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Trillions of Markets — Grant Stenger

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Why a collapse in the cost of making almost anything tradable produces not thousands of markets but trillions, and what that does to the people inside them.

I · The Market Was Never a Place There was a time when “the market” meant a room. A pit in Chicago, a ring in London, a floor in New York where people in bright jackets shouted prices into the air as if civilization turned on whether wheat closed up three cents. Markets were loud, physical, countable things. You could point at one. You could regulate the room and tally the goods inside it: corn, oil, gold, the shares of the largest firms, the debt of the most creditworthy states. Then markets became screens. Then screens became APIs. Then the APIs acquired agents. And somewhere in there the li

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