‘@AP: Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured’. So read a tweet sent from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account @AP, which affected financial markets, wiping out $136.5 billion of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s value. While the speed of the Associated Press hack crash event and the proprietary nature of the algorithms involved make it difficult to make causal claims about the relationship between social media and trading algorithms, we argue that it helps (...) us to critically examine the volatile connections between social media, financial markets, and third parties offering human and algorithmic analysis. By analyzing the commentaries of this event, we highlight two particular currents: one formed by computational processes that mine and analyze Twitter data, and the other being financial algorithms that make automated trades and steer the stock market. We build on sociology of finance together with media theory and focus on the work of Christian Marazzi, Gabriel Tarde and Tony Sampson to analyze the relationship between social media and financial markets. We argue that Twitter and social media are becoming more powerful forces, not just because they connect people or generate new modes of participation, but because they are connecting human communicative spaces to automated computational spaces in ways that are affectively contagious and highly volatile. (shrink)

My hypoltheses concerning the United States led War on Terrorism are derived from the German novelist, critic and social theorist Ernst J¸nger’s outstanding 1930 essay on ‘Total Mobilization’. Accordingly, this article explores J¸nger’s ‘Total Mobilization’ and what I label the ‘totally mobilized body’ as the philosophical underpinning of the War on Terrorism from the perspective of my own conceptions of ‘ hypermodern total mobilization’, ‘globalitarian rule’ and the ‘neoconservative body’. From this post-J¸ngerian or hypermodern viewpoint, the examination of the War (...) on Terrorism as offered by social theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman, Gilles Deleuze, Douglas Kellner and Paul Virilio is analytically evaluated and developed. For their research on the ‘spirit of terrorism’ and the new ‘planetary frontier-land’, control societies, the momentous events of September 11, 2001, and ‘globalitarianism’ can help us to understand the complexities and multiplicities of the neoconservative body. The article concludes by probing the distinction between Jünger’s idea of modern total mobilization and my own hypermodern notions of ‘egalitarian rule’ and the ‘neoegalitarian body’. (shrink)