Coding the (Digital) Flows

Abstract

In this article, I will engage the contested terrain of contemporary (online) transparency by looking at it through the lens of a “cultural studies of finance.” I will focus here especially on the conflicting but complementary tactics of technologically enhanced transparency and how it is being strategically mobilized by, on the one hand, an increasingly vocal macroeconomically informed and invested online community of bloggers and online activists (“econo-bloggers”) and, on the other hand, by one of the primary targets of their transparency-seeking attacks: the Federal Reserve (the Fed)—the central bank of the United States. I want to show how the transparency tactics being pursued by both parties at once conflict with and complement one another as both parties play the transparency game with the same objective: to win the monetary policy debate and thereby achieve a sort of monetarily significant ontological legitimacy. This legitimacy is premised upon a monopolization of the very nature of monetary “truth”: a form of truth that’s becoming increasingly important to control and manage in light of, for instance, recent economic catastrophes, the faith-based nature of contemporary credit- and fiat-based money, and ever-inflating commodity costs (e.g., gold and oil). But while both the econo-blogosphere and the Fed champion transparency-promoting agendas, their allegedly transparency-promoting tactics are not so much about getting at “objective” realities concerning money as they are about controlling the message. Transparency in this online macroeconomically inflected infowar is a tool used both offensively and defensively either to maintain or subvert status quo monetary policy; more prosaically, transparency—and the appeal to transparency as a sort of moral or ethical “good”—has today become a technologically necessitated public relations tool masquerading behind a veil of authenticity and unadulterated exposure.

Keywords

transparency econo-blogosphere ontology of money infowar new media

Introduction

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

—Laing (2005, p. 1)

In a bid to engage the insatiable info-appetite of an always-on culture bent on bringing to light individual, corporate, and national secrets, a radical transparency imperative is currently playing out across cyberspace, requiring that individual, corporate, and governmental online communication practices embrace tell-all communication strategies. We might assume that this transparency imperative could simply be defined by the equation: transparency = good; secrecy or opacity = bad (Birchall, 2011a, 2011b). Indeed, such overly straightforward assessments of the transparency trend dominate popular understandings of the meaning and value of transparency today. This logic was breathlessly described by Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine as early as 2007 when he wrote:

Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups—and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents. [ . . . ] The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. [ . . . ] Now, billion-dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. (Thompson, 2007)

Thompson concludes flippantly, “But are we really ready to do all our business in the buff?” He does not observe, however, that the relative levels of “transparency” and “secrecy” that are increasingly demanded by today’s knowledge-seeking publics, corporations, or governments do not emerge in a vacuum but correspond to and reflect the technologies and processes of exposure that accompany and/or necessitate them. That is, today’s emphasis on transparency might usefully be thought of not only as an unsurprising effect of our information-saturated existence, but also as a phenomenon that has been emergently co-constructed alongside the tools and technologies today’s communication networks make possible. In other words, today’s technologies remain incapable of—in any absolute sense—making the invisible visible, of achieving objectively complete disclosure; rather, today’s technologies make visible precisely those things these technologies are capable of “seeing.” That being the case, we can acknowledge that what is “new” about today’s technological advances is that they have contributed to an exponential expansion of visibility (and, in turn, transparency) in so far as these days the speed, storage capacity, search abilities, and distribution of information is easier, more efficient, faster, and more accessible than ever. The challenge, then, for those being exposed in new ways and those doing the exposing—particularly in the post-Prism world of surveillance and data-harvesting revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden (Greenwald, MacAskill, & Poitras, 2013)—is not whether or not to participate in what seems like an ongoing process of undesirable unveiling, but how to manage these technological changes and the corresponding messages—and “revelations”—they are producing in ways that are adequate to the demands and desires not only of the technologies and affordances of the contemporary information-filled battlefield but also in ways that take advantage of today’s info-obsessed publics and their shadowy corporate and governmental counterparts. In other words, “transparency” in our info- and internet-driven era can be understood as a concept meant to adequately reflect the new challenges and opportunities presented by today’s technologies of “seeing,” as a term that implies that new technological forms of intelligence are actually capable of dragging and distributing unlimited numbers of secrets, conspiracies, nefarious plots, and backroom dealings out into the light and across the infosphere. In light of this popular understanding of the term, transparency has been recast in the popular imagination as a sort of desirable trump card or as Thompson writes “a judo move” (2007) that enables individuals and organizations to modulate public and private perceptions. As Thompson explains it, becoming transparent today is a common sense necessity not only for marketers but also for those in—or seeking to be in—positions of power, since, after all, as he puts it, the transparency-seeking hordes “are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info—so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process?” He goes on:

Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won’t work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it—or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life. (2007)

I want to emphasize, however, that while the focus on new forms of “transparency” feigns a new culture of openness and an increasingly equal playing field, the same commonly held assumptions we make about transparency risk concealing more subtle processes of modulation, manipulation, and control (Deleuze, 1992).

In this article, I want to focus on the contested terrain of contemporary (online) transparency by looking at it through the lens of a “cultural studies of finance.” To do so I will focus here especially on the conflicting but complementary tactics of technologically enhanced transparency being strategically mobilized by, on the one hand, an increasingly vocal macroeconomically informed and invested online community of bloggers and online activists (let’s call them econo-bloggers) and, on the other hand, by one of the primary targets of their transparency-seeking attacks: the Federal Reserve (the Fed)—the central bank of the United States and, arguably, the world’s most powerful monetary-policy-dictating financial institution and authority. I want to show how the transparency tactics being pursued by both parties at once conflict with and complement one another as both parties play the digitally driven transparency game with the same objective: to win the monetary policy (or, indeed, monetary-ontology) debate and thereby achieve a sort of monetarily significant ontological legitimacy. This legitimacy is premised upon a monopolization of the very nature of monetary “truth”: a form of truth that’s becoming increasingly important to control and manage in light of, for instance, recent and ongoing economic catastrophes in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Iceland, and Ireland (to name a few); the faith-based nature of contemporary credit- and fiat-based money; and ever-inflating and fluctuating commodity costs (e.g., gold and oil). Both the econo-blogosphere and the Fed champion transparency-promoting agendas—with the blogosphere attempting to expose the Fed’s culpability relative to recent financial crises and financial bubble-blowing and the Fed attempting to foreground its own proactive financial behavior and allegedly honest attempts to operate in the public interest by propping up private banks. However, the transparency-promoting tactics I’ll be describing below are not so much about getting at—or making visible—“objective” realities concerning money as they are about controlling—or “frontrunning”—the message.¹ Transparency in this online macroeconomically inflected infowar is a tool used both offensively and defensively either to maintain or subvert status quo monetary policy; put differently, transparency—and the appeal to transparency as a sort of moral or ethical “good”—has today become a technologically necessitated public relations tool masquerading behind a veil of authenticity and unadulterated exposure. Moreover, the transparency-driven objectives of both the econo-bloggers and the Fed reveal the communicative tensions that can arise when the information-dissemination playing field becomes more equal (as it has with the Internet). That is, on the one hand, the econo-bloggers are leveraging the powers of the web to pursue the “truth” of monetary matters while the Fed—the locus of power—is leveraging the powers of the web to maintain, and perpetuate, the illusion that they are in control. With Jodi Dean, we could go on to observe that the transparency-driven infowar is symptomatic of our era of “communicative capitalism,” an era characterized “by the decline of symbolic efficiency” (Dean, 2011, p. 48). As she explains,

the decline of symbolic efficiency [characteristic of “communicative capitalism”] points to the failure of symbols and messages to produce expected responses, that is, to a fundamental uncertainty regarding what they mean or whether they are reliable. There are always other possibilities. What is obvious to some is unclear or suspicious to others. Indeed, there is no stopping point at which to resolve the uncertainties; reflexivity goes all the way down. The very conditions of possibility for adequation are missing. Images and affects rush in to fill the gap—does someone appear trustworthy? How did she seem? Did she seem believable or was something a little off? (Dean, 2011, p. 48)

Similarly, Clare Birchall observed recently that in the popular consciousness transparency has become, at once, “a sign of cultural (as well as moral) authority” and “nothing at all” (Birchall, 2011a, p. 8). We might add that today’s transparency must also be understood as one more modality of communication to be modulated, as one more overwhelmingly opaque tool for mediating the (in this case, monetary) message. For insofar as “true transparency” is surely as elusive as “objective truth,” transparency must be regarded simply as another potential impediment to our grasp of messages mediated in real time, online, across the globe, and so on. Or as Birchall notes, transparency must be regarded as neither an absolute good nor an absolute evil since, when taken to extremes, its imposition has the potential to contribute either to totalitarian control or to imposing incontrovertible guilt and culpability. Furthermore, the debate between transparency and secrecy “will never be concluded,” she remarks, because “far from being inimical to each other,” these two dynamics are “symbiotic” (Birchall, 2011a, p. 12).

The Econo-Blogosphere, the Fed, and the Online Battle to Modulate What Transparency Makes Visible

On today’s blogosphere heterodox economists, former Wall Street traders, “honest money” promoting “gold bugs” (promoters of gold-backed commodity money), and financial commentators and activists are ever more a-Twitter about ways to render transparent the endlessly opaque, diffuse, and obfuscated cascading financial tsunami that’s been rolling across the increasingly austerity-filled landscape of today’s version of capitalism. By endlessly parsing increasingly available web-based documents uploaded by central banks and international monetary authorities and power brokers in the name of “transparency,” today’s macroeconomic-focused econo-blogs such as pseudonymously named “Tyler Durden’s” zerohedge.com (the 837th most popular website in the United States according to alexa.com), Eric King’s kingworldnews.com, Max Keiser’s maxkeiser.com, Steve Keen’s debtdeflation.com, Chris Martenson’s chrismartenson.com, John William’s shadowstats.com, or Mish Shedlock’s globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.ca endlessly debate, discuss, and vehemently deride what is variously known as the “global banking cartel,” the “global ponzi scheme,” the “New World Order,” or the “Money Trust Octopus” and what in these online circles are regarded as their tools of wanton (debt-based) financial discipline and destruction, including the seemingly secretive Federal Reserve, the allegedly indentured servitude-inducing International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the mysterious Bank for International Settlements (the BIS)—the “central bank for central banks” (Welteke, 2000, p. 1). These macroeconomically oriented bloggers and commentators and their meteoric rise are joined, in turn, by more longstanding and speculatively extreme dot-connecting “conspiracy theory” websites, blogs, and forums like Alex Jones’ infowars.com (the 479th most popular website in the United States according to alexa.com), David Icke’s davidicke.com, or Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s alternative news site globalresearch.ca and many others in their common attempts to expose the motivations, methods, connections, and “endgame” of what, with the installation of banker/economist technocrats to “lead” as the unelected heads of state of democracies like Italy (Goldman Sachs advisor Mario Monti) and Greece (Trilateral Commission member Lucas Papademos), is widely regarded by the econo-blogosphere as a public/private partnership of the worst kind, bent on tightening its grip on power through the mutually dependent dealings of the global banking cartels and the indebted governments and corporations that unequivocally serve them.

The information, intelligence, and, of course, conspiracies put forward across the spectrum of the econo-blogosphere ranges from number-crunching chart-reading and analysis (i.e., shadowstats.com) to fantastical narratives of intergenerational banking families and their plots to control humanity and its governments through the endless extension and weaponization of debt (using, for instance, the international bond market to reduce nations to debt peonage over time; i.e., davidicke.com). So while on the more fact- and evidence-based end of the spectrum, academic economists like Steve Keen or Michael Hudson (michael-hudson.com) bring vast amounts of financial wisdom to these economic debates, at the more extreme end of the conspiracy spectrum David Icke, for example, goes so far as to suggest that many among the power elite are in fact alien extraterrestrial “reptilians” bent on dominating humanity. Indeed, the complexity of the econo-blogosphere and the variegated incoherencies and consistencies of their arguments operate as a vast and experimental network of individual economic agents whose messages and probes, although on the one hand articulated as a cacophonous eclecticism, is united in its target—the monolithic economic orthodoxies of the Fed and the long term financial consequences of a privately owned money creation monopoly that is perpetually in the process of generating more credit and debt than there is money is existence (thus necessitating never ending economic “growth” and moderate monetary inflation in order to pay back tomorrow what was borrowed today—and yesterday) (Benes and Kumhof, 2012).

Online criticism of our debt-based fiat money system can come from all quarters, and not only from the heterodox financial community of econo-bloggers. For example, once in a while a comment, opinion piece, or “working paper” critical of the debt- and leverage-based global financial system will emerge from out of the dominant financial apparatus itself. When such an event happens, the econo-bloggers will jump all over it (especially since they anticipate that such news or knowledge will cause less than a ripple in the mainstream media). Just such an article was recently posted on the website of the IMF (imf.org). This article, titled “The Chicago Plan Revisited” (Benes & Kumhof, 2012), is “radical” since it advocates for 100% reserve backing for deposits (rather than, as it is in today’s banking system, deposits functioning as a small amount of collateral or “reserve”—say 2% to 5%—against which new “loans” are created ex nihilo that far exceed the initial deposit). This article was pounced on by the econo-bloggers as not only confirmation of their critiques, but as a glimmer of economic sanity in a money-mad world. As economist and econo-blogger Steve Keen wrote in a post titled, “The IMF Goes Radical?” Benes’ and Kumhof’s article is “the first theoretical neoclassical paper to acknowledge the actual nature of banking, and to try to take this into account in a mathematical model” (Keen, 2012). At the same time, Keen’s scepticism leads him to note that this “working paper” clearly “isn’t official IMF policy but,” he goes on, “the fact that it has been released by the IMF is noteworthy, and the paper deserves careful attention” (Keen, 2012). Keen is especially impressed by the article’s authors’ grasp of the “endogenous” nature of contemporary money creation—that is, that banks create new money out of thin air when borrowers receive what are euphemistically called “loans” (rather than the commonly held idea that central banks create money first and distribute it to the banks for fractional lending). As Keen observes, “this is the actual process of lending that some central banks have been trying to get academic economists to understand for decades—and so far to no avail” (here he is referring specifically to New York Times pundit Paul Krugman; Keen, 2012). This blog post fits perfectly into Keen’s overarching project which is to reboot neoclassical economics by demonstrating the ways too much debt in an economy—and its exponential growth—can lead to cyclical booms and busts. He is especially interested, then, in hammering out the precise way money comes into existence—that is, the existential realities of money and its effects—to show the ways today’s form of money creation has contributed to our current economic crisis. To do this effectively and convincingly econo-bloggers like Keen are routinely left having to appeal to threads of mainstream economic thought that reinforce their own unorthodox viewpoints. Indeed, in the same blog post, Keen draws our attention to a footnote in Benes’ and Kumhof’s IMF paper where they cite a paper from the Monetary Analysis Division of the Bank of England that states: “When banks make loans, they create additional deposits for those that have borrowed the money” (Berry, Harrison, Thomas, & de Weymarn, 2007); and a similar paper by staff economists at the Federal Reserve that explains how money is created as clearly as possible:

Suppose that Bank A gives a new loan of $20 to Firm X, which continues to hold a deposit account with Bank A. Bank A does this by crediting Firm X’s account by $20. The bank now has a new asset (the loan to Firm X) and an offsetting liability (the increase in Firm X’s deposit at the bank). Importantly, Bank A still has [unchanged] reserves in its account. In other words, the loan to Firm X does not decrease Bank A’s reserve holdings at all. (Keister & McAndrews, 2009, p. 7)

And if these two “mainstream” examples aren’t clear enough, Benes and Kumhof (2012) sum it all up for us at the end of their footnote: “Putting this differently, the bank does not lend out reserves (money) that it already owns, rather it creates new deposit money ex nihilo” (Benes & Kumhof, 2012, p. 9).

As these examples from Steve Keen’s blog help illustrate, the overarching “meme,” or internet-driven idea, inspiring the econo-bloggers I’m focusing on here is that thanks to the world’s central banking-led financial model of debt-driven money production, the West’s credit-dependent, digitally driven financial system and its digitally enabled financial “innovations”—credit default swaps, re-hypothecation strategies, derivatives, and high frequency trading—are accelerating at increasing speed, approaching terminal velocity, and careening toward an abyss of unpayable, all consuming, digitally derived debt default. A primary source of the crisis, in their view, is a global, command-and-control central banking system with no checks or balances on its willingness and ability to paper over today’s credit crises by “printing” money and by delaying the inevitable. In other words, by keeping interest rates at historically low levels—effectively 0% in the United States—and by exponentially expanding their balance sheets, global monetary elites are seen merely to be papering over what will eventually become a disastrous “credit event,” “credit crisis,” or “Minsky moment” (in reference to economist Hyman Minsky, 2008) insofar as they seem willing to “extend and pretend” in perpetuity. “Netizen” followers of these financial commentaries are treated to unvarnished, subversive, contrarian, explosive, and more often than not obsessively researched and chart-laden perspectives on such topics as fiat-based currencies, inflation/deflation, the explosion and alleged manipulation of precious metals markets, Federal Reserve purchases of U.S. and European debt, sovereign credit crises, and emergent trading technologies and strategies.

The econo-blogosphere relies on a variety of transparency tactics in its attempts to expose the Fed’s behind-the-scenes dealings and to support its efforts at predicting the (Fed’s) financial endgame. On the multimedia front, many blogs and commentators rely on podcasts and podcast-based interviews to communicate with their audiences in ways that convey the affective dimension—using voice, sound, music, and so on—of the ongoing financial crisis. Online videos (on YouTube, etc.) are also used, of course, not only as a way of communicating complex information efficiently in a fluid visual form, but as a platform for distributing evidence-based documentation or “gotcha” moments featuring institutional monetary authorities unwittingly revealing more than they intended about, for example, monetary policy. In addition, financial commentators like Max Keiser and partner Stacy Herbert post entire television-length programs to their blog maxkeiser.com from the shows they host—The Keiser Report (on RT.com – formerly Russia Today) and On the Edge With Max Keiser (on PressTV)—wherein biting financial analysis and revealing economic interviews with industry insiders and experts are reinforced not only by Max’s wit and vitriol, but by the status, he gains from having been a former financial insider during his time as a Wall Street trader. Another tactic used to reveal that the Emperor has no clothes can be found on blogs like zerohedge.com that routinely circulate video of, for instance, Senator Ron Paul (a lifelong critic of the Fed whose Presidential campaign revolves his platform promise to “End the Fed”) putting current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in the hotseat.

But arguably more important than the econo-bloggers’ ability to modulate readers’ and listeners’ affect, or to expose the nefarious intentions of the elite, are the ways these bloggers dig through reams of financial data that is all but ignored by the mainstream media and that entirely escapes the popular (financial) imagination. Websites like John William’s shadowstats.com, for example, rely on historical economic data published on the Fed’s websites to reveal that today’s inflation rate or unemployment rate would be much higher if these financial yardsticks so often trumpeted by the mainstream media were measured using the same formulas as they were a decade ago. Similarly, the blogs routinely link to Fed-published economic charts and statistics released by the website FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, to demonstrate, for example, the historically epic rate at which the U.S. money supply is expanding, the ways the Fed is buying bonds from the United States’ Treasury (thus keeping the U.S. bond market liquid and afloat), or the ways the calculation of price inflation or unemployment statistics have changed—been modulated and massaged—over time. It must be noted, at the same time, that the transparency the econo-bloggers achieve is not unavailable to the layman; in fact, the data and discourses featured on these blogs is fully available to the public precisely thanks to the Fed’s own efforts to operate according to a radical transparency agenda. What these bloggers expose, then, in their attempts at institutional critique is not necessarily inaccessible information, but rather information and intelligence that is hidden and rendered opaque by mainstream (i.e., corporately owned and profit driven) media conglomerates whose (financial) interests, admittedly, lie in passing rosy and positive financial messages to the public and in insisting upon their (and the financial industry’s) ignorance and innocence when markets fall off a cliff.

Consider, for example, all the attention the mainstream media pays to the “unemployment rate” in the United States versus the absolute media blackout of the number of Americans no longer in the labor force (i.e., those who are simply no longer looking for work). Try this: Do a quick Google News search for “US ‘unemployment rate’” (use quotation marks as indicated around “unemployment rate” to help focus the search). If your search results are like mine, you received 60,600 results from media stalwarts such as Bloomberg, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, The Guardian, and so on. Now do another related Google News search using the phrase “not in labor force” (again using quotation marks). You will receive exactly five results, four of which are from obscure web sources and one of which is from a blog published by the New York Times. Why the massive disparity in media coverage when both sets of statistics are easily obtained from the FRED website (FRED, 2013a, 2013b)? Finally, do a normal Google search for “not in labor force.” You will receive 3,970,000 results. Note, however, the sources for the results. The first two hits are from the data aggregating website of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), but the fourth hit is from econo-blog zerohedge.com . The next few hits are from the FRED website itself, followed by hits from the conspiracy theory website of alternative media star Alex Jones, infowars.com, econo-blog nakedcapitalism.com, Occupy Wall Street’s website occupywallst.org, and noted econo-blogger Mish Shedlock’s globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com.

Shedlock, to focus on one of the econo-blogger examples, attempts to shed light on the significance of the “not in labor force” statistics that receive next to no mainstream attention despite the fact that over 90 million Americans are no longer looking for work ( zerohedge.com , 2013). In a post titled, “Reader Questions: Who is ‘Not in Labor Force?’ Who is Counted as Unemployed?” Shedlock argues that obscuring the ever increasing numbers of individuals no longer looking for work in the United States (whether those individuals are retired or have simply given up looking) helps keep the American unemployment rate artificially low by subtly manipulating the data. Shedlock points out that when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, 2013) tabulates unemployment levels they are able to ignore those who for whatever reason—discouragement, sense of hopelessness, futility—haven’t actively applied for a job in the last month: “The BLS description [of unemployment] seems logical enough except it ignores those who want a job but did not look in the past four weeks. BLS questions will root those people right out of the labor force” (Shedlock, 2012; my emphasis). Using charts and statistics from the FRED website Shedlock goes on to point out that the U.S. labor force peaked in October 2008, “exactly on the cusp of the great recession” and that the current labor force is “barely above what it was nearly four years ago” (Shedlock, 2012). A related post on zerohedge.com puts forward the thesis that U.S. economic and employment statistics are being manipulated or surreptitiously ignored more viscerally than Shedlock.

The admittedly activism-driven collective objective of the nonmainstream, non-front-page perspectives expressed by these members of the financial blogosphere is to contribute to what Max Keiser boldly describes as a “global insurrection against banker occupation” on one hand, and what he calls a “decentralized global rebellion against neoliberal economic policies” on the other. As a united front—these blogs endlessly link to one another on their respective “blog rolls” (i.e., list of relevant links)—these sites are generating unprecedented levels of interest in macroeconomic machinations by parsing the transparency-enabling documentation, statistics, and policy objectives of international financial institutions. This phenomenon, then, is effectively entirely new insofar as today mountains of virtual financial data have, thanks to the web and the radical transparency agenda (or imperatives) described above, become accessible to the online masses in ways that remain unavailable through more mainstream media outlets.

The emergence of this econo-blogger-front has not escaped the notice of mainstream commentators and journalists. Stephen Mihm of the New York Times, for example, observed in the 2010, 10th Annual Year in Ideas issue of the NY Times Sunday Magazine, what he identified as a new trend: “do-it-yourself macroeconomics in which ordinary citizens pull apart the data and come to their own conclusions” (2010). Mihm notes that this “democratization of economics” has resulted in: “economic data that [was] formerly greeted with grudging acceptance by the public—the latest unemployment figures, for example—[becoming] the catalyst for endless popular exegeses” (2010).

Indeed, the degree to which the econo-bloggers’ messages are beginning to have real effects beyond the blue glow of the internet, with its chatrooms and comments sections, speaks to the degree to which the issues the econo-bloggers are grappling with resonate beyond the virtual echo chamber. Recent notable examples of instances when online financial activists and their alternative or heterodox concerns have punctured the veneer of mainstream news outlets and the plans of the “don’t rock the boat” political class include (a) an unprecedented recent public tour and photo-op by Queen Elizabeth II of the Bank of England gold vaults prompted by online chatter about whether the UK’s gold is actually there and whether they will have enough collateral in the face of a credit crunch (this event conveniently preceded the UK’s recent credit downgrade by rating agency Moody’s; The Telegraph, 2012); (b) a dynamic online debate on the ontology of money and the role of debt in an economy between mainstream NY Times financial pundit Paul Krugman and previously obscure econo-blogger and professor Steve Keen; and (c) the outcome of the recent election in Italy, where the political party of a popular comedian and raging econo-blogger Beppe Grillo won 25.54% of the vote—making his the most popular single political party in Italy’s lower chamber (his blog, beppegrillo.it, is the 100th most frequented website in Italy and his political support was driven in large part by younger voters).

The ad hominem targets of much of these “econo-blogger’s” collective ire are private bankers and financial stewards such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke (affectionately known on the blogosphere as “Helicopter Ben” for his penchant for “dropping money from helicopters”); Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein; Goldman Sachs alum and former United States Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin; former Secretary of the Treasury, Chief Economist for the World Bank, and derivative trading deregulator Larry Summers; MF Global head and Goldman Sachs alumni John Corzine; or head of global commodities at J. P. Morgan Chase and credit default swap creator Blythe Masters. Serendipitously, the fuel for the econo-blogosphere’s fire is the very information put online by the economic system and economic professionals in their attempt to provide the public with access to “more transparent” financial information in our wireless, post-economic-collapse world. Crucially, this gesture at transparency seems, for the most part, to be backfiring, as it provides cannon fodder for the foaming masses intent on tearing apart mainstream economic narratives.

ZeroHedge contributor Gordon T. Long articulates the outlines of the blogosphere’s understanding of today’s debt-based mechanisms of dispossession when he declares that the “essence” of today’s money (or more accurately, credit) system, a system that seemingly magically creates money out of thin air (as the econo-blogosphere ceaselessly reminds us) is first “to create a need for debt, then finance that debt and eventually exchange that debt for the collateral assets that are the underlying wealth producing assets” (Long, 2011). In other words, the econo-bloggers’ “crowd-sourced” collaborations have driven them to similar conclusions about what they regard as the underacknowledged motivations underlying the credit-money system and the allegedly overarchingly malicious machinations of leverage- and liquidity-seeking finance capital (Nesvetailova, 2008, 2010; Seigworth & Tiessen, 2012). That is to say, in the econo-blogosphere it is well understood that today’s credit-money is, in effect, a virtual abstraction, a socially agreed upon construction that in a post-Bretton Woods and post-gold standard world depends as much on faith, belief, and trust as it does on any other quality or characteristic. Indeed, we could say that one of the econo-blogosphere’s primary objectives is to reveal the ways that money is not a neutral mediator of human relations; rather, money is constantly changing and constantly taking many different—and not inconsequential—forms. For these bloggers, then, money’s power itself must be made transparent since, after all, money is and has always been a tool for those in positions of monetary, fiscal, and economic control to use to modulate human relations according, effectively, to money’s—and the monetary elite’s—demands. Or as notorious banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) once allegedly stated: “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

It follows, then, that the econo-bloggers will point out over and over that credit-money (i.e., 95% of today’s money supply) feeds on the future, on “intertemporal monetary transactions,” the moment it comes into being (i.e., when lenders create money “in exchange for a promise of future repayment”; Carruthers, 2005, p. 355). Credit-money, in other words, pre-shapes the world and the world’s borrowers (whether these are nation states, corporations, or individuals) into debt-bearing and interest-generating machines, in turn transforming the future into a time/space tasked with servicing the interest payments on today’s expenditures. The ability of the financial establishment to exponentially expand credit (i.e., debt or money) ex nihilo drives the concurrent expansion of borrowing, resulting in the credit-money machine’s demands seeping into every corner of nearly every thing, commodifying, consuming, financializing, and abstracting as it goes (Lazzorato, 2006).

Evidence of the ex nihilo conditions of money’s creation and virtual capitalism’s enabling of credit acceleration can be found on YouTube thanks to video of a conversation between U.S. Republican Congressman Ron Paul and Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke that went viral across the econo-blogosphere. While asking Bernanke where the American dollars will come from to add $105 billion to IMF bailout funds (much of which was destined for Greece) Mr. Paul asks rhetorically: “Who pays for this? Where does it come from? Will this all come out of the printing press once again?” before replying, in response to his own question, that of course this money will get created “out of thin air”; Bernanke, nodding anxiously, replies, “well it’s a loan . . . [and] if it’s not paid back [by countries like Greece] we [and the IMF] would take [from the Greek people] our share of the loss” (youtube.com, 2010).

The online voices and alternative perspectives of the econo-bloggers, then, are growing louder and their predictions and assessments about the direction of the global financial system are having offline effects. Indeed, the presence of online macroeconomic activism is blurring the distinction between virtual and actual worlds insofar as communicational feedback loops between the bloggers and international financial policy makers are getting ever tighter and more interdependent. If nothing else, as a new social movement the econo-bloggers’ research and publishing is objectifying the degree to which the world of money, finance, and power is—and has always been—an exercise in public relations and public confidence—and crisis—management.

Worth remembering, in the context of this particular examination, is the fact that the emergence of this online social movement critical of crisis-prone macroeconomics is but a microcosm of the range of alternative social, cultural, political, and economic perspectives that are generating—at greater speed and at lower cost than mainstream news—alternative streams of data, information, and critique. These alternative streams of information are changing the relationship between individuals and institutions in the face of ongoing corporate media concentration and persistent financial industry market manipulation. Hence, my own interest in this emerging area of online activism—in the econo-blogosphere as a new social movement—is not merely an interest in the fact that online communities are discussing macroeconomics. Rather, what compels this research is the increasingly significant role these activists, economists, and investigators play in applying virtual pressure to mainstream economic (and social, and political, and ecological) debates and decision making around the globe. In a world where money is both a cultural artifact and an international medium of communication and exchange; where matters of finance, culture, and policy are mutually interdependent in complex ways; and where policy makers might one day pay as much attention to their Twitter feeds as to their internal documents, we are compelled, it seems to me, to take an interest in how affectively charged narratives are being designed to pre-emptively shape public expectations and how, globally, policy tuning and tweaking is finding its roots in the online whispers of digital media.

Of course, it is not only the econo-blogosphere that is today exposing the effects of credit-money. A creeping financial indebtedness is, at the same time, unrelentingly bringing corporations, “sovereign” states, and individuals to their knees in a cascading process of extending indentured servitude (this despite the arguably artificially inflated—through low interest rates—recent gains in the American stock markets). In the face of today’s debt crises and in response to the question on so many people’s minds—“Who is all this money owed to?”—I want to observe that “transparency” has become a crucial—and contested—meme infecting the financial infoscape. Indeed, the necessity to expose (for public consumption) monetary policy initiatives and tactics has become an increasingly urgent issue both for dominant monetary authorities (those central banks and international institutions who set interests rates and monetary objectives) and for those intent on revealing the subtle forms of control that accrue to those who have their fingers on the button of today’s increasingly virtual money-creating printing presses. This monetary policy infowar has found a home on the Web thanks to the internet’s unrivalled ability to provide an empowering playground for those intent on leveling the asymmetries of information-based power relations.

The Transparent Transparency of the Fed

In response to the increasing pressure being placed on it by the macroeconomic realities being rendered transparent by the econo-blogosphere (not to mention by, for example, recent Presidential Candidate Ron Paul who, in 2009, introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives called the Federal Reserve Transparency Act) the Federal Reserve and its current chairman Ben Bernanke have begun to wave their own version of the “transparency” flag in new and unprecedented ways in an attempt to control the debate about a topic over which they’ve historically—or at least since the post World War II Bretton Woods meetings—had monopolistic control: the ontology of money and monetary policy. Armed with their own YouTube channel, Twitter account, and RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds, the Fed is embracing the radical transparency meme as best it can (but not necessarily on its own terms).

Just such an attempt at transparency was recently enacted on April 27th, 2011 when, for the first time in history, the Fed began holding quarterly “press briefings” designed to “further enhance the clarity and timeliness of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy communication […] in the interest of ensuring accountability and increasing public understanding” (Federal Reserve, 2011a). In response to the first hour-long webcast, commentators at zerohedge.com responded en masse to what they read as an attempt at masking—or as Deleuze and Guattari might say, “overcoding” (1983)—pressing truths. The following two comments from zeroHedge.com echo the majority sentiment: (a) “It’s official. The Fed has lost control” and (b) “I feel like I am in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode after that” (zerohedge.com, 2011b).

Indeed, between March 20th and March 29th, 2012, the Fed’s Bernanke engaged in another attempt at managing the message through outsized exposure. To set the record straight on the role of the Fed and the ways it helped save America from the 2007-2008 credit crisis, he delivered a series of lectures at George Washington University and on the Fed’s website (federalreserve.gov). Bernanke—formerly an academic—presented “Chairman Bernanke’s College Lecture Series: The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis”: (a) “Origins and Mission of the Federal Reserve,” (b) The Federal Reserve After World War II,” (c) “The Federal Reserve’s Response to the Financial Crisis,” and (d) “The Aftermath of the Crisis.” In response to what was quickly construed as propaganda-pushing puffery by the “propagandist-in-chief” the econo-blogosphere jumped into action with zerohedge.com uploading a response post titled “CTRL + SPIN: Ben Bernanke And The Fed Propaganda Tour Live” before adding a series of posts titled, “Bernanke Lecture Decrypted” (Versions I, II, III, and IV; zerohedge.com, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d, 2012e).

Although the Fed’s attempts at online engagement and transparency are increasing (despite the frustration of commentators who feel investors are becoming more focused on Fed statements than on market fundamentals; Harding, 2012), it is worth observing that the transparency-embracing sentiment is not completely new. Indeed, Bernanke’s interest in the Fed’s becoming increasingly transparent (particularly when faced with an increasingly inquisitive and informed public) was earlier expressed in a 2010 speech titled, “Central Bank Independence, Transparency, and Accountability” wherein he explains that:

Transparency regarding monetary policy in particular not only helps make central banks more accountable, it also increases the effectiveness of policy. Clarity about the aims of future policy and about how the central bank likely would react under various economic circumstances reduces uncertainty and—by helping households and firms anticipate central bank actions—amplifies the effect of monetary policy on longer-term interest rates. The greater clarity and reduced uncertainty, in turn, increase the ability of policymakers to influence economic growth and inflation. Over the years, the Federal Reserve—like many central banks around the world—has taken significant steps to improve its transparency and accountability. (2010a)

Bernanke insists too that in democratic societies “like our own” institutions like central banks which tend to be given operational “independence” bring with them what he calls “fundamental obligations of transparency, responsiveness, and accountability”; insisting that the Federal Reserve is “already one of the most transparent and accountable central banks in the world, providing voluminous information and explanation concerning all of its activities,” he suggests that the Fed

should be prepared to do even more, to become even more transparent. It is essential that the public have the information it needs to understand and be assured of the integrity of all our operations, including all aspects of our balance sheet and our financial controls. (2010b)

Bernanke’s insistence here on the absolute correlation between transparency and democracy is, upon further reflection, and as Birchall points out, a somewhat naïve or troublesome one insofar as once transparency is valorized as an absolute good it risks being applied absolutely, resulting in the relative openness of the state (and its institutions) inevitably being projected onto the public, threatening individual freedoms under the guise of the benefits of inviolable openness. As Birchall explains, transparency and secrecy rely on one another to keep one another in check and in order to maintain the balance between the public and the state required of democratic societies. As she points out, “secrecy functions as a constitutive element of transparency, while transparency defines itself as a reaction against secrecy”; insofar as that’s the case, a regime “that embraces transparency,” she observes, “will only ever be able to go so far before it tips over into totalitarianism because of its parallels with surveillance, particularly when extended to citizens.” She goes on:

Resisting the call to be transparent to the state is, then, automatically registered as a sign of guilt. But if the regime doesn’t go far enough, if it shrinks back from applying transparency to its own actions, the regime meets the charge of totalitarianism coming the other way (for acting covertly, autonomously and without an explicit mandate). Hence an infinite hesitation, a radical undecidability, within any democracy that counts transparency among its operating principles. Hence too the prospect of a debate between transparency and secrecy that will never be concluded. (Birchall, 2011a, p. 12)²

But despite the conceptual short-sightedness inherent to Bernanke’s vision of transparency, the econo-blogosphere is more invested in exposing the meanings of the Fed’s actions than its words and on this front two recent Federal Reserve actions have once again attracted the attention of those bent on peering behind the seemingly endlessly receding Fed curtain.

Between 2007 and 2010 the Fed secretly facilitated the largest financial bailout the world has ever seen. While the much commented on “TARP” bailout during the credit crunch—valued at $700 billion—enraged American citizens furious at the “too big to fail” banks, it was pocket change compared to the total amount of underreported below-market-rate loans—$16 trillion worth—the Fed doled out to its globally interconnected financial friends: what were at that point the world’s imminently insolvent financial institutions. To put that $16 trillion in perspective, it exceeds the total U.S. federal debt of around $15 trillion and the U.S. total gross domestic product (GDP) (also around $15 trillion). A report innocuously titled “Federal Reserve System: Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance” conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO, 2011) at the direction of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act documents a list of the institutions that received the most money from the Fed mega-bailout, they include Citigroup ($2.5 trillion), Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion), Merrill Lynch & Co. ($1.9 trillion), Bank of America ($1.3 trillion), and the U.K. arm of Barclays ($878 billion; GAO, 2011, p. 131).

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders was most vocal on the issue. His reading of the implications of the secret FED bailout—which was anything but “transparent”—is described on his website as follows:

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U. S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders […] directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. “As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.” (Sanders, 2012)

But if any action reveals, makes transparent, or at least troubles the Federal Reserve’s and Ben Bernanke’s position relative to transparency it is the recent announcement that the Fed has allegedly issued a request for proposal for suppliers of web-monitoring solutions “to participate in an [sic] Sentiment Analysis and Social Media Monitoring Solution Request for Proposal (RFP) bid process,” the intent of which is to establish an “equitable partnership with a market leader who will gather data from various social media outlets and news sources and provide applicable reporting to the FRBNY (Federal Reserve Board of New York)” (Federal Reserve, 2011b, p. 1). First revealed by zerohedge.com , the Fed’s desired “Social Listening Platform” must be able to “gather data from various social media outlets and news sources,” “monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria”; it must also be able to “determine the sentiment of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document” and “be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube” as well as “be able to aggregate data from various media outlets such as: CNN, WSJ, Factiva etc.” (p. 10) to create a rather sinister and all-encompassing sort of automated opinion poll. zerohedge.com , on the webpage that posted the Fed report, concludes that in light of this RFP the Fed seems to have “entered the counterespionage era and will be monitoring everything written about it anywhere in the world” (zerohedge.com, 2011a). Recalling recent research in preemptive strategies of risk avoidance in surveillance studies research (Adey, 2009; Amoore, 2007; Amoore & de Goede, 2008; Amoore & Hall, 2009; Anderson, 2010; Aradau & Van Munster, 2007; de Goede & Randalls, 2009; Elmer & Opel, 2006; Massumi, 2007), the anonymous zerohedge.com author—in an effort to make transparent the Fed’s longer term objectives—imagines a dystopian future wherein the Fed, having made the Internet completely “transparent,” will proceed to spy on every telephone conversation as it moves toward “bugging” “each and every otherwise ‘private’ location in the world. Because very soon saying that ’printing money is treason’ will be treason, and such terrorist thoughts must be pre-crimed before they even occur” (zerohedge.com, 2011a). These comments, it’s worth noting, were stated prior to Edward Snowdon revealing to the world that a total surveillance grid, rather than being something outrageous is, in fact, our new normal.

Transparency, then, in this internet age of high speed, algorithmically driven sentiment assessment, is no simple matter. Rather, we can think of transparency—or the appearance or use of transparency—as just one more tool in the message management and control toolbox. As I write this in late September 2013, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 have been climbing (thanks, say the econo-bloggers, to the Fed’s historically low interest rates of less than 1%, quantitative easing, and liquidity providing programs like “Operation Twist”). All seems well as nominal stock prices—Apple especially—seem to be defying gravity and European debt crises seem able to be perpetually postponed (despite the domino-like debt-implosion of Greece, Ireland, and now Spain—with Italy, Portugal, and France waiting in the wings). The econo-blogosphere, however, is as vocal as ever in its attempt to give voice to amateur and professional macroeconomists everywhere in their efforts to make transparent financial machinations of global monetary authorities and their transparent attempts at transparency, message management, and online counter-info-insurgency.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Notes

Author Biography

Matthew Tiessen is an Assistant Professor in Professional Communication (ProCom) in the Faculty of Communication and Design (FCAD) at Ryerson University (Toronto). In 2013 Dr. Tiessen was awarded a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant in the area of “Digital Economy” to support his research on gamification and algorithmically-driven technologies. His research and teaching focuses on digital and visual communication and culture, especially topics relating to algorithmic culture, gamification, financialization, and digital media. In 2013, he completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Ryerson’s Infoscape Research Lab: Centre for the Study of Social Media. Prior to his postdoc Matthew’s doctoral research on affect theory, agency, ethics, and creativity was funded by a Killam Memorial Scholarship and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

His research has been featured in an interdisciplinary range of academic journals and anthologies such as: Theory, Culture & Society; Volume; CTheory; Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge; Surveillance & Society; Space and Culture; Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy; Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (2012, Bloomsbury); Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope (2010, Wilfrid Laurier University Press); and What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina (2008, University of Georgia Press). He is also an exhibiting artist.

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