How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street". It doesn't quite live up to its pretensions, but it does provide some details about making software that allowed Wall Street to blow up the economy. I find him less than morally honest about his actions. He is proud of his software, but metaphorically just shrugs his shoulders at the devastation it has left behind. He expresses "concern" for the devastated lives he sees around him, but there is no "dark night of the soul" in his account. Sadly, I'm left with the impression that he would do it all over again if given the chance.
Here's a tidbit:
I never would have thought, in my most extreme paranoid fantasies, that my software, and the others like it, would have enabled Wall Street to decimate the investments of everyone in my family. Not even the most jaded observer saw that coming. I can’t deny that it allowed a privileged few to exploit the unsuspecting many. But catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses? The fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.He blames capitalism. He blames complexity. He apparantly is unaware that we have to take moral responsibility for our actions. We don't pull a trigger on a shotgun then ask "but who could have known it was loaded, and how could I possibly have known what devastation a shotgun blast would do before pulling the trigger?" Well, most teachers of ethics would say that this dodge of "who could have known" isn't good enough. You have to worry about consequences if you want to claim to be a moral being.
Anyway, read the whole article. It gives a different perspective than most of what is currently being written about this disaster.
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