The global financial networks of the new economy are inherently unstable. They produce random patterns of informational turbulence that may destabilize any company, as well as entire countries or regions, regardless of their economic performances.
At the existential human level, the most alarming feature of the new economy may be that it is shaped in very fundamental ways by machines. The so-called ‘global market’, strictly speaking, is not a market at all but a network of machines programmed according to a single value - money-making for the sake of making money - to the exclusion of all other values. In the words of Manuel Castells:
“The outcome of the process of financial globalization may be that we have created an Automaton at the core of our economies that is decisively conditioning our lives. Humankind’s nightmare of seeing our machines taking control of our world seems on the edge of becoming reality - not in the form of robots that eliminate jobs or government computers that police our lives, but as an electronically based system of financial transactions.”
~ Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living (2002)