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

Transforming swaths of land into laboratories where laws and regulations are subordinate to accumulation is generative, “reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality.”

“good capitalists know the real game is capturing the existing state, not going through the hassle of creating a new one.

Residential segregation, zoned consumption, and an increasingly diffuse web of power are embedding progressively deeper into our world’s fabric. Avatars of nations remain with new matrixes of power overlaid and nestled within.

Hong Kong was a cutting-edge template for an evolving entity, the “zone,” which is the primary object of Slobodian’s analysis. Zones—free trade zones, export-processing zones, industrial parks, economic and technology development zones, free ports, and more—have pockmarked and hollowed the neat geography of the world map from Hong Kong to Dubai, wi... See more