Zero Is a Clenched Fist 
Donald MacKenzie
- Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London by Caitlin Zaloom Buy this book
The new financial trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade is a striking sight, and Caitlin Zaloom describes it well. Opened in 1997, it occupies a ‘huge stone block’; the trading floor itself is ‘the size of Grand Central Station’, and has no windows or even a public entrance. The walls are ‘unadorned granite, shiny, cold and imposing’, with huge electronic displays of prices, index levels and interest rates running across the top. ‘Diffuse, bright, fluorescent light comes from the fixtures four stories above . . . There are no internal walls to break up the space.’
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Donald MacKenzie’s Material Markets: How Economic Agents Are Constructed will be published by Oxford. He teaches sociology at Edinburgh University.
Other articles by this contributor:
Fear in the Markets · Donald MacKenzie writes about the ways in which ‘finance theory’ becomes part of what it examines
End-of-the-World Trade · the credit crisis
The Political Economy of Carbon Trading · A Ratchet
What’s in a Number? · The $300 Trillion Question
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