If you needed a law for every possible circumstance of actions that could occur, you'd have an even more complicated legal system. And one that would fall apart

If you needed a law for every possible circumstance of actions that could occur, you'd have an even more complicated legal system. And one that would fall apart under its own brittleness quite quickly. And would tend toward a dystopic totalitarian state in the meantime. While I agree the legal system is definitely a mess and needs to be made clearer, more accessible, and more machine readable, I think you're also dismissing (or unaware of) any and all scholarship in law or philosophy. Laws will always have some ambiguity, values precede laws and thus there are 'just' actions that go against the written law, interpretation is a necessity in human matters, the legal system evolves with the changes in the world and can never be all-encompassing, Judges have at least some training in these matters, language is ambiguous and evolves and is the medium of law, etc. And fwiw, it sounds like the 'joke' was actually a statement about the public markets, and produced evidence to show that the automated trading systems we have can be destabilizing. This evidence, in the form of a joke, is memorable, and can be recalled and used by people during a time that they may be building consensus or making decisions around these matters. And then those decisions may become laws, superseding the ones you're interested in enforcing. A bit of subversion, demonstration, and tests of legality are how the system moves forward.