ABSTRACT
On October 19, 1987 the stock market crashed. I lived the minute-to-minute events of this great drama in the midst of stunned stock traders bailing out of positions, frantically calling other traders who hang up under the pretense of faulty phone connections, not wishing to transact business to avoid yet more debilitating loss. Others take orders they never execute. Traders holding hundreds of millions of dollars of positions in stocks that minute by minute lose their value, lifetimes of accomplishment dwindle to nothing. Successful seasoned veterans panic under fire. The ‘Big Board’ of the capitalist world, the New York Stock Exchange de facto creasing to exist on Tuesday, October 20, 1987 near noon, players sitting befuddled next to their banks of never yet now quiet phones and unmoving computer screens. We feel the palpable terror of the end of life as we know it in the West, on the brink of unimaginable catastrophe, a giddy terror of apple carts and soup lines, of the high brought low and the low crashing the bottom. I stand in the midst of hundreds of traders in the gargantuan hyperspace of a corporate trading room, banks upon banks of instantaneous all financial markets information screens, beyond the leading edge computerized telephones, capital markets global markets muni-salesmen munitraders 1 risk managers futures traders foreign currency traders all-instrument hedgers risk arbitrageurs rocket scientist computer modelers all apparently between twenty-two and thirty-five, blue shirt white shirt grey suit pants blue suit Hermes Brooks Brothers Ralph Lauren ties Anglophile suspenders the New York Stock Exchange ticking away larger than life lights overhead the American Stock Exchange slower cousin mimicking the Action nearby Dow-Jones news across the wall blinking away now no doubt about it on the edge of what is Standard-and-Poors keeping pace any bit of information otherwise unnoticed hundreds of traders synced into their two story cathedral ceilinged open space phones ringing names calling deals happening you are it more revolutions per moment than any competing line. Breathless. And social construction looms all around, consent writ large in the logic of interaction from the corporate construction of social space.
