island94.org

The introduction to Fred Turner‘s From Counterculture to Cyberculture:

In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self—all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to “flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people,” as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte put it. The stodgy men in gray flannel suits who had so confidently roamed the corridors of industry would shortly disappear, and so too would the chains of command on which their authority depended. In their place, wrote Negroponte and dozens of others, the Internet would bring about the rise of a new “digital generation”—playful, self-sufficient, psychologically whole—and it would see that generation gather, like the Net itself, into collaborative networks of independent peers. States too would melt away, their citizens lured back from archaic part-based politics to the “natural” agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self, so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion. Ubiquitous networked computing had arrived, and in its shiny array of interlinked devices, pundits, scholars, and investors alike saw the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free.

But how did this happen? Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. In the winter of 1964, for instance, students marching for free speech at the University of California at Berkeley feared that America’s political leaders were treating them as if they were bits of abstract data. One after another, they took up blank computer cards,punched them through with new patterns of holes—”FSM” and “STRIKE”—and hung them around their necks. One student even pinned a sign to his chest that parroted the cards user instructions, “I am a UC student. Please do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me.” For the marchers of the Free Speech Movement, as for many other Americans throughout the 1960s, computers loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralized bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life, and, ultimately, of the Vietnam War. Yet, in the 1990s, the same machines that had served as the defining devices of cold war technocracy emerged as the symbols of its transformation. Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture, computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community,and spiritual communion. How did the cultural meaning of information technology shift so drastically.

As a number of journalists and historians have suggested, part of the answer is technological. By the 1990s, the room-sized, stand-alone calculating machines of the cold war era had largely disappeared. So too had the armored rooms in which they were housed and the army of technicians that supported them. Now Americans had taken up microcomputers, some the size of notebooks, all of them available to the individual user, regardless of his or her institutional standing. These new machines could perform a range of tasks that far exceeded even the complex calculations for which digital computers had first been built. They became communication devices and were used to prepare novels and spreadsheets, pictures and graphs. Linked over telephone wires and fiber-optic cables,they allowed their users to send messages to one another, to download reams of information from libraries around the world, and to publish their own thoughts on the World Wide Web. In all of these ways,changes in computer technology expanded the range of uses to which computers could be put and the types of social relations they were able to facilitate.

As dramatic as they were, however, these changes alone do not account for the particular utopian visions to which computers became attached. The fact that a computer can be put on a desktop, for instance, and that it cant be used by an individual, does not make it a “personal” technology. Nor does the fact that individuals can come together by means of computer networks necessarily require that their gatherings become “virtual communities.” On the contrary, as Shoshanna Zuboff has pointed out, in the office, desktop computers and computer networks can become powerful tools for integrating the individual ever more closely into the corporation. At home, those same machines not only allow schoolchildren to download citations from the public library, they also turn the living room into a digital shopping mall. For retailers, the computer in the home becomes an opportunity to harvest all sorts of information about potential customers. For all the utopian claims surrounding the emergence of the Internet, there is nothing about a computer or a computer network that necessarily requires that it level organizational structures, render the individual more psychologically whole, or drive the establishment of intimate, though geographically distributed, communities?

How was it, then, that computers and computer networks became linked to visions of peer-to-peer ad-hocracy, a leveled marketplace, and a more authentic self? Where did these visions come from? And who enlisted computing machines to represent them?

If that hanging question doesn’t make you want to read the book, I don’t know what will.

I just bought a copy of this book for a coworker. I used to frequently give out copies of Richard Bach’s Illusions to friends, but this is a little heavier reading.

The New York Review of Books on When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins:

And then came Betty Friedan. Her book, Collins writes, hit in 1963 “like an earthquake.” The shameful, confusing malaise felt by many women after the war now had a legitimate source, and the source had a name: The Feminine Mystique. Friedan busted the myth of the happy housewife so thoroughly that it took decades before women who were happy housewives dared to say anything about it. Women, Friedan said, “were being duped into believing homemaking was their natural destiny.” The dueling desires of motherhood and selfhood were articulated at last, and the feminist movement turned from the clear-cut demands of suffragism and equal pay to the less-defined realm of empowerment.

Accordingly, criticism of Third Wave Feminism is quite similar to that of self-actualization (from Rushkoff’s Life, Inc.):

Instead of fueling people to do something about the world, as the Weathermen and Yippies had hoped, spirituality became a way of changing one’s own perspectives, one’s own experiences and one’s own self. By pushing through to the other side of personal liberation, the descendants of Reich once again found self-adjustment the surest path to happiness.

The following quote is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. (The John mentioned is the protagonist’s buddy who wants to escape modern technological life via a motorcycle he deigns to tune-up):

Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. It’s the understanding of this rational intellectual idea that’s fundamental. John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapesand has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.

I was talking about these concepts yesterday when I said that a motorcycle can be divided according to its components and according to its functions. When I said that suddenly I created a set of boxes with the following arrangement:

And when I said the components may be subdivided into a power assembly and a running assembly, suddenly appear some more little boxes:

And you see that every time I made a further division, up came more boxes based on these divisions until I had a huge pyramid of boxes. Finally you see that while I was splitting the cycle up into finer and finer pieces, I was also building a structure.

This structure of concepts is formally called a hierarchy and since ancient times has been a basic structure for all Western knowledge. Kingdoms, empires, churches, armies have all been structured into hierarchies. Modern businesses are so structured. Tables of contents of reference material are so structured, mechanical assemblies, computer software, all scientific and technical knowledge is so structured—so much so that in some fields such as biology, the hierarchy of kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species is almost an icon.

The box “motorcycle” contains the boxes “components” and “functions.” The box “components” contains the boxes “power assembly” and “running assembly,” and so on. There are many other kinds of structures produced by other operators such as “causes” which produce long chain structures of the form, “A causes B which causes C which causes D,” and so on. A functional description of the motorcycle uses this structure. The operator’s “exists,” “equals,” and “implies” produce still other structures. These structures are normally interrelated in patterns and paths so complex and so enormous no one person can understand more than a small part of them in his lifetime. The overall name of these interrelated structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guys’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

A brief history of the United State’s subsidies to journalism and the press, from The Nation’s “How to Save Journalism” by John Nichols and Robert McChesney:

Even those sympathetic to subsidies do not grasp just how prevalent they have been in American history. From the days of Washington, Jefferson and Madison through those of Andrew Jackson to the mid-nineteenth century, enormous printing and postal subsidies were the order of the day. The need for them was rarely questioned, which is perhaps one reason they have been so easily overlooked. They were developed with the intention of expanding the quantity, quality and range of journalism–and they were astronomical by today’s standards. If, for example, the United States had devoted the same percentage of its GDP to journalism subsidies in 2009 as it did in the 1840s, we calculate that the allocation would have been $30 billion. In contrast, the federal subsidy last year for all of public broadcasting, not just journalism, was around $400 million.

The experience of America’s first century demonstrates that subsidies of the sort we suggest pose no threat to democratic discourse; in fact, they foster it. Postal subsidies historically applied to all newspapers, regardless of viewpoint. Printing subsidies were spread among all major parties and factions. Of course, some papers were rabidly partisan, even irresponsible. But serious historians of the era are unanimous in holding that the extraordinary and diverse print culture that resulted from these subsidies built a foundation for the growth and consolidation of American democracy. Subsidies made possible much of the abolitionist press that led the fight against slavery.

Our research suggests that press subsidies may well have been the second greatest expense of the federal budget of the early Republic, following the military. This commitment to nurturing and sustaining a free press was what was truly distinctive about America compared with European nations that had little press subsidy, fewer newspapers and magazines per capita, and far less democracy. This history was forgotten by the late nineteenth century, when commercial interests realized that newspaper publishing bankrolled by advertising was a goldmine, especially in monopolistic markets. Huge subsidies continued to the present, albeit at lower rates than during the first few generations of the Republic. But today’s direct and indirect subsidies–which include postal subsidies, business tax deductions for advertising, subsidies for journalism education, legal notices in papers, free monopoly licenses to scarce and lucrative radio and TV channels, and lax enforcement of anti-trust laws–have been pocketed by commercial interests even as they and their minions have lectured us on the importance of keeping the hands of government off the press. It was the hypocrisy of the current system–with subsidies and government policies made ostensibly in the public interest but actually carved out behind closed doors to benefit powerful commercial interests–that fueled the extraordinary growth of the media reform movement over the past decade.

Above is from the addendum of Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator from which I have quoted previously. Written buoyantly, it  makes jokes of specie (‘new notes of the “first water”‘ refers to the breadth of bank notes available at the time) and law (“club law” is the lynch mob). The text:

[i2] STACK ISLAND, not long since, was famed for a band of counterfeiters, horse thieves, robbers, murderers, &c. who made this part of the Mississippi a place of manufacture and deposit. From hence they would sally forth, stop boats, buy horses, flour, whiskey, &c. and pay for all in fine new notes of the “first water.” Their villages, after many severe losses sustained by innocent, good men, unsuspecting the cheat, became notorious, and after several years search and pursuit of the civil, and in some cases the club law, against this band of monsters, they have at length disappeared.

The following is from the conclusion of the Axemaker’s Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein:

The first step may be to recognize that we can use our technology as it has been used time and again through history. We can use it to change minds, but this time for our own reasons in our own terms and at our own pace, if we use the coming technologies for what they could be: instruments of freedom. The very interactive nature of the modem world makes it less easy to block such an act and to continue with the old ways of hierarchy and division. But in any case, all that ever kept us in thrall of institutions was our ignorance of the kind of knowledge that could soon now be so easily accessible and understandable that it will be a waste of time to know it. When Gutenberg printed his books, he greatly lessened the power of memory and tradition. The new technologies will lessen the power of arcane, specialist knowledge. And when they do, we will all, in one sense, return to what we were before the first axe.

The culture we live in, based on the sequential influence of language on thought and operating according to the rationalist rules of Greek philosophy and reductionist practice, has wielded tremendous power. It has given us the wonders of the modem world on a plate. But it has also fostered belieh that have tied us to centralized institutions and powerful individuals for centuries, which we must shuck off if we are to adapt to the world we’ve made: that unabated extraction of planetary resources is possible, that the most valuable members of society are specialists, that people cannot survive without leaders, that the body is mechanistic and can only be healed with knives and drugs, that there is only one superior truth, that the only important human abilities lie in the sequential and analytic mode of thought, and that the mind works like an axemaker’s gilt.

Above all (and most recently) we have also been persuaded to think that it is unacceptable to be different or even to acknowledge that differences in abilities exist between us. But our survival may depend on the realization and expression of humanity’s immense diversity. Only if we use what may be the ultimate of the many axemalcer’s gifts—the coming information systems—to nurture this individual and cultural diversity, only if we celebrate our differences rather than suppressing them, will we stand a chance of harnessing the wealth of human talent that has been ignored for millennia and that is now eager, all around the world, for release.

I greatly enjoyed the book, but I understand where the only 1-star  reviewer is coming from:

the suggested solution of a “web supported” world full of small democrartic communities is such hairy-armpit, dope-smoking, hippy rubbish I found myself laughing out loud. I’m fascinated to know who is going to design and construct and distribute the servers to enable this web-supported world, let alone who is going to host and maintain them

Burke got the wealth and attention that enabled this book through the medium of television, and i bet he tours the world for book launches on jumbo-jets. i wonder if the irony of that is lost on him.

It is very difficult to build jumbos or LSI processor chips as a cottage industry

pure twaddle

Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, has a wonderful essay entitled Frames from the Framers: How America’s Revolutionaries Imagined Intellectual Property about the differing perspectives on copyright present during the drafting of the US Constitution. I have written of historical perspectives on copyright before, but Hyde outlines 3 different frames in which creative works and copyright existed (via BoingBoing):

1. The common gift from god:

The oldest model, I suspect, is one that takes the fruits of human creativity to be gifts from the gods, the muses, or the ancient ones and, as a corollary, takes it that such works therefore should not be bought and sold (nor can they be exactly forged, plagiarized, or stolen). Such was the traditional understanding for medieval Christians, their dictum being Scientia Donum Dei Est, Unde Vendi Non Potest–“Knowledge is a gift from God, consequently it cannot be sold.” To sell knowledge was to traffic in the sacred and thus to engage in the sin of simony. Reformation Protestants were particularly sensitive to simony, having charged the Catholic church with the buying and selling of ecclesiastical preferments and benefices. Martin Luther said of his own created works, “Freely have I received, freely I have given, and I want nothing in return.”

I suppose that in the present moment if you were a Lutheran choir director who download hymns for your congregation and the music industry sued, saying that the work had been copyrighted and that “theft was theft,” you ought to be able to shift the frame by replying: “simony is simony.” I doubt that you’d find much support in the American legal tradition, however, even in its early years. Reformation ideas about knowledge had been considerably altered by the time the founders framed their own.

2. Ownership of the Landed Estate:

The second frame does not necessarily conflict with the religious background of the “common stock” [or “free as the air”] frame, but its point of departure is decidedly of this world, more focused on the problem of freeing individual talent from patronage and also, therefore, more at ease withcommerce. Here the dominant metaphor was the landed estate, an image that had the advantage, for partisans of strong intellectual property rights, of borrowing from people’s assumptions about real estate. “We conceive [that] this property is the same with that of Houses and other Estates,” declared London booksellers when first threatened with a limit to the term of their copyrights. They beg the question, of course, of what exactly we assume such property entails (there are many kinds of estates, as we shall see in the next section), but as with most compelling frames, the intuitive response is what matters, not complexities hidden beneath the surface. Shouldn’t all property, even a bookseller’s copyright, be “safe as houses”?

3. Monopoly:

Monopoly had a marked historical meaning for early theorists of intellectual property, seventeenth-century Puritans having begun their argument with royal power over exactly this issue. As the historian and statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay explains in his History of England, Puritans in the House of Commons long felt that Queen Elizabeth had encroached upon the House’s authority to manage trade having, in particular, taken it “upon herself to grant patents of monopoly by scores.”  Macaulay lists iron, coal, oil, vinegar, saltpetre, lead, starch, yarn, skins, leather, and glass, saying that these “could be bought only at exorbitant prices.”

Macaulay doesn’t list printing in his History, but it was the case that in the late sixteenth century the Queen’s printer, Christopher Barker, held monopoly rights to the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and all statutes, proclamations, and other official documents. And Macaulay does mention monopoly in his 1841 Parliamentary speech in opposition to a proposed extension to the term of copyright. “Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly,” he said, asking rhetorically if the Parliament wished to reinstate “the East India Company’s monopoly of tea, or … Lord Essex’s monopoly of sweet wines”?

The understanding of copyright as monopoly was not Macaulay’s invention; it was almost as old as copyright itself. In 1694 John Locke–a strong supporter of property rights in other respects–had objected to copyrights given by government license as a form of monopoly “injurious to learning.” Locke was partly concerned with religious liberty, the laws in question having been written to suppress books “offensive” to the Church of England, but mostly he was distressed that works by classic authors were not readily available to the public in well-made, cheap editions (he himself had tried to publish an edition of Aesop only to be blocked by a printer holding an exclusive right). “It is very absurd and ridiculous,” he wrote to a friend in Parliament, “that any one now living should pretend to have a propriety in … writings of authors who lived before printing was known or used in Europe.” Regarding authors yet living, Locke thought they should have control of their own work, but for a limited term only. As with Macaulay, his framing issue was monopoly privilege, not property rights.

The following is from the 1824 edition of Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator on Island 94:

No. 94, Stack or Crow’s nest Island, six miles below 93,

Has been sunk by the earthquake, or swept off by the floods; but just below where it stood is a high sandbar, covered with young willows, and is about the middle of the river. This bar may grow into another Crow’s, but it is to be hoped, not into another Rogue’s nest. The river here bears hard against the head of the bar, and also against the right hand bank–channel right side near to the island, thence draws toward the right hand shore.

The creek empties in on the right side, just above the two settlements. The Washita heads not far from this place, on which is a considerable settlement, 40 miles distant, and to which from hence is a cut road. It is thirty miles to Moorehouse’s settlement on that river.

Crows’s nest or Stack island was very small, and stood in about the middle of the Nine Mile reach. A large bar had formed just below where the island stood, but it also has given way to the current, and is no more.

Four miles below this island (No. 94,) is a sandbar in a right hand bend–channel on the left of it.

I love the slant rhyme humor: “This bar may grow into another Crow’s but it is to be hoped not into another Rogue’s nest.” The print is below.

As the 4th anniversary of this blog nears (November 12) I’ve been revisiting research that was near impossible when I began it. The namesake of this blog was Island 94, formerly sitting within the Mississippi River, which I was introduced to through the very excellent book When the Mississippi Ran Backwards by Jay Feldman. When I first started this blog, it was very difficult to find primary sources through the internet. Fortunately, many libraries and archives have worked to digitize their collections and make them available online. Because of that there is a lot more to say about this blog’s namesake and inspiration.

The title page above is from Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator, a navigational aid published when the Mississippi was a navigational challenge—before the Army Corps of Engineers pulled the snags, built the levees and made it all into a generally uninteresting commercial thoroughfare. It is from the 1824 edition published after Cramer’s death and after the absence of the Island 94 for which this blog is named.

As you can tell from the ample account given even on its title page, this book is from a day when to publish something, you had to really mean it.

I am continuing to enjoy Douglas Rushkoff’s Life, Inc. Adding to my enjoyment is its parallelism with Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture from which I have quoted before.

By the 1960s, the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse had revived much of the spirit of [Wilhelm] Reich—this time for an audience already dissatisfied with the spiritual vacuum offered by consumerism. He was the most vocal member of the Frankfurt School, and spoke frequrently at student and antiwar protests. Marcuse blamed the Freudians—as well as the government and corporate authorities who used their stultifying techniques—for creating a world in which people were reduced to expresssing their feelings and identities through mass-produced objects. He said the individual had been turned into a “one-dimensional man”—conformist and repressed.

Marcuse became a hero to the real counterculture movement, and his words inspired the Weathermen, Vietnam War protests and the Black Panthers. They saw consumerism as more than a way for corporations to make money; it was also a way to keep the masses docile while the government pursued an illegal war in Southeast Asia. So breaking free of consumption-defined self was a prerequisite to becoming a conscious protester. As Linda Evans of the Weathermen explained, “We want to live a life that isn’t based on materialistic  values, and yet the whole system of government and the economy is based on proit, on personal greed, and selfishness.” But as Stew Albert, a cofounder of the anti-Vietnam movement the Yippies, contended, the police state began in an individual person’s mind. People who sought to be engaged in political activism needed first to make themselves new and better people.

The counterculture and its psychologics again revised the spirit of Wilhem Reich in the hopes of freeing people from the control of their own minds. To this end, in 1962 the Esalen Institute was founded on 127 acres of California coastline. The Institute hosted a wide range of workshops and lectures in an atmosphere of massage, hot tubs and high quality sex and drugs, all in the name of freeing people from repression. The Human Potential Movement—Renaissance individualistic humanism updated for the twentieth century—began in an explosion of new therapies.

….

Like Dorothy embarking down the yellow-brick road to self-fulfillment, thousands flocked to the hot tubs of Esalen to find themselves and self-actualize [as promulgated by Abraham Maslow as the top of his Hierarachy of Needs]. Instead of annihilating the illusion of a self, as Buddha suggested, the self-centered spirituality of Eslaen led to a celebration of self as the source of all experience. Change the way you see the world, and the world changes. Kind of. Instead of fueling people to do something about the world, as the Weathermen and Yippies had hoped, spirituality became a way of changing one’s own perspectives, one’s own experiences and one’s own self. By pushing through to the other side of personal liberation, the descendants of Reich once again found self-adjustment the surest path to happiness. Anna Freud would have been proud. You are the problem, after all.

A dozen pages later, the book picks back up at the pivotal 1960s and, just as Turner does so excellently, connects it towards the spread of free-market economic liberalism that both the Left and Right embraced.

The young technocrats at Rand believed that John Nash’s equations presented a way to organize a society of self-interested individuals that promoted their personal freedom. By the 1960s, they had the backing of a counterculture equally obsessed with the personal needs of individuals and the corrupting influence of all institutions—even family. The Scottish psychologist R.D. Laing used game theory to model human interactions, and concluded that kindness and love were merely the tools through which people manipulated one another to get their selfish needs fulfilled. Mental illness was just a label created by the repressive state. So-called crazy people were really evidence of some greater societal problem—a “cry for help” against oppressive institutions. In fact, like the family, the state was just a means of social control that violated the most primal and fundamental urge of human beings to pursue their individual interests. Through Lain, the darkest aspects of game theory were extended to the culture at large and popularized as social truisms: your parents don’t really love you and the man is after your money. What look like social relationships are really just “the games people play.”

Hippies tool these assessments to the streets, but most of them were too distracted by self-actualization  for the movement to maintain any cohesion. Within a decade, the counterculture’s war against institutional control would become the rallying cry of the Right. The brilliance of Reagonomics was to marry the antiauthoritarian urge of what had once been the counterculture with the antigovernment bias of free-market conservatives. In Reagan’s persona as well as his politics, the independent, shoot-from-the-hip individualism of the Marlboro man became compatible—even synergistic—with the economics and culture of self-interest. No-blink brinksmanship with the “evil” Soviet empire, the dismantling of domestic government institutions, the decertification of labor unions, and the promotion of unfettered corporate capitalism all came out of the same combination of Rand Corporation game theory and the 1960s antipsychiatry movement. Regulations designed to protect the environment, worker safety, and consumer rights were summarily decried as unnecessary government meddling in the marketplace. As if channeling Friedrich Hayek by way of R.D. Laing, Reagan shrank the social-welfare system by closing the public-psychiatric-hospital system.

…

Make no mistake about it: by the late Clinton-Blair year, both the Right and the mainstream Left had accepted the basic premise adopted from systems theory that the economy was a natural system whose stability depended on the government’s getting out of the way and allowing self-interested people to work toward a dynamic equilibrium. Gone were the “compassion” and “love” that Mario Cuomo had demanded of government back in his rousing “Tale of Two Cities” speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. In their place were small government and personal accountability. The last heroes of the political age, Reagan and Thatcher were long gone. In their place, the only rebels capable of dismantling the social-welfare hierarchy were the super-CEOs: Jack Welch, Richard Branson, and Ken Lay, as well as the new breed of free-market theorists advising them.

Thanks to the combined emergence of a computer culture capable of recognizing the power of emergent systems and a rising class of dot-com workers profiting off what appeared to them to be the exploitation of a free-market technology, libertarianism was in ascendance. In reality, the phenomena we were all celebrating in the mid-1990s had little to do with the free market; the Internet had been paid for by the government, and dynamical systems theory was much more applicable to the weather and plankton populations than it was to economics. But as profits and stock indexes rose, the stars themselves seemed to be aligning, and systems theory was a good a way as any of justifying the same options packages that young programmers would have been embarrassed by just a few years before, when they were antiestablishment hackers.

…

Ironically, while the intelligentsia were using social evolution to confirm laissez fair capitalism to one another, the politicians promoting these policies to the masses were making the same sale through creationism. Right-wing conservatives turned to fundamentalist Christians to promote the free-market ethos, in return promising lip service to hot-button Christian issues such as abortion and gay marriage. It was now the godless Soviets who sought to thwart the maker’s plan to bestow the universal rights of happiness and property on mankind. America’s founders, on the other hand, had been divinely inspired to create a nation in God’s service, through which people could pursue their individual salvation and savings.

…

The same right wing think tanks writing white papers justifying game-theory economics through bottom-up social Darwinism were simultaneously advising conservatives on how to leverage Christian fundamentalists in support of the resultant ideals. What both PR efforts had in common were two falsely reasoned premises: that human beings are private, self-interested actors behaving in ways that consistently promote personal wealth, and that the laissez-faire free market is a natural and self-sustaining system through which scarce resources can be equitably distributed.