16. Initial Price Offering. This meant the price at which shares were offered to the general public. This was usually a vastly inflated price, which served as the lowest and final level of the investment pyramid.

  17. A person “in the new” was one who had knowledge of the most current trends and information. This idiom became popular in the early twenty-first century; to be “in the new” was even better than being “in the know.”

  18. Human attention was measured in quantities known as eyeball hours.

  19. Wholesale.

  20. These were mostly consumer corporations, whose brand recognition was used to fuel stock purchases. Most of the corporations mentioned in this conversation are no longer in existence.

  21. A violent video arcade game. See note 43.

  22. A classic horror film based on a story by a period fiction hack named Stephen King.

  23. Wedgie: an attack meant to cause pain and embarrassment simultaneously, in which the rear waistband of the underwear is pulled upward so that the rest of the garment lodges snugly and somewhat visibly between the buttocks.

  24. Whale-hook: a similar maneuver to the “wedgie” (above), performed by reaching through the victim’s legs from behind, grasping the front waistband of his undershorts, and pulling them over and around the beltline as hard as possible for considerably more infliction of discomfort. For additional descriptions of these rituals, as well as their psychological impact, see George Thomas Duncan, Initiation Rites among the Pubescent, Oakland, Calif.: EC Press, 2005.

  25. Ritalin was an amphetamine prescribed during this period to young men who resisted coercive electronic programming. It appears that once corporations redefined the social and public strata as “attention economies,” all restraints on commercial messaging were removed. As a result, children growing up in an American city were exposed to marketing and brand messaging literally everywhere they set their eyes.

  As an adaptive strategy, many of these children evolved a primitive version of what we now call “skim-sight.” At the time, however, it was considered a mental illness, because it rendered children impervious to media “stickiness,” and thus resistant to advertising messages. It also produced serious side-effects, such as the inability to follow linear arguments. Many children who were prescribed the drug sold the pills to their peers as “speed.”

  26. An inefficient suite of programs that modeled office tasks such as typing and spreadsheets, but which was used mostly by Microsoft as a way of leveraging its operating system and perpetuating market share before the company’s eventual downfall. It is also thought that the program’s outlandishly cumbersome code was designed to necessitate the purchase of faster computer chips, and new versions of the Microsoft operating system, in a tiered scheme of planned obsolescence.

  27. In this period, electronic mail was used mostly for the transmission of primitive marketing pitches called spam, in which the very same advertisement was sent to millions of people at once. This technique was still employed long after computer-generated one-to-one electronic target-marketing had became economical. Spam was also the brand name of a canned food made from a variety of animal flesh products. The two terms may have been related.

  28. Inside Edition: news had devolved into a form of entertainment. “News magazines” such as Inside Edition mostly featured stories about the actors in “reality television” programs—social experiments based on ritualized survival sagas. The program also sensationalized the mundane, such as the sex-partner choices of politicians and corporate celebrities.

  29. Until 2020, most computer software was still produced using encrypted code. This meant that only the company that published and owned the software could modify it. It was an antievolutionary posture adopted by most of the software industry that stunted technological development. Current analysis indicates that by 2009, computer software was thirty years behind where it would have been had open source been the dominant development model.

  30. Rivera’s World: a television show created, apparently, to explore the social ramifications of the murder trial of former football hero O.J. Simpson.

  31. Credit cards were ways of incurring debt.

  32. An airline that went out of business after losing a class action suit in which it was sued by its customers and flight attendants for reducing the amount of breathable oxygen onboard below legal limits.

  33. A profit-driven medical insurance scheme where computers were used to deny necessary health services to paying subscribers. Amazingly, widespread dissatisfaction with Health Management Organizations was used to dissuade Americans from endorsing a state-administrated national health plan.

  34. A form of birth control—basically a rubber glove for the penis—that also prevented the transmission of disease. Although originally made of lamb intestine, by the mid-twentieth century most condoms were composed of rubber, which was in turn replaced by latex and synthetic polymers. As one might guess, condoms greatly reduced sensitivity, and many wearers were reduced to ingesting prescription medications to maintain erections sufficient for coitus.

  35. A nickname for cannabis, which was illegal at the time. Inconsistencies in drug laws of the period—both alcohol and tobacco were legal—have yet to be fully explained.

  36. At the time, it was believed that women were more difficult to arouse to the level of orgasm than men. As a result of this self-perpetuating fallacy, a female’s satisfaction threshold was put at a premium.

  37. Newspapers of the period were printed on large sheets (a legacy from an earlier era when periodicals were taxed by the page) and with toxic ink that transferred easily onto the reader’s hands.

  38. No one was ready to admit that global warming had reached a critical stage, even though the polar ice caps had melted into lakes. Many journalists offhandedly referred to their personal sneaking suspicions that the run of record temperatures, floods, and environmental disasters may have indicated a pattern worth addressing. But OPEC—a cartel of Arabic-speaking nations with no actual genetic or racial commonality who allied for economic leverage—was keeping oil prices artificially steady, and the numbers at the gas pump were this society’s only means of gauging climactic crisis.

  39. A chain of apparel stores, originally known for their inexpensive blue jeans, which became the supplier of inoffensive clothes for working technology professionals. Their children’s line was quite popular with the upper middle class, who tended to use their children as exhibits for their own lifestyle commitments. Such children were called “designer babies.” See Daryl Pritchard’s The Joys of Autonomous Consumption, New York: Signifier Press, 2011.

  40. aka: Ralph Lipshitz, a fashion and housewares designer originally from New York City, best known for popularizing the River Runs Through It aesthetic. The underlying mythological promise of Lauren’s aesthetic was that transplanted Eastern Europeans could use clothing and plastic surgery to experience themselves as if they were late-nineteenth-century cowboys of Anglican origins.

  41. A subsidiary of a popular online auction site called Ebay. The parent company catered to the obsessive collector, while this off-shoot popularized the concept of second-tier consumption. Although the recycling of used merchandise actually decreased GNP, it was seen as a way of rehabilitating those who had proved resistant to market ethos.

  42. Dynamic market psychology, or DMP, was a metric initiated by the DowJones after the correction of 2001. It was hoped that self-imposed restrictions on unsubstantiated cynicism, particularly in the media, would maintain a more bullish market sentiment.

  43. Streetfighter 2 was an early two-player fighting game. Many megabytes of RAM have been spent trying to explain why early computer entertainments were dedicated almost completely to combat scenarios. Most analysts have concluded that it was a result of the technology’s first implementation as a military training tool. Still, this does little to explain the popularity of violent play in this era. It may have its roots in the society’s undiagnosed glucose addiction.

  44. Not that plenty of rabbis, reverends, and gurus hadn’t been cashing in on the self-improvement craze with complex regimens for a brand of greed called “self actualization.” Bestselling books all had numerical titles—Seven Habits, Six Programs, Nine Insights, Ten Truths. Most of their authors boasted ordination by one religious institution or another. Capitalizing on a fad that, according to historian Assaria Glib, “would make even a Calvinist blush,” two such self-help gurus created spiritual e-commerce websites that earned listings in the S&P 500.

  45. A famous victim of the Nazi genocide.

  46. A genetic variation that inhibited physical and mental development. At the time, it was still inconceivable that such conditions were treatable, and the debate over the ethics of corrective genetic displacement hadn’t yet begun.

  47. Still carnivores, Americans were plagued by a number of meat-borne diseases. The most famous of these, called “Mad Cow,” began in cattle, but variants quickly spread to poultry and fish. A number of pharmaceutical companies sold home-testing kits that allowed people to test meat for a range of diseases before consuming it.

  48. Slang for Midrash—an ongoing tradition of Biblical commentary.

  49. According to Isaac Schwartz in The Passions of the Hebrews, goyim naches were traditional American achievements to which most Jewish people were still unaccustomed, such as growing award-winning roses, winning football trophies, or shooting a large buck.

  50. A popular multilevel marketing program in which members were encouraged to sell expensive memberships to their friends and family. Scores of psychology studies were done on the victims of such schemes before the practice was outlawed in 2023.

  51. Sun Microsystems’ proprietary precursor to the Linux computer operating system.

  52. The Internet was accessed through clumsy hypertext programs known as browsers. Netscape was the browser owned and distributed by America Online. Though originally developed as freeware at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, Netscape was the first Internet program to be sold commercially, and was often blamed for turning the online software development space into a market-driven phenomenon. Compared to Microsoft’s Explorer browser, however, Netscape seemed positively proletariat.

  53. A term first used by the Communist party in the Soviet Union, meaning that a statement or view conformed to the state ideology. As Jamie employs the term, it refers to America’s efforts to weed out racist or sexist language and actions through self-repression rather than insight.

  54. From events as he depicted them in the preceding chapters, Jamie betrayed Carla before he incorrectly assumed she had slept with her superior. We do not know whether he is misrepresenting himself intentionally here, or if has simply revised his own memory.

  55. Widespread water pollution and additives led to the use of bottled water. To make this less upsetting, many people chose to make their brand selection a fashion statement. Contamination of the polar ice caps eventually made brands such as Evian even less safe than highly chlorinated “tap” water.

  56. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was still just a television game show and website, and hadn’t yet grown into a church.

  57. A whistle-blowing news program. 60 Minutes uncovered many instances of corporate corruption until its parent network was purchased by an aerospace media conglomerate, after which its investigations focused solely on government.

  58. Packaging was an accepted measure of quality. Successful sales pitches of the period utilized snazzy audiovisual accompaniment. Although these computer-aided presentations usually offered no additional information, the complexity of their technology was thought to indicate the technological level of the idea being pitched. It also kept the audience’s attention away from the speaker, who might communicate unwanted information inadvertently through his body language.

  59. At the time, Wired was a full-fledged magazine with articles—not the computer-parts catalogue we know it as today.

  60. Another computer industry magazine.

  61. The Scientology Building, on Forty-second Street.

  62. A gossip column in the now-defunct New York Post that originally focused on entertainers, but eventually became a scandal sheet dedicated to the exploits of the City’s celebrity businessmen.

  63. One of several different models of Sport Utility Vehicles, or SUVs. They originally were military trucks that had been adapted for use in urban (African-American) zones, where aggressive driving, profligate gas consumption, and a sense of insulation from potential attacks were valued.

  64. Air pollution and artificial ingredients in processed foods had so compromised the human immune system by this time that many people would spontaneously launch antibody attacks against harmless natural agents such as pollen and animal hair. Such reactions were called allergies.

  65. Free items with corporate logos. Many of these items are now collected in the Museum of Shwag, in Barcelona.

  66. Americans valued clothing made in other countries, especially European ones. Little did they know (or acknowledge) these clothes were not manufactured in Europe, but in Southeast Asian factories.

  67. A television channel delivered through wire cable. Its programming, at the time, focused on the stock market.

  68. By filling in yet another level on the Great Pyramid’s base, Stendhal’s efforts would allow the international investment scheme to build for another eighteen months before it sank. Her former contacts in the Eastern Bloc governments were now directors of their countries’ telecommunications monopolies, and although she lacked the leverage that the State Department afforded her in her earlier incarnation, the kinds of ROI she was promising these Eastern Europeans meant much more to them than any of their former Politburo sympathies.

  69. A diagnosis used to describe young men whose brains had developed resistance to corporate programming.

  70. A digital storage medium quite popular at the time, even though its data degraded quite rapidly by today’s standards.

  71. A popular television program about spirituality and obesity, hosted by an African-American woman.

  72. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, like the Harvard Business School, became a technology incubator early in the twenty-first century. Students paid no tuition, but all their research and business plans became property of the schools, with the condition that the inventors had first right of refusal on serving as CEO of any resulting spinoff company.

  73. Since the 1970s, the most extreme forms of objectified or polarized sexual behavior, such as inquisitor’s garb, torture, and bondage had been recontextualized by their practitioners as a path to sexual freedom. It was believed that surrendering to one’s most fetishistic desires and dualist fantasies that a person liberated him- or herself from the social and religious taboos inhibiting healthy sex. This was a time, you must remember, when pornographer Larry Flynt and fundamentalist minister Jerry Falwell were thought to be on opposite ends of the sexual liberation spectrum; of course, both media personalities actually objectified females to an equal extent.

  74. Throughout most of Jamie’s youth, this chain of retail electronics stores sold transistors and circuitry that, in the hands of a knowledgeable hacker, could serve as the component parts for media devices that could not be purchased legally in their assembled form, such as the tuners that allow people to descramble encrypted television signals. Oddly, though the radio waves were passing through their bodies, people were not permitted to access the content without paying. Radio Shack eventually became a cellular telephone distribution outlet before being absorbed by an office supply chain.

  75. A peanut-butter candy made famous by its paid placement in a Steven Spielberg film about a friendly alien. This was long before extraterrestrials’ true nature had been determined.

  76. Slang for cocaine and oral sex. Presumably he is referring to the former, but several editors on our staff insist this is a homoerotic reference, in light of the passages immediately following.

  77. Male circumcision was practiced by a majority of Americans until halfway through the twentieth century. Called a bris by Jews, the ritualized removal of a baby’s foreskin eight days after his birth was thought to serve as a covenant with God, guaranteeing the child’s, as well as the father’s, future prosperity.

  78. The tzondik, usually a relative, held the baby while a professional mohel actually performed the ritual mutilation.

  79. In violation of Jewish dietary laws.

  80. A list of the wealthiest humans in the world, published in a magazine founded by one of those people.

  81. A delivery company of the period, most remembered for its association with the Tom Hanks character in the film Cast Away.

  82. Hebrew Union was actually a college for rabbinical students. It closed in 2079, after the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements in Judaism finally merged.

  83. A Jewish cult that grew in popularity in the late 1990s when it claimed that it had found the messiah in the personage of its own head rabbi. They disbanded after a scandal in which forty of their rabbis were revealed to be selling psychedelic drugs to non-Jewish children.