Back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I lived close to wild nature in a 30-foot diameter yurt in Jackson Hole Wyoming and enjoyed a rich, if impecunious life of reading, writing, walking or skiing in the mountains, and consulting as an astrologer, a few of my friends were on their way to becoming monetarily “rich” — relatively so, of course, by serving as contractors in building gigantic stone and log homes at the end of long meadow- and forest-lined roads for the wealthy “hedge fund” and other financial operators (including Dick Cheney) who were moving in and starting to change the “economic, politic, social and cultural” atmosphere of “the Hole.” I had never heard of a “hedge fund,” wondered what it was. Here’s one instruction manual that, thankfully, besides relentlessly demonstrating the interwoven soulless and intrinsically unfair financialization of everyday life, also sketches, in the final paragraphs, the transformation of predatory capitalism into what we might call the “networked commons.” Read on to find out what that means.

Financial Totalitarianism: The Economic, Politic, Cultural and Social Rule of Speculative Capital