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Abstract
Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality studies, this article follows the contested construction of the early online investor. First, it explores the contingency of the investor's imagined freedom, as an expression of neoliberal and informationalist prescriptions of personhood. But it also explores the complexity and multiplicity with which that freedom was structured—especially in countervailing “intermediate-level” regulation, oriented as much toward protecting a vulnerable client as toward liberating an information-savvy sovereign consumer. In complicating the investor's freedom, and in clarifying its limits, struggles over online investment offer an instructive model for evaluating the ambivalence of self-entrepreneurial work.
Notes
1. Gina Neff, “The Lure of Risk: Surviving and Welcoming Risk in the New Economy,” in Surviving the New Economy, ed. John Amman, Tris Carpenter, and Gina Neff (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007), 33–4.
2. In simplifications complicated below, professional “day-traders” execute their own trades, exploiting intra-day fluctuations in price; amateur “online investors” execute trades through an automated interface rather than a human broker, but otherwise pursue a similar range of practices as offline investors. Though I refer generally to “online investing,” more active and aggressive trading raises more salient questions of risk and responsibility than buying and holding.
3. Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” ed. Mark Blasius and Thomas Keenan, Political Theory 21, no. 2 (1993): 198–227.
4. Though little critical-cultural scholarship gives direct or sustained engagement with early online investment, I take this neglect partly as a symptom of a sweeping left skepticism toward the 1990s New Economy and the dot-com boom, and sometimes toward the longer history of ideas they mobilized. Here I want to supplement and extend a consensus that approaches them first and foremost as objects for demystification. For a few of the most prominent examples, closest to early online investment, see Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Anchor, 2000); John Cassidy, Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: Harper-Collins, 2002); and Doug Henwood, After the New Economy: The Binge and the Hangover That Won't Go Away (New York: New Press, 2003).
5. Gillian Ursell, “Television Production: Issues of Exploitation, Commodification, and Subjectivity in UK Television Labour Markets,” Media, Culture & Society 22, no. 6 (2000): 805–25.
6. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Stategies for a Connected World (New York: Penguin, 1999).
7. My approach to these longer and broader new economies follows the spirit of Richard Barbrook's catalog of various “new” classes of workers cast as vanguards of economic history. Richard Barbrook, The Class of the New (London: Pluto, 2006). This broad approach flattens specificities of different kinds of work; even in relatively narrow “creative industries” scholarship, it seems obligatory to insist on the category's incoherence. But first, I would emphasize continuities in discourses about different forms of “new” work. For example, see John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas (London: Penguin, 2001); and Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). More pointedly, across their wide variation, these different forms often represent leading scenes for the elaboration of discourses and practices of self-enterprise.
8. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self.”
9. Angela McRobbie, “Everyone is Creative: Artists as New Economy Pioneers?” openDemocracy, August 29, 2001, http://www.opendemocracy.net/node/652.
10. Fabian Holt and Francesco Lapenta, “Introduction: Autonomy and Creative Labour,” Journal for Cultural Research 14, no. 3 (2010): 224.
11. This formulation (and this article as a whole) might slide too quickly over the specific life of affect in early online investing, in following a Foucauldian framework that tends to fold in the affective with the corporeal, behavioral, and ethical (in opposition to the cognitive or ideological). In a very schematic accounting, online brokers promoted a simple (and simplistic) harmony of affective and calculative engagements; trading is fun. More interestingly, skeptics sometimes seemed to problematize and police investors’ affective engagements as an improper carnivalization of personal finance as a serious business; see Jane Bryant Quinn, “No, Mama, Don't Trade,” Newsweek May 24, 1999, 58, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis. While perhaps sharing similar sentiments, regulators left a wider margin for such engagements, in distinguishing between regulably and unregulably irresponsible investing. At the same time, skeptics along with true believers might underestimate the complexity of the lived interrelationship between affective and calculative engagements. In variations on a common theme, one investor discusses trading online as a “game function” (and executing more serious trades with a broker), while another mentions a pot of “play money” reserved for riskier investments. Martin Moylan, “Cyber Traders,” Saint Paul Pioneer Press, May 16, 1999, 1A, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis.
12. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 30. Of course ascending analysis is easier appreciated than achieved; while my own discussion of “neoliberalism” falls short of radical constructionism, I hope to approach it as a question as well as an answer.
13. Pat O'Malley, Lorna Weir, and Clifford Shearing, “Governmentality, Criticism, Politics,” Economy and Society 26, no. 4 (1997): 510. On political transition, see also John Clarke, “Dissolving the Public Realm: The Logics and Limits of Neo-liberalism,” Journal of Social Policy 33, no. 1 (2004): 27–48; and Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, eds., Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (New York: Oxford, 2005).
14. Lee Grieveson, “On Governmentality and Screens,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 180–7.
15. For a synthesis of this “edge,” see Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998).
16. In general, from different perspectives, see Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, eds., The Sociology of Economic Life, (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991); Paul Du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds., Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002); and Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo/Liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 327–31. On the New Economy in particular, see Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005); and Greg Downey and Melissa Fisher, eds., Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
17. Greg Downey and Melissa Fisher, eds.,“Introduction: The Anthropology of Capital and the Frontiers of Ethnography,” in Frontiers of Capital, 8.
18. See Bennett, Culture; and more broadly, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality; with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
19. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010), 216.
20. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010), 239–40.
21. Of course all of these transformations have been explored outside governmentality studies. Most pointedly, online investment intersects larger movements in US personal finance toward an individualization of security politicized as popular, democratic empowerment. Charles Schwab, How to be Your Own Stockbroker (New York: Scribner, 1985); Joseph Nocera, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Became the Money Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); and Rob Aitken, Performing Capital: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance (New York: Macmillan, 2007). Suggestively, however, this intersection was only latent in the early emergence of online investing during the dot-com boom. At the extreme, the boom spurred various Social Security “reform” projects, with which online investment may have dovetailed neatly (e.g., in individual control of Social Security contributions in online brokerage accounts). But in mobilizing discourses of the web as revolution, for example, online investment was much too “newfangled” to be articulated with the delicate promotion of Social Security reform. Short of that extreme, online investment since the bust has dovetailed with new possibilities for self-directed retirement planning, as with employee-directed 401(k) plans. Though closely related to the earlier phase, these possibilities represent distinct moments in online investment's trajectory as a political technology; the arguments that I follow here focus on the amateur (active) trader rather than the retirement planner. This shifting focus certainly reflects different points of the web's diffusion curve (and brokers’ targeting of relatively early adopters in the dot-com boom). But I would also suggest that it registers tellingly different orientations to work: retirement plans like the 401(k) refer at least implicitly to a relatively traditional career, while in early constructions, online trading was set apart from or in opposition to traditional patterns of work.
22. Robert Britt Horwtiz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (New York: Oxford, 1989).
23. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 260.
24. Nikolas Rose, “Governing the Enterprising Self,” in The Values of the Enterprise Culture: The Moral Debate, ed. Paul Heelas and Paul Morris (New York: Routledge, 1992): 141–64.
25. It bears emphasis that neoliberalism and informationalism do not meet as strangers in 1990s online investment. The abrogation of the welfarist state's promises of collective security after the 1970s crisis, and the elaboration of more entrepreneurial norms of economic citizenship, were strongly supported by new informationalist promises of individual mobility, flexibility, and self-fulfillment in an information society. For a forceful critique of the politics of informationalism, see Nicholas Garnham, “‘Information Society’ as Theory or Ideology: A Critical Perspective in Technology, Education and Employment in the Information Age,” Information, Communication & Society 3, no. 2 (2000): 139–52; for insightful discussions of neoliberalism in the contemporary computer culture, see Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72; and Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
26. Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (New York: Continuum, 2001), 3–4.
27. Daniel Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 409.
28. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 215.
29. Matthew Adams, “The Reflexive Self and Culture: A Critique.” British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 2 (2003): 224. More generally, see also Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work, trans. Patrick Camiller (Malden, MA: Polity, 2000); and Jerold Wallulis, The New Insecurity: The End of the Standard Job & Family (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
30. Alan Aldridge, “Habitus and Cultural Capital in the Field of Personal Finance,” Sociological Review 46, no. 1 (1998): 1–23; and Kaye Peggs, “Which Pension? Women, Risk and Pension Choice,” Sociological Review 48, no. 3 (2000): 349–64.
31. Nikolas Rose, “Towards a Critical Sociology of Freedom” (inaugural lecture, Goldsmiths College, London, May 5, 1992), 17.
32. Securities and Exchange Commission, On-Line Brokerage: Keeping Apace of Cyberspace, sec.gov, November 22, 1999, http://www.sec.gov/pdf/cybrtrnd.pdf, 1.
33. Gary Smith, “Your Guide to Online Investing,” Business Week, May 24, 1999, 90, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
34. Jack Guinan, The Online Trading Survival Guide: An Indespensible Handbook for Today's Wired Investor (Chicago: Dearborn Trade, 2001), 9.
35. Leah Spiro, “Who Needs a Broker?” Business Week, February 22, 1999, 113, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
36. John Authers, “From DIY to Branded Broking on the Net,” Financial Times, June 24, 1998, 28, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis; and Bernhard Warner, “Taking Stock of the Web,” Mediaweek, September 21, 1998, 14, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis.
37. For “gutsy,” see Tom Walker, “Some Individual Investors are Trying to Trade Like Pros,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 30, 1998, 4F, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis. For “plucky,” see Douglas Gerlach, “Trading Places: The Top Online Brokers,” PC World, February 1999, 177, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest. For “savvy,” see Laurent Belsie, “On-Line Investing Lures Stockbrokers, Customers,” Christian Science Monitor, January 16, 2000, 8, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis; and Shannon Buggs, “How to Use the Net to Do Your Investing,” Houston Chronicle, January 16, 2000, 2, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis.
38. Lynnley Browning, “On-Line Trading Starting to Click with Mainstream, Low-Risk Investors,” Boston Globe, December 19, 1999, A1, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis.
39. Frank, One Market under God; and E*Trade, 1999 Corporate Report, https://us.etrade.com/e/t/home/aboutus?gxml = annual/report-1999/index.html.
40. Derek Dingle, “The Path to Future Financial Empowerment,” Black Enterprise, August 2000, 101, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis; and “Charles Schwab On-Line; E-Trading Attracts Latin Americans,” Latin Finance, September 1998, 40, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis.
41. Dave Pettit and Rich Jaroslovsky, The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition's Guide to Online Investing (New York: Crown Business, 2000), 22.
42. Nocera, A Piece of the Action; Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life.
43. Christos Cotsakos, It's Your Money: The E*Trade Step-by-Step Guide to Online Investing (New York: Harper Business, 2000), 113.
44. See for example Douglas Gerlach and Eric Dahl, “Trading Up,” PC World, May 2000, 171, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis; Bob Brooke, “Investing Online,” Hispanic, March 2000, 54, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis; and Jill Gilbert, Getting Started in Online Investing: What You Need to Know Now! (New York: IDG, 2000).
45. Deborah Lupton and John Tulloch, “‘Life Would be Pretty Dull without Risk’: Voluntary Risk-Taking and its Pleasures,” Health, Risk & Society 4 no. (2002): 122.
46. Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life, 106–7.
47. Arthur Levitt, “Plain Talk about On-line Investing,” sec.gov (speech at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, May 4, 1999), http://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speecharchive/1999/spch274.htm.
48. Securities and Exchange Commission, Disclosure of Order Execution and Routing Practices, sec.gov, November 27, 2000, http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/34-43590.htm.
49. David Gardner and Tom Gardner, The Motley Fool Investment Guide: How the Fool Beats Wall Street's Wise Men and How You Can Too (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 9–11.
50. Cassell Bryan-Low, “The Internet is a Fount of Financial Misinformation,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2001, R9, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
51. Buzz Garlock, qtd. in Jim Rasmussen, “A New Investment Era Dawns,” Omaha World-Herald, January 2, 2000, 1R, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis.
52. Jeff Opdyke, “No Free Lunch,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2000, R12, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
53. Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, “Online Investors: Do the Slow Die First?” Review of Financial Studies 15 no. 2 (2002): 456.
54. Arthur Levitt, “Financial Literacy and the Role of the Media,” sec.gov (speech at at the Media Studies Center, New York, April 26, 1999), http://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speecharchive/1999/spch269.htm.
55. Securities and Exchange Commission, On-Line Brokerage, 71.
56. New York State Office of the Attorney-General, From Wall Street to Web Street: A Report on the Problems and Promise of the Online Brokerage Industry, November 22, 1999, 38, http://www.oag.state.ny.us/bureaus/investor_protection/investors/1999_online_brokers/full.pdf (accessed April 15, 2011). Investors trading on margin buy stocks with loans from brokers, collateralized with existing holdings. Brokers issue “margin calls” when an investor's equity in a portfolio falls below industry-set limits, sometimes liquidating holdings in order to fulfill the call—however inopportune the liquidation.
57. National Association of Securities Dealers, “2310. Recommendations to Customers (Suitability): (a)–(b),” NASD Rules, http://finra.complinet.com/en/display/display_main.html?rbid = 2403&element_id = 3638 (accessed March 3, 2012).
58. Securities and Exchange Commission, On-Line Brokerage, 24–34; National Association of Securities Dealers, Suitability Rule and Online Communications, April 2001, http://www.finra.org/Industry/Regulation/Notices/2001/P003886 (accessed April 15, 2011); Renée Barnett, “Online Trading and the National Association of Securities Dealers’ Suitability Rule: Are Online Investors Adequately Protected?” American University Law Review 49, no. 5 (2000): 1089–125; and Nancy Libin and James Wrona, “The Securities Industry and the Internet: A Suitable Match?” Columbia Business Law Review, no. 3 (2001): 601–80.
59. Michael Anderson, qtd. in Rebecca Buckman, “Discount and Online Brokers Worry about Investor Cases,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 1998, C1, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
60. Matthew Benson, “Online Investing and the Suitability Obligations of Brokers and Broker-Dealers,” Suffolk University Law Review 34, no. 2 (2001): 412.
61. Barnett, “Online Trading and the National Association of Securities Dealers’ Suitability Rule,” 1121.
62. Mary Condon, “Technologies of Risk? Regulating Online Investing in Canada,” Law & Policy 26, no. 3 & 4 (2004): 411–37.
63. Barnett, “Online Trading and the National Association of Securities Dealers’ Suitability Rule.”
64. Buckman, “Discount and Online Brokers Worry about Investor Cases.”
65. Stephen Choi, “Regulating Investors Not Issuers: A Market-Based Proposal,” California Law Review 88, no. 2 (2000): 279–334.
66. On bifurcation in liberal regulation, see National Deviancy Council, ed., Permissiveness and Control: The Fate of the Sixties Legislation (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980).
67. Levitt, “Plain Talk about On-line Investing.”
68. Joey Anuff and Gary Wolf, Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader (New York: Random House, 2000), 41–64.
69. Dawn Kawamoto and Sandeep Junnarkar, “Troubles Await Online Brokers,” CNet News.com, December 9, 1998, http://news.com.com/2009/1017/218815.html (accessed April 15, 2011).
70. Cassell Bryan-Low, “Tools of the Trade,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2000, R14, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
71. Jonathan Hechinger and Jeff Opdyke, “Day Trading Making a Comeback and Brokers Vie for the Business,” Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2003, A1, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
72. Glenn Schwartz, “How Many Trades Must a Trader Make to be in the Trading Business?” Virginia Tax Review 22, no. (2003): 429–30.
73. Saul S. Cohen, qtd. in Day Trading: An Overview: Hearing on H.R. 106–285 Before the Permanent Subcommittee of the Committee on Governmental Affairs,United States Senate, 106th Cong., First Session, September 16, 1999 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2000), 44.
74. Senator Susan M. Collins, qtd. in Day Trading, 3.
75. Senator Carl Levin, qtd. in Day Trading, 4.
76. Senator Max Cleland, qtd. in Day Trading, 6, 32.
77. Arthur Levitt, qtd. in Day Trading, 17.
78. Senator Peter C. Hildreth, qtd. in Day Trading, 25.
79. Pat O'Malley, “Risky Contracts: Gambling, Speculation, and Insurance,” in Risk, Uncertainty and Government (London: GlassHouse, 2004), 95–115.
80. Mary L. Schapiro, qtd. in Day Trading, 20.
81. National Association of Securities Dealers “2360. Approval Procedures for Day-Trading Accounts,” NASD Rules http://finra.complinet.com/en/display/display.html?rbid = 2403&record_id = 4328&element_id = 3651 (accessed March 6, 2012).
82. Levitt, qtd. in Day Trading, 17.
83. Stacy Forster, “The Cop,” Wall Street Journal, June 12 2000, R18, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
84. Especially here but also above, I borrow the concept of dematerialization from Leonard Jackson's critique of Gramscian cultural studies; Lawrence Grossberg and Tony Bennett pursue critiques along broadly similar lines. While these critiques participate in specific arguments about cultural studies at the moment of 1990s crisis, I would emphasize their more general critique of textualist approaches to cultural analysis, and how such approaches tend to neglect institutional forces, reifying and hollowing key terms of explanation like “capitalism” and “neoliberalism.” Leonard Jackson, The Dematerialization of Karl Marx: Literature and Marxist Theory (New York: Longman, 1994); Lawrence Grossberg, “The Victory of Culture, Part 1: Against the Logic of Mediation,” Angelaki: The Journal of Theoretical Humanities 3, no. 3 (1998): 3–29; and Bennett, Culture.
85. Andrew Ross, “The Making of Sustainable Livelihoods,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2010): 92.
86. Andrew Ross, “The Making of Sustainable Livelihoods,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2010): 92.
87. “Pew Internet & American Life Project Poll, March, 2000 (Q23I),” http://webapps.ropercenter.uconn.edu/cfide/psearch_v11/webroot/question_view.cfm?qid = 419681&pid = 53&ccid = 53 (accessed March 6, 2012); Dawn Ostrom, “Study Finds More Hispanics Logging on to Internet,” San Jose Mercury News, July 27, 2001, accessed March 6, 2012 via LexisNexis; and Robert Libbon, “Who is Making Online Trades?” American Demographics, March 2001, 28, accessed March 6, 2012 via ProQuest.
88. See Nicholas Garnham, “Amartya Sen's ‘Capabilities’ Approach to the Evaluation of Welfare: Its Application to Communications,” Javnost—The Public 4, no. 4 (1997): 25–34.
89. Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life.