METAPHOR MELTDOWN!!
Abandon Ship!!!
Pretty perfervid for Mr. Slide Rule. ;^)
Sorry, I should have attributed it. I thought the blockquote and italics were sufficient to indicate that it was a quote. It's from the science fiction story "The Shores of Bohemia" by Bruce Sterling. I highly recommend it. It's about how nanotechnology puts the political shoe on the other foot: the bourgeoisie capitalists go back to nature and the hippie communists struggle to preserve industrial society.