Other definitions of anomie have been based on Durkheim's original destructive view of social disintegration, some definitions even more mechanistic than his. Such as the idea of a human heat death analogous to the second law of thermodynamics, except (in the spirit of Soylent Green) energy... is people!
[maximum social entropy ]

But not all technophiles have been so dogmatic about the negatives of decentralization, One particular pipe-smoking scientist -- Dr. Vannevar Bush (not French) -- even came up with an idea to make the decentralized individual researcher into the very tool for the reintegration of social knowledge. He described the "memex" as a device which would use individual will as its sole indexing principle -- almost a paradigmatically anomic device.
[As We May Think]

But in Bush's vision, these trails of individually linked knowledge would be woven into pattern, swapped and intermingled. Rather than simply kill one's self as a Durkheimian social scientist might, the researcher could go study ways of killing one's self and then trade it with another researcher for, say, nudie pictures. Anomie baseball cards. All very sci-fi sounding in 1947, but people eventually latched on to the idea, particularly after that quirky little internet thing took off.
[Techno-capitalism at Work]

It would be many decades after Durkheim before the personal computer would become a reality and just about that long before other French people would manage to put a fashonable spin on social decentralization. But once postmodernity took off, it took off in a big way. Many of the stars of this anomic culture industry such as Lyotard, Virrilio, Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari (all more or less French) have ridden the breakdown of social norms to international commercial success. But the star power of anomie didn't stop at the flimsy borders of Gallic culture, no indeed! The rise of Silicon Valley and networked telecommunications are even more dramatic symptoms of the strange integrative movements of dis-integrating anomie.
[postmodern voting results] and [freethinking bots]

Today the very fragmentation of society has long been perversely reintegrated into the social fabric as a powerful economic force. All of popular music for example. There are even several bands not content to merely act out the anomie of the multinational music industry who have actually named themselves "anomie." Fittingly, they've interpreted this to mean anything from "kick-ass hardcore metal" to "a trip through the doors of your mind to the heart of genetic memory."
[anomie] vs. [anomie]

As would be expected, Karl Marx had something to say about this: he felt that people in a market-based society come to be judged by their position in the market rather than as individuals. Individuals then become alienated from each other, separated by the reifications of a dehumanizing system. Marx later abandoned this description of anomic individual alienation in favor of a more systemic theory of exploitation. Although he did eventually become a best-seller in some Asian markets, it must be noted that Marx (who spent a lot of time in Paris but wasnot French) never made much money. And today, like the profitablity of the self-destructive rock star, the related conditions of alienation and anomie in contemporary techno-capitalist society are accepted as axiomatic givens.
[alienation] and [Pete's cube]

It may seem merely playful word games to associate "alienation" of the capitalist reifying sort with "aliens" of the little green UFO driving sort, but this is no game. The most cutting-edge site of anomie is the nexus where alienation and social fragmentation are folded back in to society in the most complex way, namely the field of conspiracy theory and ufology. No postmodern theorist, no matter how French, has confronted the crisis of contemporary epistemology in the visceral way of an average conspiracy buff. And the most sophisticated UFO researchers -- such as the highly French Dr Jaques Vallee -- have put most contemporary cultural philosophy to shame. That the best-selling Vallee is now a venture capitalist should come as no surprise.
[Jaques Vallee on conspire.com] and [secret documents for sale]

Not long ago, a web designer UFO cult chose to advertize Nike shoes with their mass suicide. This actually isn't strange at all: this special brand of anomie somehow flows from Durkheim's theories, but in a way that he could never have predicted in his most feverish French imaginings. The UFO and the Alien are ideal icons for the status of post-war epistemology: they are both social mythologies and individual experiences, urgent and unknowable. They call for rational analysis, but they refuse to fit a single logical explanation. They offering grandiose delusions while simultaneously demanding to be understood.
[faith-based org]

Alien studies anc conspiracy theory is one of the only tools which can encompass the alienating machinations of global capital, not because capitalism is run by a single secret cabal (its actually run by several well-known cabals) but rather because the global capitalist economy is so bizzare. And what's even stranger is that some might doubt the urgency of the current situation; the dismissal of tangled epistemologies as mere paranoia is what's really scary.
[really scary]