It used to be that you would only hear of plotlines like this in the context of sci-fi, in which evil entities use a virus to put massive oil tankers in a position to be capsized or use subsidiaries to move around strategically important metals and secretly corner the market.

But these sorts of leeching global finance corporations are viruses, self-propagating and endangering our lives. And they are the result of a singularity—a corporate one, in which corporations now have both the rights and intelligence of humans and the global reach of nonhuman networks. Hello, Da Vinci virus! Hello, Skynet! They're already here.

Cross-posted here in the MetaFilter thread about investment banks manipulating metals markets.

In 2008, after the vice-presidential debate, I asked Rudy Giuliani a question that I very much wanted answered (and that, of course, not being obliged to answer, he ignored):

Well, I think we have an answer. The government has no interest in keeping anyone's email safe, especially after an arbitrary 180-day period has elapsed. Instead, it has developed a very strong interest in making the details of our email, chats, social-media posts, phone conversations, and credit-card statements available to anyone in government who might have a passing interest in their contents, all to support some vaguely outlined notion of "keeping us safe."

This is wrong.

See, we don't even need Terminators; totalitarian regimes of nonhuman actors uninterested in keeping individual humans alive are already here in the form of megacorporations. Most of the top search results for "corporate singularity" have to do with people answering the question "Will corporations prevent the singularity?" But I fear the rise of these human-enslaving corporations is the singularity. The hive mind of corporate culture serves to give these nonhuman entities sentience of a sort, all directed toward the preservation and propagation of the company at all costs. And the worst part is, we volunteer to surrender our minds and our energy to these entities. As my husband puts it, it's the voluntary Matrix.

Cross-posted here in the MetaFilter thread about Walmart's corporate abuses.

Last night's dream: I was set to travel to Germany, only to realize the morning of the trip that

1. I hadn't bought my plane ticket yet (I'd apparently been planning all along to buy it the day of),

2. I hadn't packed yet,

3. I wasn't even sure I had enough money in my bank account to pay for the ticket,

4. I don't speak German, and

5. We were just leaving to drive to the airport (on completely iced-over roads) as of 9:30 a.m., when we already should've been at the airport by then. The flight's departure time was 11 a.m.