This is about as "real" as 9/11. What happened to world trade after the WTC was destroyed? Basically nothing. After a slight delay, business continued as usual. The markets absorbed and reacted to the information and continued running the world.

I also agree with Barry Hampe that endorsement by those worthies is the kiss of death. It's a sign that it is center-stage in the Counterculture Theater. I am not a conservative or even a libertarian, and I am all for progressive ideas if they actually work, but I haven't heard any. All I hear is recycled 60s rhetoric. I've enjoyed Chomsky's insights and Moore's exposes, but that doesn't mean they have useful actionable suggestions on how to do better.

I've been groping for a metaphor, and the best one I could come up with is this one: you've got an obese patient who has suffered a major heart attack after a lifetime of junk food and unhealthy living and has clogged arteries.

What's going to save the guy: intervention by a surgeon from the evil pharma-agro-medicine complex, or somebody standing outside yelling that people should eat healthy, organic food?

The system is a mess, but the only people who are capable of doing something about it without making the whole thing a whole lot worse are people who are complicit in the mess and still part of it. The people in the street have no real ideas. At best they serve a minor function in creating a pressure group that may influence politics a bit and inform the last remaining clueless morons that there is a big problem and that All Is Not Well in global finance.

Basically, classical collective action theory is completely intellectually bankrupt in grappling with the complexity of modern problems. It is still of some use in medieval autocracies in the Middle East, but in the rest of the world, the one effect it is capable of producing (this "pressure and awareness" effect) is basically useless. All it does is polarize politics and make the political process even more broken than it already is. It is a blunt instrument.

Why did it work a century ago? The problems were simpler. Robber baron fleecing you? Strike and lockout and you get him to talk hours and wages. Capitalism then was a blunt instrument and a blunt instrument could resist it and create a healthy balance of power.

Today capitalism has evolved into a complicated and delicate machine. Blunt force will merely destroy it, creating misery for all.

Anonymous and Wikileaks are at least as sophisticated as their adversary. Bitcoin? Yeah, there's some genuinely modern subversive thinking there, even if it fails. I take those sorts of things seriously. They are for real. That's a kind of collective action that's never really been seen before.

But these guys? Forget it. Sideshow.

What might be real interesting is if somebody pulls a Napster on the finance world in the next decade or so. I think it will happen. Bitcoin is a bit of a false start in that department, but that's the direction to watch, for a real counterweight to Wall Street to emerge.

The problem today is that Wall Street represents an effective monopoly of ideas on how to run the economy, because they frame the game to which the economic policies of governments respond.

If you don't have an alternative idea, you've basically got nothing. For an idea to be a serious one, it has to be global in scope and capable of providing the financial infrastructure for complex, large-scale technology-driven operations. Piddly little local currency movements and ecovillage BS will not do. As a test challenge, if your idea of a reformed financial system cannot power (say) the manufacture and delivery of something like the iPhone, it is a non-starter. If all your financial ideas can do is run stone age low-tech villages, not only can it not run a world of 9 billion people by 2050, it won't even attract any adopters outside the loony hairshirt-green fringe (I just learned that term and love it).