The venture is a more attractive potential partner for the New York Stock Exchange, which has said it is looking at a link with one ECN or more. There are two reasons this development is significant for socialists. This reinforces the trend toward information centralization across corporate boundaries analyzed elsewhere on this site. Second, it chips away at the remaining degree of human intervention in stock transactions, in this case minimizing further the search by human buyers and sellers for each other as each seek an acceptable price. What's more, and more importantly, even to the extent they attempt to evaluate a company's own health, that data is not used as a gauge of its contribution to the overall economy's performance.
Data mining is once again big news, thanks to the new Web interfaces plopped on top.
Together they can analyze consumer spending trends and market the results to retailers. And the next wave of the revolution will push things much further. Most actions and transactions are already recorded somewhere on a computer. In the new world, the technology exists to mine that information and make commercial use of it. Yet data mining is designed to provide such information in a capitalist economy which, by virtue of the atomized structure of the economy, multiplies geometrically the amount of information to be mined.