A Sociologist Shines a Light on Traders, Flash Boys and Online Adtech

In 1972, Donald MacKenzie won a medal for being the best mathematics student at the University of Edinburgh. But the previous year, he’d taken a course on the sociology of science that changed his life. The young Scot had always preferred the self-contained truths of pure math, but the class sparked a pivot to something entirely different: the messy, morally ambiguous study of human society.

Since then, the now 74-year-old sociologist has written about nuclear missile systems, mathematical proofs in computing, cryptocurrencies and online advertising. Among Wall Street’s bookish set, he’s known best for writing the other book about high-frequency trading. Seven years after Michael Lewis’ bestseller Flash Boys portrayed traders as wily villains who used blink-and-you-miss-it speed to beat one another, MacKenzie made them wonky again. In 304 dense pages, Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets, published in 2021, digs deep into the history of market structure and HFT.