When was it that unbridled avarice became cool? When dotcom hipsters started wearing ripped jeans and baggy sweaters to work? When Apple Computers chose to style itself as a fountainhead of individuality rather than a manufacturer of day-glo microprocessors? When we began to think of billionaires as anti-establishment drop-outs?
The silicon revolution has wrought a seismic shift in public attitudes towards extreme wealth and its appropriators, argues left-wing writer Thomas Frank in his incendiary new book, One Market Under God. Frank claims the advent of the new economy has precipitated a hugely significant role reversal between big business and state regulators throughout the West. More significantly, it has nurtured a quasi-spiritual belief that the unchecked free market is a sacrosanct keystone of democracy.
As editor of the cheerfully luddite Chicago quarterly, the Baffler, Frank has been tilting at capitalist windmills since the 1980s. Shoulder-to-shoulder with regular Baffler contributor Naomi Klein, whose coffee-table expose of corporate duplicity, No Logo, made the best-seller lists, he embodies the intellectual rearguard of the anti-globalisation movement, which ran amok at the G7, World Bank and World Trade Organisation meetings in Prague, Washington and Seattle. Frank directs his warnings to an increasingly complacent US; the message resonates in an Ireland that, grown ever more besotted with Uncle Sam's winner-take-all credo, has begun to import economic policy wholesale from across the Atlantic.
The new orthodoxy, claims Frank, casts the boardroom as a streetwise, pop-culture, savvy hotbed of innovation. It sets itself against the grey ranks of frowning legislative autodictats bent on hemming in the Internet and stifling our liberty to generate riches. The new economy beseeches the state to chill out and quit cramping its style.
The self-proclaimed futurists, who hail the Web as a brave, unexplored frontier that should remain unsullied by state regulation, couching their invective in the language of 1960s flower-power radicalism, merely serve as proxies for the unreconstructed capitalist megalith, Frank contends. He cites a famous call to arms by revolutionary technology writer, John Perry Barlow, an outspoken new economy zealot and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead: "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
The proclamation - in response to mutterings in the US legislature against the mooted deregulation of Americas telecommunications sector - resonated around the world, and still adorns hundreds of thousands of desk tops. While framed in the phraseology of the bong-puffing outsider, Barlow's pronouncement amounts to a demand for governments to pull back and allow multinationals free reign, contends Frank.
"Barlow may have sounded like an alienated counter-culturist, but he essentially agreed with the suit-and-tie media execs on the big issue that markets enjoyed some mystic, organic connection to the people, while governments were fundamentally illegitimate."
In decades past, the public harboured an instinctive wariness towards the super-rich, regarding captains of industry as a distant "them" holding sway over the disfranchised "us", propounds Frank. Regulation of the market was a basic tenet of democratic freedom.
In the 1990s, however, the IT billionaires repositioned themselves, and turned the tables on the law makers. High-fiving corporate Goliaths - such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos - today impersonate nerdy idea-men who worked hard and got a little lucky. The extreme capitalism they promulgate is a pure expression of people power. The market is democracy. The market is the guarantor of personal freedoms. Resistance is futile.
"One of the most treasured fantasies of the 1990s was that of the hard-working billionaire, the no-nonsense businessman whose pragmatic ways weren't ruined by his massive wealth. They were rich because they had somehow done the labour of a million other men, created all manner of good things in direct proportion to their reward."
Are Frank's polemics relevant to the Republic? The anti-corporatist movement is predominantly the preserve of fringe extremists. A perfunctory WTO protest outside the Central Bank in Dublin last November drew a smattering of charity shop-outfitted, student Marxists (many of whom railed against the evils of global branding while sporting shiny white Nikes). Our love affair with the new economy remains more of an unquestioning adolescent crush than a mature relationship of equals.
"As the free money dries up and the euphoria cools off, as the commercials get pulled and the websites are disconnected and the high-flying shares settle down for a 30-year flat line, we will look back on this long summer of corporate love and wonder how it was that we ever came to believe this stuff," says Frank.
One Market Under God is published by Secker & Warburg, £24.99 in UK.