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

Information technology is creating economic inequality magnitudes outside the range of anything experienced by our ancestors in the pristinely egalitarian Stone Age. Information technology is also creating supraterritorial assets, which will help to subvert the embodiment of the in-group, the nation-state. Ironically, these new cyberassets will pro

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Like an angry farmer, the state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies. Such expedients will work only temporarily, if at all. The twentieth-century nation-state, with all its pretensions, will starve to death a

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The main thrust of the counter-revolution has been either the elimination or the financialization of social arrangements that had previously supported many kinds of cooperative activity. Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support

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All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

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