of Advanced Encryption Standard, and now they're spending billions trying to break it. This is difficult for me to wrap my mind around, but I think it relates to class discussions we've had about control, the way control seems to escalate, find a balance, and then re-escalate as new breakouts occur.
Khan Academy on 60 Minutes
I wondered how many of you saw this 60 Minutes segment about Khan Academy, the free online education system we've talked about a couple of times in class. I'm very excited about these kinds of developments in education, fusing customized online and classroom learning, with the teacher as mentor and coach, rather than knowledge deliverer. If you are or intend to be an educator it's worth your time to take a look.
One of my hobbies is cooking. It relaxes me at the end of the day and also gives me a sense of accomplishment — hey, I created something that others can enjoy! I get many of my recipes from cooking blogs, many of which I discovered through Pinterest. However, cooking blogs are a completely...
I've also thought about food bloggers as an example of a relatively new kind of network that borrows many of its protocols from older networks. Over the past year I've become involved with a group of food writers and food bloggers who get together to have lunch once a month. I'm not a food blogger, but I sometimes write restaurant reviews as a part of my job, so I've found it interesting to "meet" these ladies both online and in person.
Everyone in the group "met" through Twitter, but they have become offline friends as well. They interact online, but they also get together to cook and eat. In addition, they throw baby showers, sympathize with each other's losses, help each through sickness, and do a lot of the things "regular" girlfriends would do. Their friendships help promote their blogs, because there are a few people in the group who can help get the food bloggers into the local newspapers and onto local TV shows.
I agree that the photos are a huge part of the attraction with these food blogs. In my blog, I'm restricted to an old-fashioned format that's required by my employer. I don't have the freedom to use tons of gorgeous photos like, for example, the Pioneer Woman, who for her most recent recipe post used 30 large photos! I'm not a huge fan of the Pioneer Woman's over-the-top use of photos or her country girl online persona, but it's working for her. She's become a celebrity, and her blog brings in more that $1 million per year in ad revenues.
I can't be the only one who thought of this scene from The Matrix during our discussion of Jane Bennett and the power of things. Bennett's emphasis on the force of things, placing things on a level playing field with human subjects, in fact asserting that human subjects are themselves things, is the opposite of what Neo finds in the Matrix, where the subject is all and things are illusions. I admire Bennett and her project, and I appreciate her rhetorical stance, which combines the courage to make bold statements with a lack of pretense toward originality and a willingness to be a little goofy.
Philosophical and literary discussions surrounding the limits of subjectivity and representation, the gap between subjects and objects, between words and things, go back at least as far as the myth of Adam and Eve (when Adam and Eve gain knowledge and self-awareness, they lose contact with God or the absolute), continuing through Greek philosophy and into the present. Bennett points out that the increasing connectedness and networked nature of people and things changes the tone of these discussions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In various ways, people have sought to escape the limits of the subject and experience oneness with the absolute (through spiritual practices, meditation or psychedelic drugs), or to experience subjectivity as mastery (mind over matter, The Secret, the Matrix). In Western thought, however, the subject is usually given primacy over things; things are represented as both unreal and inert. Plato's allegory of the cave, for example, paradoxically insists that material experience is an illusion and idealized Forms, which live in the mind and in representation, are ultimately real.
I think the history of the 20th century has illustrated the extreme danger of making things, and human being as things, subservient to Ideals, Forms, and Big Ideas. it's time for more practical, and more networked, ways of thinking. As Bennett states, "A newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself."

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Project Ideas
Here are a couple of project ideas I thought of as an an alternative to a traditional "close reading" of Rainbows End. I don't know if these are on the right track . . .
Interview an executive from a data security company about the history, current trends and future of identity theft, or about the relationship between data security and national security. Write this up as a magazine article of about 1000 words. The connections with Rainbows End would be implied. Alternatively, you could do a 2-person project, and add an academic paper spelling out some of the relationships between the interview and Rainbows End.
Visit a computer class for seniors; these are taught at most senior citizen centers. Interview and record seniors with different attitudes toward technology. Do the same thing at a computer class for children. Create a short documentary film or an audio podcast. This could easily be a group project.
I read this article just a few weeks ago in the Huffington Post about clothing becoming wearable computers. So obviously I thought about it as I’ve read Rainbow’s End. Vinge writes of the world set in 2025 but really, we’re not so far away from the future he imagines right now. I remember reading a novel called “Looking Backwards” where a man falls asleep in 1888 and wakes up in 2000 to a socialist society that lives in a world of credit and debt. When Edward Bellamy wrote that book I’m sure the idea of purchasing items with something made of plastic seemed absurd. That all happened much sooner than the year 2000. Vernor Vinge’s ideas are probably closer than they seem….
I have felt exactly this way several times throughout the novel. Someone in class mentioned that the computer that Robert uses right after his rehabilitation is very similar to an iPad. The professor beat me to it but I saw that Google is rumored to be launching wearable heads up displays by the end of the year. The article I linked to has much the same information as the other posted, but I linked to this one because of the picture. It shows exactly what I have pictured during the novel when they describe “wearing.” We live in the future!
I wonder what the new Google glasses will look like - it's funny that "Google" sounds a lot like "goggle." I hope they will eventually look like regular glasses, because we will probably reach a point where somebody who doesn't have them will seem behind the times and will not be able to fully participate in society, the way someone who doesn't have a cell phone seems today.
My husband is in the data security business, and he tells me that Android is the least secure operating system around. What happens if your eyeglasses are hacked or infected with a virus?
We’ve talked a lot in class about protecting an idea or product from other people using it. It made me wonder about “trends” and how those are similar or different. Pick up any fashion magazine and you are almost guaranteed to see some ad or article about how to get something you have seen on a celebrity. From cars to clothes and accessories these ads push the suggested added consumption onto the general populace. This makes sense as it makes more money for the people who created the items and they pay not only the magazines to run the pictures and ads, but sometimes also pay the celebrities to use and, therefore, endorse, their product. But what about when it comes to features?
There was a time at the height of “Friends” when every woman wanted Jennifer Aniston’s hair for her own. Then everyone wanted Angelina Jolie’s lips. (apparently Brad Pitt wanted them both.) These along with a number of other famous features have been, subsequently, solicited to the public. It almost seems it is encouraged for everyone to get said hairstyle, or collagen injections. But I have never heard of a celebrity suing someone for having their same hairstyle or the like. Nor even the hair designer saying anyone who wanted that haircut would have to give him or her money first. I hope nobody takes this as a suggestion to do as such, but I just wondered why this seemed to be an exception to the “that’s my idea, pay me” rule of the majority of what we have discussed.
Image courtesy CBS.com
networktopologies:I couldn't find an image or ad for the Jackie Kennedy wig, but I did find a newspaper article from 1966, an advertorial about the new synthetic wig's realism and skyrocketing sales. The name of the company was Reid-Meredith Living Wigs. After getting out of the wig business, my uncle made a second fortune as an executive and investor in a company that pioneered another type of simulation, computer graphics and flight simulation firm Evans and Sutherland, which originated in the University of Utah computer science department.
browncoat27: In making a distinction between remix and ripoff, I mean that remix is borrowing material from another artist and using it in a way that is at least minimally creative, while ripoff is just taking another person's work and either using it without permission or presenting it as original. The line between remix and ripoff is a matter of opinion, so I agree that the legal definition is important, and copyright infringement will probably always be litigated.
With that being said I can't resist posting a link to a 2012 Grammy acceptance speech from Dave Grolhl, my second favorite middle-aged rocker. Grohl said, "To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what's important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that's the most important thing for people to do." Grohl's speech angered some fans of electronic music, but I liked it. What made me smile was that the Foo Fighters walked offstage accompanied by a track from autotune kings LMFAO.
I Heart Creative Commons (With a Prologue)
Watching RiP! made me think of a line from the U2 song "The Fly":
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief
Truthfully, I'm a little confused by all the violent rhetoric in the stuff we've discussed about remix, copyright infringement and artistic influence. Girl Talk said he wanted to "put Elton John in a headlock, and pour a beer over his head." Back off, dude! Elton's an old man! And he's a knight!
Shaviro, paraphrasing Jeter, says "copyright violation cannot possibly be creative; it's a pure expression of negativity and hatred," explaining that someone who appreciates art has a death wish for both the creator and for himself (59-60). I'm deliberately using the masculine pronoun here, because I wonder if this is largely a male attitude. I wasn't surprised when Shaviro turned to the subject of testosterone, because I had been thinking about it for a couple of days before I got to that section of the book.
Now that I've got that off my chest, I actually wanted to write about Creative Commons. I love Creative Commons and think it's a genius idea. I use it quite a bit to find images for my work as an online journalist. But it has its limitations. Certain types of images are not usually available on Creative Commons - those that are expensive to produce, requiring specialized camera equipment, lots of time, and a trained photographer.
For more expensively produced images my employer provides me with a paid subscription to Getty Images, a company that offers images produced by their own photographers and by freelancers. The most expensively produced, timely, rare or otherwise desirable images are usually not available through Getty's subscription, but have to be licensed individually, and these types of licenses are not cheap.
Obviously, in a capitalist society, people expect to get paid. Some photographers are willing to give their work away, but professionals usually aren't - they've invested a lot of time and money in it.
I don't know a lot about the market for music samples, but it seems there could be a negotiated protocol, or set of protocols, for licensing music that would be parallel to the protocols for licensing photography.
The newest, most expensively produced music won't, and probably shouldn't, be cheap to license. Older music, or music for which the copyright holder chooses to give away the license, could be treated differently.
As a point of reference, here's a link to an NPR story explaining how Rhianna's record label, Def Jam, spent over $1 million to produce the song "Man Down," not knowing whether or not the song would be a hit (it wasn't). Until record labels get a less expensive business model, they will probably fight to protect their investment.
How Much Does It Cost to Make a Hit Song?
Photo: U2 performing "The Fly," by Ryan Adams/Creative Commons
We’ve talked a lot in class about protecting an idea or product from other people using it. It made me wonder about “trends” and how those are similar or different. Pick up any fashion magazine and you are almost guaranteed to see some ad or article about how to get something you have seen on a celebrity. From cars to clothes and accessories these ads push the suggested added consumption onto the general populace. This makes sense as it makes more money for the people who created the items and they pay not only the magazines to run the pictures and ads, but sometimes also pay the celebrities to use and, therefore, endorse, their product. But what about when it comes to features?
There was a time at the height of “Friends” when every woman wanted Jennifer Aniston’s hair for her own. Then everyone wanted Angelina Jolie’s lips. (apparently Brad Pitt wanted them both.) These along with a number of other famous features have been, subsequently, solicited to the public. It almost seems it is encouraged for everyone to get said hairstyle, or collagen injections. But I have never heard of a celebrity suing someone for having their same hairstyle or the like. Nor even the hair designer saying anyone who wanted that haircut would have to give him or her money first. I hope nobody takes this as a suggestion to do as such, but I just wondered why this seemed to be an exception to the “that’s my idea, pay me” rule of the majority of what we have discussed.
I like this example - I actually have an uncle who became very rich in the '60s because he invented and sold a Jackie Kennedy style wig. As far as I know Mrs. Kennedy never sued him. I think a lot depends on how much you copy from any particular source, and how you use it. Remix is one thing, ripoff is another. Hopefully copyright law will continue to develop a distinction between the two.

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The Napster Hole
Shaviro's musings on Napster made me think of one powerful illustration of Galloway and Thacker's notions of protocol. "Often a misuse or an exploit of a protocol, be it intended or unintended, can identify the political fissures in a network."
Napster operated as a free, peer-to-peer music file sharing network from 1999 to 2001, allowing anyone to upload their music library to a server, where anyone else could download it, illegally and for free. Shaviro, who says he downloaded about 500 songs from Napster, describes the period as a time of "unprecedented freedom and joy" (Wow, all that from free music?).
I had a different reaction; I downloaded a few songs from Napster but didn't like the fact that it amounted to theft. I had just been through the experience of running an online software sales business in which I was victimized on a daily basis by people using fake credit card numbers (in the earliest days of online commerce when security was nonexistent), so I had the same hatred of pirates Shaviro ascribes to Jeter (minus that creepy trophy thing). These were people who would never dream of sticking a gun in my face and demanding the $20 bill in my wallet, but they didn't seem to have any compunction about defrauding me of that same $20 by stealing software with a fake credit card number.
Napster had legal problems from the beginning and was eventually shut down as a free file sharing service, but I kept thinking it could be a great idea if only someone developed a way to download a song for a fair price, say $1. In 2001, someone did just that when Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes. From my point of view the thing that sets the iPod apart is not the player, but the software. iTunes is a lot easier to use than other programs I've tried for downloading and organizing music. iTunes also offers a lot more content than competing services. Admittedly, the strict Digital Rights Management can be a drag - once you pay for a song you can't always do everything you want with it.
Napster exposed a huge hole in the online economy, a hole that iTunes ended up filling. iTunes represents a form of negotiated protocol - users have easy access to more content (more information) than ever, and content producers generally get paid. Not everyone who participates in this negotiated protocol has equal control or gets equal benefit - the major beneficiary is the ultra-influential, ultra-rich Apple Corporation. As Galloway and Thacker write, "protological control brings into existence a certain contradiction, at once distributing agencies in a complex manner, while at the same time concentrating rigid forms of management and control."
Image courtesy of Apple Corp. (I hope by adding that link I have complied with fair use.)
Make the "Invisible Hand" Visible
Shaviro writes: "The technolibertarians of Silicon Valley and Redmond tend to regard the capitalist economy as a natural, organic network, just like the rain forest (29ff). It’s almost too perfect a metaphor. The high-tech industry gets to have things both ways. On one hand, the rain forest is a place of life-and-death, Darwinian struggle. This is the famous vision of nature “red in tooth and claw,” rape as the natural order of things, a warrant for cutthroat capitalist competition. On the other hand, and at the very same time, the rain forest is a complex, self-regulating ecosystem. It exhibits spontaneous, self-generated order. All its pieces fit seamlessly together, and each problem receives an optimal solution. Everything converges, as the New Economy evangelist Kevin Kelly puts it, into a universal, corporate “hive mind.” The economy, like the rain forest, thus miraculously embodies both the New Age ideal of harmony and balance, and the workings of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. All is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds, as long as nobody intervenes to limit corporate power" (2).
Why limit this description to Silicon Valley and Redmond, when it applies equally well to Wall Street and Washington, D.C.? The view of "The Market" as an all-powerful, inscrutable, godlike entity that will bless us all as long as we make the proper sacrifices is widely held, but only to a point.
When the unregulated market reaches a crisis so large that it might collapse, the federal government comes to the rescue with billions of taxpayer dollars. This happened with the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, and on a much larger scale with the mortgage market collapse that began in 2008.
One recent example of the prevailing schizophrenic attitude toward markets is a scandal at Freddie Mac, which was chartered by the Federal government in 1970. "Our statutory mission is to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the U.S. housing market," Freddie Mac says on its website" (NPR, "Freddie Mac Betting Against Struggling Homeowners"). Freddie Mac would not exist without the backing and taxation power of the federal government, yet it operates as a private corporation. It is a "government sponsored enterprise," traded on the New York Stock Exchange until it delisted amid scandal in 2010.
In the past few weeks, NPR and ProPublica have revealed that Freddie Mac, while it largely controls access to mortgage refinancing, also has essentially placed bets against homeowners being able to refinance, through an internal hedge fund. The hedge fund branch of the Freddie Mac corporation held sophisticated mortgage derivatives that would make the company money if homeowners were unable to refinance, while the corporation's main "statutory mission is to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the U.S. housing market." Freddie Mac executives saw nothing wrong with this contradiction and maintained that their first job is to make money for the company, especially with the goal of paying back the roughly $169 billion bailout it received from the federal government in 2008. They also argued that the hedge fund branch of the company is walled off from the main corporation and has no power over access to mortgage refinance.
Why am I telling this long-winded story? It's time for a more rational view of "The Market." The market is made up of people with their competing self-interests. These competing interests should be made explicit, and if necessary regulated in a rational way. "The Market" is not a god, either benevolent or demonic, nor is it inscrutable. It is not a "hive mind," but rather a collection of minds with differing and competing points of view.