A Complicated System of Traps: On Quinn Slobodian’s “Crack-Up Capitalism” — Cleveland Review of Books

Capitalists build cities designed for bourgeois identity performance and commerce only to invest in them so heavily that all that can afford to exist are carefully managed environments: postmodern corporate mishmashes of symbols and architectural referents that have no discernible connection to a past, only a technologically mediated amalgam of int

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It’s all too easy to overlook the rush of activity that enables privileged retreat; the Othered precarity that ensures our security; the tangle of urban, regional, national, and global socio-technical networks that support our local stasis — unless we are ourselves a node within those essential systems, or unless we experience the repercussions of ... See more

3. The remote economy has created a talent market for citizens: Walt asserts that because proponents of stateless digital techno-utopias still need to live somewhere, a state ultimately has control over them. But in a competitive marketplace of jurisdictions where somewhere can be anywhere, no single government has as much authority as people think... See more

When anyone can create an entity that materially organizes the flow of value across borders, what can national regulatory regimes do to stop them? What will this do to labor and environmental standards? I can see massive benefits as well as grim consequences.