For those of you pronos­ti­ca­tors who want to get in on the ground floor of the Psy­chic Ter­ror Net­work (a.k.a. the Pol­i­cy Analy­sis Mar­ket), here’s the home of dot-com Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Its home­page is appro­pri­ate­ly rem­i­nis­cent of the Heav­en’s Gate Cult web­site, anoth­er mod­ern pseudo-religion (their sto­ry here).
The Pol­i­cy Analy­sis Mar­ket is cosponored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects, and a spin-off of The econ­o­mist mag­a­zine, con­firm­ing my sus­pi­cion that this is the cult of the cap­i­tal­ists at work. It’s Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations here: there’s a “guid­ing hand” to com­plete­ly unfet­tered mar­kets that allows them to meet peo­ple’s needs bet­ter than indi­vid­ual intel­li­gence ever could. For­get the CIA, we’ll use inter­net surfers! They’ll want to make mon­ey and they can do our intel­li­gence gath­er­ing for us bet­ter than those desk jock­eys in Lan­g­ley! This Psy­chic Ter­ror Stock exchange is the per­fect mar­riage of Nineties dot-com can-do, eight­ies market-uber-alles and Seventeen-Seventies God-guides-the-rich Calvinism.
Trad­er accounts open in two days so get ready to join the Pyschic Ter­ror Net­work yourself!
UPDATe: We’re too late. Pen­ta­gon can­cel­ing Pyschic Ter­ror Net­work under the weight of ridicule they’ve received to the idea. Maybe the Pen­ta­gon should hire Nan­cy Rea­gan’s astrologer for their ter­ror alerts instead (actu­al­ly they should hire her great web­mas­ter, whose great design sure beats that of the Heav­en’s Gate dropout they used).