Nonsense - what could be more beneficial to society than providing imaginary "liquidity" by interposing yourself between legitimate buyers and sellers?

It's a bit like stock brokers - and why wouldn't we want stock brokers to operate at drastically faster-than-human timescales, because we all know the value of a company changes every nanosecond! And "flash crashes" create opportunities for investors to make huge amounts of money!

And just as crypto has poured money into GPU companies (providing opportunities for enterprising secondary market resellers of same) HFT has poured money into networking companies.

Short of creating the great firewall or helping governments slurp up all the traffic on the internet, what could be a more beneficial application of network technology?

HFT (like finance in general) has also gobbled up lots of tech grads, making it easier to find jobs at tech companies.