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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission this week announced rules for bloggers who take money and various other forms of booty in exchange for reviewing products. Somehow I missed this business of selling one’s soul. But I think it is a good idea to take a moment and be straight with my readers about the limits of my journalistic ethics in this space.

I don’t take money for reviewing products because I don’t review products.  Never have, never will. So don’t send me any products, okay?

Publishers send me early copies of a few books per year, generally hoping I’ll either provide a quote for the book jacket or write a positive column about it.  I do accept such books but rarely write about them. If I give a quote it is never for money, mainly because I didn’t think anyone would pay. I was probably right about that.

I once sent a book of mine to Joe Bob Briggs only to have him give it away on his web site.  Tacky.

While it is true that I write for money, in the case of this page the only money comes from those ads you haven’t been clicking on.  I have no idea what those ads will be, by the way. They are served automatically by IDG Technet, which sends me each month a check that is pitifully smaller than I was led to believe it would be.

If you want to suggest a topic to me and accompany that suggestion with a gift or a check, it pretty much guarantees I won’t write about what you want me to. This is all part of my reverse psychology plan to get Microsoft to pay me $1 million to never write anything about them again.  So far that strategy is not working.

Bear Stearns (remember them?) once offered me money to participate in a conference call with their customers.  I had done such a call before for free to talk about my Google shipping container data center column but felt too much like a talking dog and didn’t want to do it again.  So they offered money.  I said “no.”  And of course Bear Stearns is now dead.  So be careful what you ask of me.

I write for other publications like the New York Times and they pay me, but so far that pay is not from vendors except in the case of Perforce Software, where I write a column for their company newsletter. But I’ve never written about Perforce here.  Until now that is. Does that mean the FTC will now arrest me specifically because of this disclosure? Sounds like a Star Trek episode.

Most of my income actually comes from giving speeches and participating in events like brainstorming sessions, many of which happen at companies I have written about.  Often I learn things at these events that are worth writing about, though strictly within the bounds of whatever non-disclosure agreement I’ve signed (violate NDA = wife takes kids and leaves).  So in this sense I do take money from companies I might write about.  But the companies never give me money specifically to write (except for Perforce, above) and they often don’t like at all what I end up writing. Screw ‘em.

The FTC rules say nothing about giving speeches or selling one-page screenplays for $2 million.  If they expand the rules in that direction, of course, I may yet be in trouble.

In that case there’s always pizza delivery.

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This column started out being titled “Is Goldman Sachs Evil?” until I realized the issue is far more broad.  It began with a blog post by my old boss Jim Casella, who now runs Asset International, a financial publisher.  Jim concludes after a review of some recent and very negative press that Goldman isn’t evil, per se, just cocky.  But by comparing the investment bank to sports teams and players I think Jim makes a grave error.  Goldman Sachs isn’t evil, just stupid.  And that stupidity comes in the form of their witless abuse of technology.

Jim’s sports analogies are misplaced because while sporting events must inevitably have winners and losers economies don’t. TRADING has winners and losers but Goldman is an INVESTMENT bank (worse still, they are now a bank holding company) pretending to be on the side of economic growth.  Trading relies on finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the system while investing grows the economy.  Trading is a parasite on investing.  I’m not saying to ban it, I AM saying that technology has enabled outfits like Goldman to be such efficient parasites that they threaten the survival of their hosts.

This is fine if we look at it as a process of evolution.  Maybe what we are going through lately is natural selection that will over time improve our culture and society.  But that’s not the way it is being pursued by Goldman and others: they aren’t envisioning some future after they’ve killed their host, nor do their techniques allow the host to recover before being bitten again.  I’ve talked with these guys and they are clueless about the implications of their work. The deepest they’ll go is to allow that China will likely be the next economic superpower so they’ll just move their operations to Beijing or Shanghai.

That doesn’t do much for Ma and Pa back on the farm.

Economies need a little slack to function smoothly but these companies are removing all of it. All they need to be is a little less greedy, but their greed apparently knows no bounds.

Their techniques usually come down to the application of technology.  Faster computers and bigger pipes allow the relentless application of small advantages that eventually suck profit out of the market.  The answer is bigger and bigger guns wielded by bigger and bigger players, which is fine unless you aren’t a big player, which pretty much describes the rest of us.

This process builds financial bubbles until they pop then it is left to the despised government to fix things.  But what if government runs out of options?  Then there is economic revolution.  That’s what happened in the former Soviet Union in 1989 — a process we in the west cheered at the time.

But what if it happened to us?

We can’t imagine that.  Our economic policy doesn’t imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don’t acknowledge weakness.

But we ARE weak.

It all comes back to technology.  Remember the work of Black and Scholes that underlay the staggering growth of derivative securities was based on thermodynamics. We use principles from one area in another to good effect, but what makes an efficient heat exchanger can make a deadly security.

There’s a sore failing here, I believe, in the application of ethics to technology.

Ethics?  What does ethics have to do with Boyle’s Law?

Maybe nothing, maybe plenty, but the overall problem is that those who claim to understand ethics aren’t so good at the technology parts, and vice versa.  We saw that with Enron, which was technology gaming the market, and we evidently haven’t learned much since.

Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be Evil.” I thought that was silly when I heard it first.  But now I think it is the height of wisdom.  Because the techiest of techie companies probably knows better than most the power of tweaking systems to death.

It’s possible.  We CAN kill our own culture trying to preserve or defend it.  Understanding that and helping to make change as painless as possible comes down to the best efforts of those few people who really understand the complexity of our society — many of whom are readers of this column.

Everything is interconnected in this era where technology drives society yet few really understand technology.  If someone can take down Twitter because of a petty grudge then ANY information system is vulnerable.  Sometime neglect is all it takes.

And neglect is all around us.