Waiting for the guillotine

"Where are the tumbrils?" asks Cringley.  Week by week, item by item of economic bad news, we imagine violence to come. 

...it is a type of horse cart used during the French Revolution to transport condemned prisoners to the guillotine for beheading. What Adam wonders is how we can get so deep into such a hellacious financial crisis without finding at least a few bad guys to behead?

It’s a good question.

This trope is now established, open wonderment at the lack of mob violence. We see no peasants with torches, and are surprised (perhaps because we have not yet become those peasants).

Cringley pulls back from condemning any one class:

I’m beginning to think there aren’t as many devils as one might suspect in this passion play. There are a few devils, sure, but also a lot of innocent dopes who may have made the situation much worse while not even making very much money from our pain.

In fact, his column ends up looking into technological causes - without a flavoring of cyberfear.

At Infocult, we keep an eye on all the economic monstrosity: peasants with torches, zombies, too much fear, doomful ruins, anticipatory ruins, growing mourning, public calls for suicide, a catalog of names, secret tyranny, even a world-wrecking formula,