As the Dow has yo-yo'd through the past week, a familiar criticism has risen from the crowd. It's the computers fault!

Take this article from ABC, "High-Frequency Trading May Magnify Market Woes," in which the author leads with the idea that "experts believe that computer-driven high frequency trading is partially responsible for accelerating stock gyrations."

It's not that algorithmic trading couldn't have negative repercussions like last year's flash crash, but we know that there are so many human factors driving the markets crazy that we need real evidence for algorithmic hijinks before we should blame the bots. People like to scapegoat computers when the market starts doing things that are beyond any human's ability to tell a plausible story about. Dow down! Dow up! Dow down! Dow up! It must be the computers' fault!

Blaming computer-assisted trading has been a go-to strategy to explain market dips since the October 1987 market crash. "This computer-assisted trading trading has been credited with helping feed the remarkable run-up in stock values that began in 1982," the AP wrote days after the crash. "But in the wake of Monday's historic 508-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial average, the technique was being viewed as a destructive force." The Miami Herald was less measured; its headline read, "Computers Bring Doomsday to Wall Street." Even technology evangelists like the ones featured in the video above take it for granted that computerized trading might one area where computers were dangerous.