In a couple hours computers will begin executing algorithms, which will govern the transparent financial markets for the United States. These computers will sift through mountains of current and historical data in hopes of predicting market prices. Each program will have its own strategy for determining the best way to make money for the institutions, which deploy them. These machines have become the new seat of capitalism. The decisions making of trillions of dollars divorced from intuition or sentiment.
This is the world we live in. A world, where uncovering objective truths, is easier than at any point in history. There is so much information available in real time, that analysis should evolve rapidly. Prejudice and corruption should be exposed as bad gears in the machinery.
Instead we see ideology gaining influence, rather than giving way to unbiased evaluation. We see the most obvious of solutions seemingly incomprehensible to the political system.
The question needs to be asked. With all the information available to us, why aren't we getting smarter?
Why would the capitalists hand over their decision making to machines? The answer is obvious. Because the machines do a better job, than their human counterparts did.
Likewise the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 implemented a novel approach to election analysis. Rather than using traditional election strategies, they let data drive how and where they spent money. They focused resources in areas, which cut against the grain of conventional wisdom. This was not an effort to snub the existing political class. It was simply doing what the data said they should do.
Yet this kind of decision making has failed to translate into governing. The Obama administration is trapped in the same Marx brother's film as previous administrations. Republicans have dug their trenches in the most simplistic of contrary lines. If Obama is for it, they are against it. They do so with little regard to their own benefit.
One needs only look at the last redistricting to see the folly of this reality avoiding mindset. Republicans designed a map, which encouraged policy positions antithetical to national elections. The result of this elevates Republican politicians with increasingly narrower appeal. Undoing the damage of these decisions will be a generational effort for the GOP.
This does not mean that Democrats have made the change over in their thinking either. Their strongest issues such as climate change, progressive economic reform, shifting foreign policy and health care reform have been contorted often within their own caucus. Despite broad based mandates for most of their positions, they have been unable to leverage even their own numbers.
This is the paradox of our age. At a time where information is so readily available, we see almost universal institutional dysfunction.