Bill,
I'm behind in my CSG reading -- my new job at Cisco demanding a lot of time -- and so have just started reading your essay.
A suggestion is to use the dichotomy between independence and autonomy. I recall Philip Slater developing this a bit in one of his books. The illusion of independence is well illustrated by the notion of the individual 'economic man', as you have sketched it.
The autonomous person is not independent of all others, but rather controls interfaces and relations with others so as to be master within what he thereby defines (projects?) as his domain. Slater is talking about the origins of mass behavior. The individual decision-maker chooses independently to take his family to the seashore (or to the mountains, or to Disney) for their vacation, and they find themselves in the mass traffic jam with all the other individuals who have made the same decision without regard to one another. An autonomous decision maker might take all that into account and choose a different vacation destination (or route).
The example is perhaps shallow but the distinction is cogent. Note that a control system might be either independent or autonomous. The moving players in the Crowd program are autonomous in their paths but not in their eventual participation in rings and arcs, precisely because the formation of rings and arcs is not a variable that they control, any more then participation in a traffic jam is a desired outcome. But a fungible 'economic man' can only be independent, precisely because it does not control relevant variables.
Bruce