Margin Call, Schiller and Mr. Robot

Admittedly, I do not know much about the way Wall Street works, so when we were watching Margin Call in class I did not always have the clearest idea what was going on, or why certain actions were good, or others bad.  What I did understand was that in this true life example, certain people held the power to make decisions that affected the lives of others, simply because of the access to information that they had.

I then read the Dan Schiller piece, How to Think About Information, and I think what he said about commodifying information is relatable to what we watched in Margin Call. Thinking of information as a resource adds an interesting dimension to Margin Call.  Really, there was no actual money in the film, it was all just data and data analysis.  Zachary Quinto’s character predicts the collapse of a market because he has access to the information and the “know-how” to understand it (techne).  This demonstrates the commodification of information because Quinto’s job is to develop and work with information, and in the case of Wall Street the information is directly tied to capital.

This reminds me as well of a theme in a newer TV series that I’ve been watching called Mr. Robot (very mild spoilers ahead).  In the show, one of the main characters make the point that “money is the operating system of society” (S01E01).  This really sunk in with me and I think it relates to the course, especially when you look at money as just digitized numbers in a database that determine a person’s worth and the privilege they have to access information.  In the show, they suggest that erasing all the informational history of money will ultimately put everyone on an equal playing field and allow for the redistribution of wealth.

I believe that this ties into the course because this perspective turns money into something imaginary- something invisible that guides our society, and demonstrates how imaginaries profoundly impact the materialities of our society, such as economic inequality as a result of capitalism.

I know that the show is fictional, but do you guys think that it is too utopian of a notion to suggest that “erasing” the information that is money could contribute to a more egalitarian society? Or do you think that it is a necessary articulation in our cultural economy?