Self sufficient and autonomous, able to survive and thrive in any geographical location that is wired, establishing holistics and models across a range of market sectors and structures, the part of one's life that relates to trading is highly innovative and should be celebrated. Or should it?
Baudrillard: "The miracle of gaming is to make us live our freedom not as reality but as illusion - a higher illusion, an aristocratic challenge to reality. For reality is democratic, and illusion is aristocratic".
"Its A Lottery!" or "Its A Fix!". You pays yer money and takes yer choice.
The Babylonians in Borges's fable chose "to entrust their fate to the Lottery, preferring that uncertainty to the torments of individual responsibility and free will". Not a good call this on behalf of the Babylonians. Some lotteries are fixes and some lotteries, a lesser number unfortunately, are truly randomised events which offer a meritocratic environment in which to accept a voluntary form of taxation. Meritocratic stupidity. If you win, you're fucked. If you lose, you're stupid. This is not a good deal.
But, at least a truly randomised event is a truly randomised event. In a world which demands that we believe in "Centres For Experiments In Totally Random Environments", this is important.
Okay, lets get one thing clear. There can be no celebration of gambling. We are good at it and that is great but it is also sad. Of all the things that could be done, we are doing this. To seek knowledge outside the confines of a blinkered system of science and discovery is our only option when economic performativity defines the applicable areas of research. To work within that system destructs any semblance of a suitable work/life balance so we try and do some good things while creaming a profit off some inefficient and rigged financial markets. Voila!
To virtually everyone else, the gambling industry is not good news. "The Lottery" is your best option and that is not a good life choice as we outlined above. "The Fix" is something else altogether. Markets, betting and otherwise, are primed for corruption and insider trading to the major competitive advantage of, well, insiders. Baudrillard: "This takes us into the worst type of utopia - an insider raving [trading], which slides automatically into cultish practices with the violence characteristic of that type of organisation, where arbitrariness figures no longer as a function of chance, but as arbitrary power". This is "The Fix".
To whatever extent disenfranchised, the gambler lives the Baudrillardian "dream of a radical democracy which haunts the imaginations of all gamblers.., as a refuge for their thwarted demand for 'social' democracy'". But for gamblers choosing "The Fix", "the most liberating principle ends in the most commonplace tyranny".
Dealing with casinos, online poker platforms, bookmakers for all sports, the day trading markets offered by the spread betting firms, the heavily manipulated fringe markets in both sports and the financial sector (think the "Bookings" market or virtually any type of derivative market, for example), these are all tyrannical edifices. For example, it is reaching the stage where a very high percentage of televised sport, with its critically increased liquidity, is rigged to some extent. Only where the prize money and/or kudos counterbalances the bribery bank can a truly competitive event be expected to take place. And, believe us, that is not a whole load of occasions! If you play "The Fix", you are in collusion with the gambling sector against your financial interests. You will misrepresent your losses and create new realities of winnings that only occurred in some parallel pseudo-existence in anecdoteland. You will possess a whole concoction of different personality styles and disorders which will define both your performance in the gambling markets and the targeting of your good self by that self same industry. The European bookmakers not only actively work to develop suitable event outcomes across a range of sports, they also market alternative realities to you to fuck with your already well-fucked-up brain.
On only one level is an interaction with the speculative markets applicable and conducive to a positive self advancement financially and that is when you are ahead of the market. That edge might be due to inside information, cloned trading, quantitative analysis, superior modelling techniques, pattern recognition, purchase of information from prime sources etc etc but unless you have got it, forget it. Even with the benefits of some or all of the necessary attributes, there will need to be extensive time given to knowing yourself, understanding self-psychological mechanisms and self-management issues relating to projects and a work/life balance.
Some people do the I Ching. They trust to fate the major decisions that one needs to make in spectacular society. This is parallelled by the gambler. The randomising of strategy is a foolish option, even more so when one considers the tilting of the markets against one's interests that is built into the very fabric of the particular betting market structure.
"The most liberating principle ends in the most commonplace tyranny" defines our experiences as market traders too. Once we move beyond the self-congratulatory aesthetics of niche superiority, we understand that we are in a dark corner of social and business interaction. I am not convinced that there are any other types of interaction available under shareholder capitalism but that is another moan for another time. You lucky people...
If we choose "real" lives, we are restricted by our options in IT, philosophy, neurology and science. We instead choose to play the hyperreal games offered in the gambling world of First Life but we play fast and contrarian with the intention of getting out of this shoddy little work environment just as soon as we are able.
Not too long now.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
