While brave activists had proven willing to invent new forms of civil disobedience, much of their tweeting and blogging tended to reveal a reversion to themes already promulgated by the usual suspects covered in this volume. When not openly appealing to a lost world, like the “Take Back the American Dream” motif, they would propose “reforms” dating back to the 1980s, such as the Tobin tax on financial transactions, or a “fairness doctrine” for political ads, or an ineffectual public financing scheme for election campaigns. Mostly in the heat of Occupy, disputations over the crisis and financial sector were dominated by backward-looking ambitions and nostalgia for a happier and more prosperous time. Slogans like “We are the 99%” seemed to be calculated so as to be overly inclusive, confusing expansiveness with democracy, and therefore ineffectual.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 905