It should be noted that another neoliberal phenomenon came into play to reinforce the equation of physical technology and finance. As described in detail in ScienceMart, the expansion of the patent system to encompass all sorts of previously unpatentable phenomena occurred in the 1980s. One of the major classes of newly minted intellectual property was precisely "business methods," particularly those which were inscribed within computer programs. Almost immediately, a wave of financial algorithms were newly patented; and this, in turn, rendered financial manipulations conceptually more on a par with technologies that had been previously subject to being reduced to intellectual property. What was posited as a newly valid classification ended up as real in its consequences.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 957