I won't let you pay me for my open source

This is more than a bit ahistorical. The qualities that were being "unleashed" were efficiency and memory rather than creativity, but attitudes were in some cases no less utopian and self-important.

There is actually a rather good book on the filing cabinet as a piece of information technology:

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-filing-ca...