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A similar but much less sweeping series of bank failures occurred about a year earlier in the computer-generated virtual world known as Second Life.

The company proposes to build power plants using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert the generated electricity to radio-frequency transmissions to beam down to a receiving station in Fresno, California.

The poster for 2008's zeitgeist-defining comic book movie The Dark Night invited us to “imagine a world without rules.” Its box office was second only to the 1997 blockbuster, Titanic.  At the time, the Dow Jones (DJIA) averages were over 11,000.

In 1994, Joel Kurtzman wrote an alarming book titled The Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy Has Destabilized the World's Market and Created Financial Chaos. Kurtzman reported that the digitization, or virtualization, of capital was causing a disconnect from reality that threatened financial anarchy… with possible positive and/or negative results.

Hacking the economy is easier than it looks. The first step, of course, is to remember that the economy itself is just a model. It's a way of understanding the world as a series of transactions made by rational, self-interested beings working to maximize value for themselves. That's supposedly the given.

It’s never easy to see your hard-won earnings disappear. When you open your 401K and see it’s just lost another 30%, you think: Holy moly, there goes my retirement. Yeah, it’s a natural reaction, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right one.

I can hardly stand to listen to the radio or read the news these days. Seems that every bit of news tells me that there is no money left anywhere. Companies are laying people off and cutting back their budgets, the state of California can’t afford to pay the counties who can’t afford to provide services to the citizens, taxes are squeezing the middle-class and non-profits are suffering big losses in donations, which is leading to cutbacks in aid to the people who need it the most.

At the Singularity 2008 conference, a small group of smart people had Verner Vinge surrounded and were pressing him to metaphorically roll them bones and read our civilization's horoscope.

Billionaires who care about escape velocity, radical life extension, or the Turing Test don’t come along very often, but when they do, their actions have the potential to dramatically change the world. Space travel, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence are three areas where some super-smart, superwealthy people are directing their money – and it’s starting to pay off.

DOCTOROW: It’s not hard to think about a kind of nanotech future where virtually all objects are available on demand. In that kind of world, both the traditional Marxist and the traditional Keynesian analyses don’t make a lot of sense. These are predicated first and foremost on the regulation of scarce and valuable objects.