84. Hebrew characters, as we know today, aren’t really Hebrew at all, but Aramaic. The Torah was itself a transliteration for a population of Jews who could no longer read Hebrew. But most Jews of the twenty-first century did not know this, or pretended not to know.

  85. Political parties of the period competed through a complex process of accusation and recrimination, usually about sexual misconduct, but occasionally with reference to campaign financing. (Candidates raised money from corporations and then purchased advertisements on television and elsewhere.) Although feminism was given lip service at the time, most politicians still practiced blatant sexual harassment, making themselves vulnerable to scandal. In many cases, however, a politician’s post-scandal contrition could earn him higher poll ratings than he would have achieved had the sexual misconduct never been unearthed. See biographies of William Jefferson Clinton for more on this phenomenon.

  86. We’re not sure exactly what is being referred to here. Most likely it refers to an obscure ritual practiced on adolescent boys by physical education teachers, in which the wearing of protective undergear is enforced through some sort of inspection.

  87. From the way they were coveted, it appears that basketball tickets hadn’t been available to the general public for several years. Only companies like M&L, television actors, and extremely wealthy individuals had access to seats in Madison Square Garden. In addition, games were not broadcast on free television, making the sport virtually inaccessible to the lower classes and minorities (except those who played, of course).

  88. Electronic documents from the recently decrypted SEC archives indicate that shortly after the turn of the century, online brokerages had discovered (or created) a particularly complex multipart tax loophole. It allowed corporations to save enormously on taxes if they deposited their employees’ payroll checks directly into their online trading accounts as stock purchases. Employees who opted for these “direct investment” plans were, in turn, incentivized by much better terms on their margined securities. So instead of being held to a borrowing limit of 80 percent against current assets, account holders whose paychecks were invested automatically were free to borrow against the full value of their next twenty-four months’ salary. It led to an average margin of 600 percent against savings, and accounted for the last few pumps of air into the NASDAQ bubble. Worse, every extended downswing in the NASDAQ threatened a cascade of margin calls that could wipe out two-thirds of the valuation of the entire index. As a result, even those who originally had concerns about the practice were soon depending on it for the market value of their own investments.

  89. What follows is a direct transcript of Ezra Birnbaum’s videotaped Senate testimony:

  Senator of Louisiana: These “frenzied paroxysms” you speak of, Chairman Birnbaum. Are you suggesting some kind of Biblical retribution for our citizens’ faith in what always struck me as the American Way?

  Birnbaum: No, Mr. Senator. With all due respect, I simply mean to suggest that investments of various kinds will provide varying levels of long-term protection of capital. Many of the gentlemen in this very room, in fact, have—irresponsibly and to the detriment of the individual investor—recast the bear market of 2001 as a sustained correction. Further, if working nonprofessional investors are routinely exposed to what could only be considered self-promotional trading systems, they may very well lose sight of the relative value of cash and bond savings vehicles in light of the more speculative allure of high-flying technology issues.

  Senator of Louisiana: If I understand you correctly, and I’m not sure I’m quite educated enough to do that [laughter from other Senators], I understand that the Fed’s job is to protect the value of money. Of the currency of this great land. But also, and please correct me if I am mistaken, that the Federal Reserve is, in fact, a private corporation with no direct accountability to any elected authority.

  Birnbaum: That is correct, sir. But that is merely to insure that—

  Senator of Louisiana: Please allow me to finish, good sir. [pause] And that as a spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bankers, whose primary asset is U.S. currency, you have what could only be understood as a vested interest in the worth of the dollar.

  Birnbaum: Yes, but it was set up this way to insure that—

  Senator of Louisiana: You’ll have a chance to speak. [Senator toys with his pencil] It seems to me that you are challenging the American people’s faith in the investments that make this country grow, the ones that stand a chance of providing us with new prospects for education and opportunities for advancement across all race and class boundaries. And you are doing this so that they will keep more capital tied up in your dollars.

  Birnbaum: They’re not my dollars, Mr. Senator.

  Senator of Louisiana: I think I understand your position, Mr. Birnbaum. I surrender the balance of my time.

  90. The Congress used a two-party system based on an ancient French parliament, whose designations as “left” and “right” referred to their positions relative to the Speaker. Once the two chief American parties became indistinguishable and were subsequently joined by countless others, such designations were abandoned.

  91. The Synapticom building was located at a pier in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Office rents had skyrocketed in New York. Development of new properties had been successfully thwarted for years by a powerful group of real estate cartels. But once the hi-tech and biotech billionaires realized they could bribe government officials for half of what they were already doling out to their landlords, redlined areas like Harlem, Washington Heights, and the Lower East Side were razed for office space. Before that happened, though, even the wealthiest new companies were forced to find creative solutions to the real estate shortage.

  Synapticom’s answer was a free-floating barge, designed and constructed in Singapore, then towed all the way to Fort Lee. Visitors were flown to the facility in bright green helicopters that took off every fifteen minutes from Manhattan’s East Side, or carried on a hovercraft from the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin. Employees simply drove across the George Washington Bridge and parked in a lot at the pier.

  92. A set of supposedly ancient Chinese architectural principles based on astrology and geography, which were later revealed to be the invention of an interior designer from San Diego.

  93. A television game show developed by a former talk show host and casino owner named Mervyn Griffen, in which contestants won prizes by reverse-cognating the questions to a series of answers. Its long-term psychological effect on players and audience was to stress inevitability. We still do not understand the origin of the program’s title, or who is actually thought to be in jeopardy as the game is played.

  94. Aggressive military psyops tactics were applied to attention retention protocols on e-commerce websites. Many users, particularly in the highly targeted 16–24 demographic, were inadvertently terrorized on a subconscious level, leading to a series of symptoms—paranoia, aural hallucinations, convulsions—normally associated with end-stage amphetamine psychosis.

  95. The first application of intelligent agent technology was for product selection in online shopping auctions. Customers would launch agents through the online shopping malls to find the kinds of products they wanted, at the best deals.

  96. People still believed that females had a greater capacity for empathy and greater propensity for honesty than males.

  97. A 1970s television show that, along with many other canceled series, enjoyed a cult comeback when streaming media came to the Internet. Fantasy Island was a one-hour network drama in which a white-suited Spanish therapist and his dwarf sidekick combined obsolete applications of Freudian dream interpretation with deluxe vacation packages in order to heal their clients of the lasting effects of childhood traumas.

  98. It appears clear that the protagonist was familiar with and influenced by the works of twentieth-century novelist Ayn Rand. See her novel Fountainhead for a fuller, if nonsensical deliberation on this philosophy. In fairness, we must remember that these outrageously inane ideas were generally accepted principles of the silicon culture. And due to the society’s fascist nature, dissenting views were frowned upon, or even forcibly discouraged.

  99. A pun on the title of a series of movies about a whale, made before the sea mammals went extinct. Jamie means that he needs to urinate.

  100. An eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher who had come back into vogue for his contention that the Noble Savage, untainted by institutional influences, was morally superior to civilized man. We must not judge such phenomena too harshly. These were victims of a media-generated mob psychology.

  101. A case history of the research conducted for the M&L campaign appears in Martha Babcock’s Ascent of the Icon: Man, Myth, and Money, (New York: Rutledge Press, 2009):

  “In an effort to appease the many forces of nature they did not understand, ancient men customarily sacrificed their firstborn sons to the gods of chaos. The myth of Abraham introduced a kinder, gentler method of reparation, to a single, benevolent, and contractually obligated Lord. A mere piece of foreskin would satisfy his lust for flesh. That, and a few goats at regular intervals.

  “But people found it difficult to transfer paternal authority onto an abstract, unknowable deity. He didn’t even have a name, and provided little solace in times of need. Yaweh, though universal, made for a hard sell. So the messianic religions arose to put human faces on our surrogate parents. What they lost in universal applicability they made up for with personality.

  “Jesus and his mother functioned quite adequately in this regard until about the sixteenth century, when a revirginized Queen Elizabeth claimed the Virgin Mary’s mantle for herself. For two centuries, people looked to the monarchy as its primary source of transference, until the parental role was in turn usurped by the elected leaders of more democratically conceived republics, who were themselves eventually replaced in our affections by movie-stars-turned-politicians or vice versa.

  “Thus humans evolved from slaves to children to lambs to subjects to citizens to fans.

  “The twenty-first century transition from fans to consumers, however, marked a significant break from this pattern. The paradox in the public consciousness, we theorized, stemmed from the market’s inability to provide a convincing and reassuring parent figure toward whom consumers could project their unresolved childhood anxieties. In the market reality that replaced the culture of celebrity, figureheads were not people but brand icons, and they could not achieve parental status.

  “This ‘cultural voltage’ is not a liability but an opportunity, for in every paradox lay the ‘key consumer insight’ for an effective campaign. Just stand the problem on its head and you find the solution. In this case, our job was not to find a new parental substitute for the trading public, but rather to accelerate and affirm the market culture’s independence from all such projections of the superego.

  “Ezra Birnbaum, and the governmental authority he represented, was cast as the dominating parent, incapable of letting his children grow up. His intellectual language and Jewish demeanor would resonate well with rising populist and anti-Semitic sentiment. The consumers of America were being infantilized by an old man who wished to be their new father and thus stymie their natural evolution. He was an enemy of the people. Worse, his lack of faith in folks’ ability to make decisions for themselves as autonomous human beings was costing them money.”

  This entire message was to be crafted by compliance professionals into a series of communications that induced transference on all levels—subliminal, neurolinguistic, aspirational and psycho-sexual—simultaneously.

  Amazingly, Ms. Babcock only once defends the ethical questions posed by using such techniques, justifying that the ads cause no social detriment if they merely help convince people of what they already feel, subconsciously. This is why it was DD&D’s responsibility to conduct such painstaking research and analysis. It guaranteed that their most coercive techniques were only used in service of the extant cultural appetite. They were not creating public opinion, they were “energizing and accelerating it.”

  102. A network of radio stations whose commercials were called “underwriting.” This dubious distinction, along with their dismal balance sheets, allowed the network to claim a moral high ground.

  103. At the time, Star Trek was still a relatively small phenomenon compared to how we know it today. It had only run five television series, and fewer than ten movies.

  104. A news magazine broadcast on a television subsidiary of Disney, then known as ABC. The program’s title was an oblique reference to an optical examination popular in this period.

  105. With a century’s hindsight, it’s easy to see how these unknowing architects of the last fascist age were fooling themselves. But, in all fairness, they were suffering from the same cultural confusion as the people they hoped to influence. With no fuhrer or il duce at the helm, how were they to recognize the implications of their scheme? They were working under no higher power save the economy itself, and they had no idea that they were the ones truly in charge. They thought they were merely responding to market forces—the forces of nature.

  106. Foot-longs were a popular sausage containing otherwise unusable beef by-products, and traditionally consumed at sporting events, where their flavor, presumably, would remain unnoticed.

  107. A once-powerful group of lawyers who fought for civil rights and eventually turned their efforts completely toward supporting the consumer sector. Even these self-proclaimed leftists became just another cog in the machine they originally sought to dismantle.

  108. A German architect of the twentieth century who designed spectacles for Adolph Hitler, including the Nuremberg Rallies. Jamie’s identification with the antihero is, most likely, hyperbole.

  109. A movie star(let) who engaged in sexual intercourse with the first President John F. Kennedy, before committing suicide.

  110. A movie actor whose ubiquity provoked a website that automatically calculated how many degrees of separation existed between him and any other performer.

  111. Documentation in diaries and newspaper articles from the period supports the narrator’s claim. One’s placement at a Knicks game may have said as much about his or her company’s worth as a quarterly report. Since the only products many of these corporations produced were stock certificates, the most efficient use of an executive’s time and energy was not to work at a desk, but get out and tout the value of the shares themselves. It seems nothing validated share value better than a CEO’s ability to leverage his worth into higher status seats at Madison Square Garden.

  Investors on the upper levels used binoculars to scope out whose seating positions were improving or worsening, and then submitted orders based on this information through palmtop devices with cellular connections to after-hours trading companies. According to a New York Times study done at the height of this phenomenon, Instanet was experiencing a 40 percent increase in trading activity during the first thirty minutes of any New York home game.

  112. Plates made of ceramics.

  113. Sporting events, though hardly public affairs, still adhered to the patriotic tradition of playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” as if to imply that the teams were dedicated to preserving a national ethos.

  114. The Knicks City Dancers descended from what were originally known as cheerleaders. Cheerleaders, as the name implies, were a squad of young women who led the crowd in cheers during the game. Over time, however, their function changed to one of providing a sexual outlet during time-outs and other lulls in the action for the largely male crowd, whose blood was testosterone rich as result of the competitive atmosphere.

  115. At the time, microwaves were a popular method of heating food. The ill effects on people’s health of using the device were still unknown, or were well hidden.

  116. A popular comic strip character of the period, whose name became synonymous with mindless participation in corporate inefficiency. That people could still find humor in their predicaments indicates some measure of self-awareness, however repressed.

  117. Vulgar slang for Roman ethnic origins.

  118. A brand of sports shoe, presumably popular with African-American youth, if the advertisements for the corporation’s products are an accurate reflection of their use.

  119. A brand of cellular phone based on the Star Trek communicator. Jamie’s use of the device, given the proliferation of wrist phones, probably indicated a techno-nostalgia.

  120. Cellular telephones of the period used extremely high voltages and emitted electromagnetic radiation. By raising the antenna, users could substantially reduce the quantity of radiation absorbed through the skull and any associated health risks.

  121. Frottage.

  122. A thinner wire, better suited for use as bondage.

  123. It was the classic error of early hi-tech-era businesspeople. They didn’t realize that the computer was simply a modeling tool—that it could model anything: a typewriter, a palette and canvas, a telephone, an electrical grid, a spleen, the weather, or a civilization.

  They chose to model commerce, the economy, and the flow of capital. Perhaps the reason they descended into psychosis was that money was already a metaphor. Or, conversely, psychologists have hypothesized it was because money seemed so very real to people, and remained so closely tied to their instinct for survival. In any case, the better and more compelling the simulations got, the easier it was to mistake the map for the territory. The model of the market became the dominant reality, and reality itself became the game.