We will float from joy to joy, even the poorest among us living like a sybaritic magician.

The usual Manichaean portrayal of the digital world is "new versus old". Crowdsourcing is "new," for instance, while salaries and pensions are "old." This book proposes pushing what is "new" all the way instead of part of the way.

Without our system of levees, rising like a glimmering bell-curved mountain of rice paddies, capitalism would probably have decayed into Marx's "attractor nightmare" in which markets decay into plutocracy.

Turing's humor also provides a destination, or an eschatology that the Invisible Hand's humor lacks. Turing's algorithms could inherit the world in a way that the Hand could not.

This is the Laffer curve, which was promoted by one late 20th century president, Ronald Reagan, and ridiculed by another, George H. W. Bush, as "voodoo economics."

Michel Foucault popularized this metaphor. The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's prison design in which cells were arranged in a circle around a central guard tower so that all prisoners were put under constant surveillance with maximum efficiency by a small number of guards.

Silicon Valley is far from the first society sprouting from protean quests.