4

A Shrinking Planet

six thousand beans fit into one

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1994: 149)

This is the year the world got smaller

Alcatel advertisement (1987)

If there is an indisputable fact concerning the information society, it must be that it has given us a very much smaller world. Thinking in abstract terms, the world today brings people together in virtual proximity to a degree that is unprecedented. Being in the information society is to be within (and be a constitutive part of) a network of networks that span the globe, putting one in the same space and time of information flows as billions of others. The geometric space- and Newtonian time-perspectives that had shaped our modernist world have become transformed utterly in the present post-Fordist postmodernity. In reference to the above line from the communications company Alcatel, we can safely say that in many ways every year the world gets smaller.

A smaller world is undoubtedly a greatly accelerated social world too. For example, no longer does it matter so much that you may live, say, in Australia and your mother in the UK. An important aspect of neoliberal globalization has been the dramatic reduction in transportation costs since the 1970s. This means that almost anyone with a job can afford to travel a long way after only a bit of saving. This is reflected in the fact that in 2006 the world’s combined airlines carried on average more than 6.3 million passengers every day. This translates as a record 3.3 billion seats on 28.2 million flights during that year, an increase of 3.4 per cent and 1.8 per cent respectively on 2005 (Aviation News, 2007). Getting on a plane is becoming just as common as getting on a bus or train, and so family and friends are never more than a few hours away. This is remarkable because, as recently as the 1960s, people came from or went to Australia predominantly by sea, a mammoth, consciousness-shifting journey that could take six weeks. Today, one doesn’t even need to bother getting a taxi to the airport to wait around for a flight. You can be in virtual touch through using voice-over Internet protocols (VoIP). Downloadable software from a business such as Skype means you can speak to and see anyone, anywhere, who is similarly connected – immediately and for next to no cost.

Our shrinking world means that, for billions of us, almost the whole world is literally at our fingertips through computer keyboard or mobile phone pad. We are stretched over time and space through networks, and, through everyday use of these networks, the miniaturized time and space of our worlds become part of who and what we are: information nodes that form part of a global communications network where everything seems to be available, and available almost immediately. Our old-fashioned and modernist conceptions of geometric space and clock-based time are fast becoming irrelevant.

In the new economy, businesses, as we have already seen, are transforming themselves, or dying, and new ones are constantly being born. When looking for a new job nowadays, growing numbers of people simply log on to sites such as Jobsearch.co.uk and are able to build an exact profile of the job they want in seconds – and can also see the jobs that are available in the UK and across the world. No longer do they need to sit down with a cup of tea and a pen, poring over column after column of every kind of job before coming to something remotely related to their interests and skills. That job may be applied for through a telephone interview where, with a mobile in your pocket, you can be on a Greek holiday from your home in New Zealand and still be in line for a new job in San Francisco. Such prospective employers will, if they are willing to conduct a global search for candidates through the Internet, doubtless consider themselves a ‘globalized’ entity. Moreover, such companies are unconcerned now by the fact that their next hire may come from half a world away. The dramatic shrinking of the planet means that they would view the world as their potential marketplace, and the whole world is similarly the potential source of their raw materials, their human capital as well as their finance capital.

This notional corporation may be headquartered in San Francisco, but its field of operations will cross (or will be prepared to cross) all national boundaries. The goal of ‘weightlessness’ that we discussed previously in relation to corporations means that the outsourcing of ‘cost-effective’ processes will be simply automatic, a reflex response for managers in the globalized economy. If this corporation makes computer chips or T-shirts, then having them produced in a maquiladora in Mexico, or a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) factory in Shenzen, China, is just a normalized part of business, with the only ones giving it a second thought being those San Francisco workers whose jobs have suddenly evaporated through outsourcing. Outsourcing, indeed, may be seen as a kind metaphor for the shrinking of the world. What this conveys is ‘ability’ and ‘mobility’ – the ability of capitalism, for all the reasons we have previously discussed, to scour a very much more manageable-sized planet for the optimization of business opportunities, and the use of the new mobility of workers and of capital to follow this logic in the search – the never-ending search – for profit.

For many in business, and for many ordinary workers keen to get on in life, this fundamental aspect of the information society is (or seems to be) yet another ‘good thing’. The ‘tyranny of distance’ that not so very long ago kept most of us locked into a localized life with localized opportunities, engendering a localized perspective, has been blown away by the gales of neoliberal change that now regularly sweep the planet. The world is no longer our oyster – whatever that terrible cliché was supposed to mean – but potentially it is now literally ours to possess and to dominate, to range over and manipulate at will. Is this ‘progress’? What can possibly be wrong with seeing my mother every day on the computer, and chatting with her via VoIP? What can be wrong with her seeing her grandchildren grow up in real time, and not having to depend on occasional letters and photographs that cannot speak, or laugh, or cry?

In theory, all this is good, maybe. However, to make sound judgements about a shrinking world we need to go beyond the unthinking generalization of our own experience. We need to understand what it means to have the world at the ends of our fingers, and so we need to know what kinds of theory underpin the reality of our being what Mark Poster terms ‘nomads who daily wander at will . . . without necessarily moving our bodies at all’ (1990: 15). To do this we shall look here at two theorists, both influential in important ways, and from both ends of the political/ideological spectrum, who see the contraction of space and the acceleration of time as the key elements of our post-industrial world. The persuasiveness and critical insight of these respective theories are assessed from within the framework of my own arguments on the centrality of neoliberalist globalization and social acceleration through information technologies.

‘. . . profoundly democratic and liberating’: Frances Cairncross

Frances Cairncross wrote an influential book titled The Death of Distance, in 1997, just as we were nearing the cusp of the first Internet boom. The author was also an award-winning journalist for the business weekly The Economist, and a senior academic at Oxford University. The CV is not without interest as it shows once more the value in being able to traverse those powerful institutional realms of media and ideas that make the successful promulgation of a concept so very much easier.

The book was influential in the Dyson-Gilder milieu and was read and admired by the powerful change agents of the time. For example, the blurb on the front cover of the book comes from Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, who lauds it as ‘essential reading’ for those who wish to understand the future of the information society. The publishing success of the book meant that it was extensively rewritten and reprinted in 2001. The existence of these two editions is fortunate as it allows us to compare and contrast them over a critical period in the development of the information society (1997–2001) and to consider also how Cairncross’s list of ‘future trends’ – that constituted much of the book’s importance – was able to stand the test of subsequent events.

In its written style and its focus, The Death of Distance is clearly addressed to a business readership. Penned by a business journalist, the title itself connotes ‘globalization’ from the perspective of corporate capitalism. The extent of Rupert Murdoch’s interest, for example, is obvious. The ‘death of distance’ for media tycoons such as Murdoch signals that through technological innovation (new media technologies) the functional ability to manipulate space (and time) will offer tremendous new business opportunities. For canny business executives and corporate planners, the idea of the world getting ‘smaller’ does not mean that markets shrink. In fact they see the opposite to be the case. The technological ability to more effectively manipulate and control space and time means that more markets are reachable and new media technologies, such as the Internet and satellite TV, create new markets. Indeed, the vista of a shrinking planet is the book’s main attraction, I believe, and the ideas and the salient ‘trends’ contained within it are somewhat secondary. What really interests business people is the concept of a world that is small enough to control and manipulate through technology.

As is customary within the business-oriented genre, the book takes as given that technology and technological innovations are positive. Indeed, Cairncross urges the reader to cast aside any fears about the constant change that untrammelled technological systems bring and to surrender willingly to the logic of earth-shrinking communications systems. She writes: ‘For many people, this prospective new world is frightening. Change is always unsettling, and we are now seeing the fastest technological change the world has ever known’ (1997: 4). Change is described and change is forecast along specific paths that we have since come to recognize. We see this in her ‘predictions’ of the convergence of the telephone and the PC through a mobile phone, or the coming difficulties over intellectual property (IP) rights. However, what I want to focus on more is Cairncross’s occasional focus on people, and what the ‘death of distance’ will do for them, and how it will change them, as opposed to what it will do for globalizing corporations.

In what reads like her mission statement, Cairncross argues strongly that we need to grasp the opportunities afforded by ICT systems, systems organized and guided by the dynamics of market competition, so as to be able to reap the fabulous benefits that await us. She writes:

at the heart of the communications revolution lies something that will, in the main, benefit humanity: global diffusion of knowledge. Information once available only to the few will be available to the many, instantly and inexpensively. [N]ew ideas will spread faster, leaping borders. Poor countries will have immediate access to information that was once restricted to the industrial world and travelled only slowly, if at all, beyond it. Entire electorates will learn things that once only a few bureaucrats knew . . . In these ways, the communications revolution is profoundly democratic and liberating, levelling the imbalance between large and small, rich and poor. The death of distance, overall, should be welcomed and enjoyed. (1997: 4)

An information society, we can see, is also a knowledge society. In this she echoes the work of Daniel Bell in the 1970s and Peter Drucker in the 1990s; and like them she conflates information with knowledge.

Let us look, first of all, at the ‘global diffusion of knowledge’ that Cairncross predicts and compare it with recent developments. There is no doubt that there has been a massive global diffusion of information – but is that the same as knowledge? Cairncross thinks it is, and that this explosion of knowledge will benefit our reading and writing skills, making for a more literate humanity. The positive effect of the ‘global diffusion of knowledge’ is outlined in number 28 of her list of coming trends, which is: ‘Improved Writing and Reading Skills. Electronic mail will induce young people to express themselves effectively and to admire clear and lively written prose. Dull or muddled communicators will fall by the wayside’ (1997: xvi).

Now, the non-equivalence of information and knowledge is something that we have already looked at, when I argued, through the work of Lyotard, that knowledge created under the regime of the ICT revolution has become ‘performative’ and ‘commodified’. How would an increasing glut of information/knowledge improve literacy? Cairncross does admit that a ‘deluge of information’ might be a problem, but she sees this only from the perspective of business, not the individual, and so prescribes ‘filters to sift, process and edit it’ (1997: xii). This is a lot of sifting and editing when we consider the 60 billion emails that we send to and from each other every day (Reuters, 2006a). And this is just a fairly small part of the 161 billion gigabytes that was being produced in total by that year. To get this in some perspective, this equates to filling 161 billion iPods with data, or, even more breathtakingly, it amounts to ‘12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun . . . or 3 million times the information in all the books ever written’ (Bergstein, 2007). We are drowning in information, the production of which has no objective limits. We are subject to a thickening ‘data smog’ which, as David Shenk put it, ‘simply gets in the way’ (Shenk, 1997: 31). The tendency is for the blizzard of information to crowd out quiet moments of reflection and obstruct the spaces for contemplation and learning. It instrumentalizes conversation, transforms literature and reorganizes entertainment. Importantly, it thwarts a natural scepticism, rendering us less sophisticated as consumers and as citizens, and as naturally inquisitive beings (Hassan, 2003).

What ‘data smog’ also ‘gets in the way’ of, I argue, is a solid concept of precisely where knowledge comes from. Literacy is a form of knowledge that comes from learning – an essential part of which is achieved through contemplation. We learn to read and write through the time-consuming process of learning to read and write – processes that are antithetical to increased speed and acceleration across society. I just gave some theoretical consequences of the torrents of information being generated each day, but there is also growing empirical evidence to support this. For example, businesses themselves are becoming concerned that people are less able to write in ‘clear and lively written prose’. In 2004 the New York Times published an article on a survey of 120 US corporations, which found that a third of employees write poorly. More alarming for corporate America is the fact that it is forced to spend ‘as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training’. Expressing a concern on this particular mode of communication, the article cites a professor of English who heads an online business school and who notes, with rather poor sarcasm, that ‘E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited.’ It goes on to conclude that this poor standard of literacy is bad for productivity and efficiency because ‘Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion’ (Dillon, 2004). Tellingly, perhaps, this particular ‘trend’ was dropped from Cairncross’s rewritten 2001 edition. This omission may point to a tacit acceptance that there are not nearly enough sifting and editing processes available to individuals with which to counter the intellectually clouding effect of information production systems. Indeed, it points to the more intuitively recognized fact that we are increasingly asked to deal with more information, across all realms of culture and society – and are coping badly (de Zengotita, 2005).

Cairncross maintains, as we just saw, that such free-marketbased information systems are ‘profoundly democratic and liberating’. Knowledge once shared only between the elites could now be available to us all – presumably to enable and empower people to act and seek redress through energized democratic processes. One can see the logic in this argument, and there are many observers, from Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Community and Smart Mobs (1993; 2002) to William Mitchell’s City of Bits (1996), who were early boosters of the idea that the digital domain was potentially the new agora of ancient Athens. Concrete evidence of this argument is difficult to find, however. Not so for the contrary opinion that the information society has a dark political side. For example, in 2007, after being invisible from the global political radar for many years, the country of Burma (or Myanmar) suddenly filled our screens. Led by Buddhist monks, demonstrations against the price of petrol began to spread rapidly and increase in frequency. Armed with mobile phones and Internet access, protesters were able to get vision out through the Internet to dissident Burmese groups in cities such as London and New Delhi. The demonstrators themselves were suddenly opening an essentially closed country and its repressive regime to global scrutiny. Local Burmese bloggers were able to augment the footage with reportage from the demonstrations, commenting on the supposed vacillations of the government who seemingly were caught unawares by being suddenly thrust into the glare of global media – from sources inside the country itself. ICTs had become a kind of Trojan horse for the regime, and initially it did not know how to respond. Recovering its balance, the regime moved quickly to use its near-monopoly of the network and its servers to shut down Internet access completely. The information flow instantly slowed to a trickle, and access to the ‘.mm Burma’ domain name suffix was closed off (Johnson, 2007). The momentum of the protest movement was immediately lost and the government regained the initiative with a wave of arrests throughout the country. This represents a stark example of how what might be termed the innately anti-democratic function of the Internet is closer to the truth because governments have the ultimate control over whether or not the people have access to it. When the situation is serious, in other words, it is a relatively easy thing to shut down potentially dangerous ‘network communities’.

Indeed, Cairncross herself seems to think that the ‘profoundly democratic’ effect of ICTs may not, in fact, be so profound after all. We see this shift in the general political dimension of the ‘death of distance’ in point number 30 of her ‘trend spotting’ list called ‘Global Peace’. The second edition, published in 2001, with ‘over 70% new material’, decided to keep this particular trend in her list (some, such as ‘The Rebalance of Political Power’, did not make it into the new edition). However, the rewriting of her ‘Global Peace’ for the 2001 edition incorporated a subtle and illuminating change of language. Compare the entries and judge for yourself:

(1997) Global Peace. As countries become even more economically interdependent and as global trade and foreign investment grow, people will communicate more freely and learn more about the ideas and aspirations of human beings in other parts of the globe. The effect will be to increase understanding, foster tolerance and ultimately promote worldwide peace. (xvi)

And:

(2001) Global Peace. Democracy will continue to spread: people who live in dictatorial regimes will be more aware of their governments’ failures. Democracies have always been more reluctant to fight than dictatorships. In addition, countries will grow yet more economically interdependent. People will communicate more freely with human beings in other parts of the globe. As a result, while wars will still be fought, the effect may be to foster world peace. (xvii; my italics)

Note how the confident tone from the refulgent days of the first Internet boom has turned into weaker hedging of the bets concerning war and peace. Of course the information technology revolution continued over the period between these publications, and global trade and capitalist interdependence has grown massively too. However, as Cairncross’s caution reveals, there is little sign of the ‘near-frictionless markets’ she predicted in the 1990s (1997: xii). Instead, there has been friction aplenty and this shows in a disturbing global political scene. Many countries, and a diversity of social movements within countries, now see globalization as simply the attempted imposition of Anglo-American economic and cultural hegemony, and they try to resist it (see Klein, 2002, for example).

As for people being able to ‘communicate more freely’ with others in this shrinking world, in one sense this is true enough. Blogs and listservs and email, and the myriad means of expressing oneself to the whole world through YouTube or MySpace, do exist and millions take advantage of these. However, when we consider the political realm, the ‘death of distance’ as inaugurating new forms of freedom of expression presents a different reality. The case of Burma is instructive and salutary. Moreover, people in, say, China or Iran certainly know of the political aspirations of their fellow global citizens, but if they try to discuss these aspirations ‘freely’ and in the context of their own country, they quickly come up against the antithesis of such freedom in the shape of repressive state apparatuses that limit online free expression as much as possible, while trying to keep their economy high-tech and ICT-oriented to the maximum degree (Tait, 2007).

What the evidence points to is that, far from freedom being enabled by ICTs and the ‘death of distance’ as Cairncross suggests (and subsequently modifies), political freedom and democratic practice is a never-changing terrain of struggle under capitalism. Freedom to use communications systems does not make a democracy; democracy is about power relations, and the democratic use of social power. Neither can ICTs bring freedom in any deterministic sense. Freedom needs to be fought for, and in a networked, but still class-based and ideologically structured global system, struggle continues in cyberspace as well as on the street. No matter how small the world has become, defeat and victory are part of the ongoing fight for freedom by peoples everywhere. What is certain is that the fostering of ‘world peace’ will only come through more equality and more democracy – and not through simply being able to communicate on YouTube or MySpace. These can help, but they are easily closed-off vectors for democratic communication – and when they are closed off, then the struggle for democracy suddenly becomes old-fashioned and sometimes painfully slow.

The shrinking of space and the acceleration of time: David Harvey

The social geographer and Marxist theorist David Harvey brought a powerful vision to the issues of time and space in his 1989 book, The Condition of Postmodernity. In it he was concerned with theorizing what he called the ‘transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation’, which for him constituted the political, economic and cultural underpinnings of a much broader shift from a society (or societies) dominated by the ideas of modernity and progress, to become characterized instead by modernity’s historical antithesis, postmodernity.

Earlier, we discussed the transition to flexible accumulation and saw how this process restructured the world around the principles of so-called ‘free markets’, combined with the abrogation by governments of their role in the managing of the economy, and how this enabled ‘globalization’ through the revolution in information and communication technologies. As Harvey sees it, this process greatly accelerated time–space compression, and has had two principal effects: one in our heads, and the other on the concrete reality of the capitalist world. Both have been transformed fundamentally. Let us take these in their turn. In the first instance, Harvey argues, the transformation to a globalizing regime of flexible accumulation has changed how we relate to the world and how we make sense of the world. In reference to the term ‘time–space compression’, Harvey wrote: ‘I mean to signal by that term processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves’ (1989: 240). This intense process, a process enabled by information technologies and the rise of neoliberalism, disrupted our previous view of the world that was based much more upon the sureties of modernity.

Notwithstanding the ideology of neoliberalism that promoted the information society as a bright and efficient and welcoming new world, the collapse of the ‘whole way of life’ that had seemed so normal and permanent has had a ‘disorienting and disruptive impact’ (1989: 284) that shook the very foundations of established practices, established values and established ways of being conscious of the world and our place in it. A similar idea was forwarded by Anthony Giddens with his theory of ‘time–space distantiation’ that argued that social practices are stretched across time and space, and that remote action and the effects of remote action become more prevalent at the level of the institution down to the level of the individual (Giddens, 1990).

The idea of the world being a single, capitalist marketplace, driven by a single instrumental logic, is something we will take up in more detail shortly. However, cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, like Harvey (Giddens hedges his bets), also saw the processes of time–space compression as invoking a dystopian sense of what computerization and the information society might bring. In his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson writes that our ‘faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism’ (Jameson, 1991: 37). The seeming overriding dominance of capital, into all areas of society, across the whole planet – and based upon a generalized speed-up of life – threw into salience questions not only of the possible negative effects of global capitalism as a ‘whole way of life’, but also the validity of the ‘truths’ that held modernity together as a narrative story.

The status of ‘truth’ in our postmodernity has been hotly debated since the mid- to late 1970s, the very period (not coincidentally) when the shift to neoliberal globalization began. Jean-François Lyotard argued famously in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition, that, with the collapse of the metanarratives of modernity, ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ was contestable between a proliferation of many different versions that were constructed through what he termed ‘language games’. The ‘truth’ of science and technology as being legitimized through their orientation towards ‘efficiency’ and performativity, Lyotard argues, is but one version of truth and reality in the postmodern condition. However, Lyotard also saw that science and technology had become indissolubly linked to the project of capitalism, indeed had become subordinated to capital, and so ceased to be ‘science and technology’ in the objective sense, but were linked more to the idea of performativity and efficiency. In a context where science and technology in the service of the economy appear as a ‘truth’ amidst a sea of proliferating versions of who we are and what we should be, the ideas projected by globalizing capitalism and the high value it places on the science and technology of computers seem all the more assuring. In other words, in the absence of any solid and recognizable truths that act as a unifying anchor for all kinds of people from a myriad of cultural and social traditions (an impossible task), the ideology or ‘language game’ of capitalism/science and technology becomes powerfully enhanced. We may not like what we hear regarding the information society, but the world is framed in such a highly ideologized way that there appear to be no options, no alternatives, despite the seeming diversity of ways of interpreting the postmodern era that we are living through. Moreover, the aspect of where power resides in this transition from modernity to postmodernity is occluded in many of the disputes on truth (Lyotard’s thesis included). However, Terry Eagleton, in his criticism of Lyotard’s position and his advocacy of multiple truths, makes the useful point that if one takes this position to its rational and logical end point we find that: ‘there can be no difference between truth, authority and rhetorical seductiveness; he who has the smoothest tongue or the raciest story has the power’ (cited in Harvey, 1989: 117).

This argument in effect posits a new postmodern consciousness. The cultural, political and economic anchorlessness that emerges through the compression of time and space effectively makes the majority of people more amenable to the ‘smooth tongue’ of the capitalist and the advocates for a wired world. And this process, this new consciousness, enables the second principal effect of time–space compression – which is the imposition of a capitalist concrete reality across every corner of the globe.

In purely economic terms, the ‘death of distance’ seemed to be good for capitalism. Indeed, it is official policy in institutions such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the world’s oldest international organization that was set up in 1865 to coordinate and standardize communications between countries. Its Secretary General, Yoshio Utsumi, addressed the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005, and declared that:

Today, information is a source of power and a route to riches. God gave us the power to see and hear. Our parents and teachers taught us to read and write and to use information to make sense of the world around us. Now, the power of information and communication technology is removing the boundaries of time and space, which have long kept us apart. (Utsumi, 2005)

In this mirroring of Frances Cairncross, Utsumi envisions a single world marketplace operating within the same circuits of production, distribution and consumption through the rational functioning of information technologies that are used to bring people and markets together. Capital, raw materials and labour could be integrated through global networks. This offers the opportunity for businesses to access these inputs cheaply, wherever they may be found, and to use them to access markets that were formerly too far away, or to create new markets altogether in the new industries that the information technology revolution was creating. Quite suddenly, from the late 1970s onwards, through the rise of neoliberal ideology in particular, the world seemed to be much more manipulable and controllable from the perspective of business, and it was able, finally, to be ordered on a rational and profitable basis.

The flow of capital as information through spreading and deepening digital networks, and the flow of goods and services through dramatic improvements in distribution and transportation, quickly made business (in potential at least) a planet-wide operation. Moreover, the word ‘potential’ is connoted with ‘freedom’ in neoliberal discourse: the freedom to expand, invest, restructure – to do whatever was deemed necessary by business leaders to increase the ‘bottom line’. Not only was the global spread of capital now politically possible through the rise of neoliberalism – it was also technologically possible through the proliferation and growing effectiveness of ICTs.

This ‘potential’ or ‘freedom’ meant that local or national businesses (even quite small ones) could step up a level and restructure themselves as multinational or global companies. For instance, a local shoe company may have manufactured quite profitably at the local level, using local suppliers and local labour for the past 100 years. But from the 1980s onwards, the growing compression of time and space meant that it was increasingly cheaper (and economically more logical) to outsource all of these operations. This local shoe manufacturer was now able to shut down its local production facilities and become a multinational. It could do this by contracting the production to, say, China; by sourcing the procurement of raw materials (leather, plastic, rubber, etc.) to an agent in Hong Kong; by creating distribution links with overseas partners for the exploitation of new markets; and by employing the services of a global shipping agent in Singapore. All this could be financed by turning to a multinational bank that will lend on the basis of a global monetary system that is currently predicated on cheap money and low interest rates. Importantly, all this interactivity is made possible (and profitable) through growing information networks that are geared towards bringing cheaper shoes, not only to the original local market, but also to a globalizing marketplace. We can see the dramatic effects of this logic (of suddenly being able to become a multinational within a shrinking world) when we consider the estimate that the number of multinational corporations rose from 7,000 in 1969 to 37,000 in 1994 (The Economist, 1994).

Through neoliberal globalization, time and space were being compressed to enhance business efficiency, and business used the new information technologies to augment this transformation. Nonetheless, there have been difficulties with this process since its inception in the late 1970s, and we have already touched upon some of them. Unemployment in many countries has reached serious levels, especially in the early 1980s and then again in the early 1990s; in the 2000s it has reached historic highs as a global phenomenon; the reduced role of the government in economic management has left many people exposed to economic volatility; and the perceived dwindling of social solidarity with its replacement by an ‘acquisitive individualism’ has been argued to have produced a less caring society (Sennett, 1998; Putnam, 2000).

However, there are other ways of looking at this transformation. For some, the ‘neoliberalization of culture’, as Harvey (2005: 47) puts it, appears to be nowhere near as bad as the doomsayers of the 1980s had predicted. Until the ‘credit crunch’ of 2008, at first glance many of us seemed to be better off – at least in material terms. In the advanced economies of the West, people now regularly, and in their millions, take overseas holidays. Car sales steadily increase, as do purchases of computers and mobile phones and MP3 players, and many other kinds of new media equipment. There are more homeowners than ever before, more jobs in more diverse industries than ever before. More people finish secondary education and go on to take higher degrees than ever before. Clothing and air transport are cheaper than ever before – and, by the approaching end of the first decade of the new century, globalized capitalism appears to have been riding what a Deutsche Bank analyst termed the ‘longest ever [economic] recovery’ (Deutsche Bank, 2007).

From this it would seem that through its unprecedented ‘control’ over time and space the neoliberal logic is now able to deliver the kind of world that it has always promised: a world of increasing material wealth, of dense interconnectivity, a life full of gadgets and innovation and growth, with capitalism nestling in every corner of the planet and busily developing, extracting, building, producing, creating and placing us (or increasing numbers of us) on an upward spiral of well-being. However, the fact that time–space compression has been so radical and palpable over the last twenty or so years, under the regime of neoliberalism, suggests something else, something more alarming about the nature of the capitalist drive for unlimited growth and unlimited consumption – we live on a planet of finite resources. The abstract pros and cons that have just been outlined may be (and are) debated ad infinitum. But the environmental limits to our common home are something we all at least intuitively understand and accept. The earth is finite in terms of the space available, and it is finite in terms of its carrying capacity for humans. Harvey considers what he sees as a fundamental contradiction in the neoliberal project as it relates to time–space compression and rapid technological change. As he observes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism:

The neoliberal theory of technological change relies upon the coercive powers of competition to drive the search for new products, new production methods, and new organizational forms. This drive becomes so deeply embedded in entrepreneurial common sense, however, that it becomes a fetish belief: there is a technological fix for every problem. [This can] produce powerful independent trends of technological change that can become destabilizing, if not counterproductive. (2005: 68–9)

Then he gets to the crux of the matter:

There is an inner contradiction . . . between technological dynamism, instability, dissolution of social solidarities, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, and rapid shifts in space–time relations, speculative bubbles, and the general tendency towards crisis formation within capitalism. (69)

We have noted some of the salient and negative social, cultural and political issues concerning the rise of neoliberalism and the information society in the previous chapters. However, what Harvey called the ‘coercive powers of competition’ and the technological ‘fetish’ regarding ICTs has contributed massively to a problem that has been simmering away almost since the beginning of the industrialization process itself, but has worsened markedly over the last twenty-five years – and that is environmental degradation and the depletion of the world’s natural resources (Flannery, 2006). We currently live in a global economic system dominated by neoliberal, free-market rule, where technology and the market are posited as the solution to all of our difficulties. But our problems as a global society have never been greater or more pressing than in the realm of our global ecology, and it is here we find the ‘inner contradiction’ Harvey speaks of. Capitalism is predicated on constant spatial expansion and constant material consumption. This intrinsic process has been turbocharged by neoliberalism and ICTs. Since the end of the Cold War the so-called socialist and communist societies of China and Russia, as well as the state-dominated society of India – major economies with huge populations – have all enthusiastically joined the circuits of the neoliberal free market, in practice if not in theory. This has led to the neoliberal model of growth, with expansion and consumption becoming general, and conceived as the natural way forward for the whole of humanity. Under this model, the six billion (and counting) inhabitants of the earth are encouraged to believe that they can all achieve, and should strive for, and view as their right, the growing levels of consumption that are taken as standard in the advanced Western countries.

However, seen from the critical perspective of political economy that Harvey articulates in his space–time compression thesis, it becomes clear that the planet cannot sustain such a drain on its natural resources. The neoliberal model is a danger to the ecosystem, and it is an issue which people are waking up to with some difficulty, notwithstanding the salience of global warming in the mainstream media (Monbiot, 2006). It seems that in the context of the shrinking of space, we as individuals and as collectivities have a cognitive problem with the nature of the environmental threat. Even the linking of the information society with ecological crisis is a rare intellectual move. This may have something to do with the potential enormity of the predicament that has come to us from the hitherto obscure realms of climatology. As John Lanchester writes on the issue of global warming: ‘Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is a subject so much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to frame or discuss’ (2007: 24).

It follows that current Western levels of consumption and production will be as nothing compared with a future of growing demands and aspirations of the 2 billion proto-consumers of China and India. These societies are already becoming heavily networked and people from Shenzen and Beijing to Bangalore and Mumbai take the Western standard of living in the form of a car, a house full of gadgets, and a well-paid job in a free-market economy, as an entitlement, something that belongs to them as much as it does to the citizens of New York or London or Berlin. And, indeed, who can say that a first-world lifestyle can be ‘ours’ but not ‘theirs’?

Take the example of China. Previously overwhelmingly poor and dominated by the agricultural sector, this country of 1.3 billion people is now experiencing a massive transfer of population from the countryside to the cities in search of work and wealth. It is a movement of humanity the likes of which is historically unprecedented, and is driven principally by the logic that underpins time–space compression. Its erstwhile ‘closed’ economy is becoming fully integrated into the world economy, and hundreds of millions of Chinese are now more or less easily able to connect to a global network of economic-information flows that would have been not only politically impossible a generation ago, but technologically impossible too.

The dynamics of neoliberalism and the ICT revolution in China are contributing to an immense economic-environmental contradiction. On the one hand, these processes act as magnets that draw people to the large urbanizing coastal areas that supply many of the manufactured goods that flood the Western economies – from textiles and toys to cars and computers. Large-scale production has meant that China is now the largest single supplier of high-tech goods to the USA (Branstetter and Lardy, 2006: 36). On the other hand, the booming Chinese economy acts as a vast ‘sink’ for the world’s extractable resources. The demands for non-renewable resources such as coal, oil, gas, uranium and other minerals are so large that commentators regularly ascribe this as the principal reason for the ongoing world economic boom. Indeed, it has been estimated that in 2007 a new coal-fired power plant was being opened every week (Shukman, 2006). The domestic Chinese economy itself, of course, is a part of this boom, and, since 1984 when Deng Xiaoping told the Chinese people that ‘to get rich is glorious’, the focus for millions of citizens in this ostensibly communist country has been to own and to consume on a par with people in the advanced Western countries. Accordingly, domestic demand for items like automobiles is now enormous. With no tax levied on fuel, and more and more people attaining the relative affluence needed to buy them, China is on a car-buying binge. In 1994 there were 1 million private cars in the country. By 2004 this had ballooned to 16 million – and, by 2020, China is set to overtake the USA in private car ownership, with a projected 170 million cars on the roads at that time, requiring yearly some 100 million tonnes of oil to power them (China Development Brief, 2006).

Car consumption is only one aspect of the process, and within the overall picture China is only one country, albeit a highly illustrative one. Breakneck development in countries such as these, and growth-at-any-price policies in all parts of the world, has ensured that the pressure on the planetary ecosystem is not sustainable. In parentheses it is interesting (and alarming) to note that, as Harvey reminds us, ‘The era of neoliberalization also happens to be the era of the fastest mass extinction of species in the Earth’s recent history’ (2005: 173). But to the example of cars can be added the growth in demand for buses, trains, aircraft and air conditioners, and the development of the widespread infrastructure that the mass movement of people on a global scale demands.

Many cities are now densely crowded and choking in clouds of particulate matter that spew from cars and smokestack industries; major rivers are either fouled by industrial waste, or they are diverted into massive dam-building projects to provide energy for yet more development. Cities across the world, both old and new ones, now sprawl with unprecedented rapidity, drawing more energy from the finite supply that the earth has.

The growth of industry and urbanization is most marked in the developing regions of Asia, Latin America and Africa – the ‘South’ in the global divide of the neoliberal development process. The urban sociologist Mike Davis has considered the rise of ‘megacities’ as a particularly neoliberal phenomenon whereby a rapidly globalizing economy has concentrated immense agglomerations of people, ramshackle infrastructure, polluting industries and human misery into spaces with numbers approaching 20 million souls (2006). All in all, the South contains a billion people who live not in a Western affluence, but in slums. Davis’s book Planet of Slums shows that their existence is directly due to the model of capitalism that has given us globalization and the information society. He writes that ‘In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million . . . by 2015 there will be at least 550’ (11). Moreover, and to put the era of neoliberalism into frightening context, Davis notes that ‘neoliberal capitalism since 1970 has multiplied Dickens’s notorious slum of Tom-all-Alone’s in Bleak House by exponential powers. Residents of slums, while only 6% of the city population of the developed countries, constitute a staggering 78.2% of urbanites in the least-developed countries’; and ‘China . . . added more city-dwellers in the 1980s than did all of Europe (including Russia) in the entire 19th century!’ (11). The information society, at the most fundamental level, is a society – as these figures suggest – where more people than ever before in history have lives of precarious instability, between absolute poverty and the sliver of luminescence on the horizon that indicates some kind of hope.

In what way do these 1 billion slum-dwellers constitute a direct effect of Harvey’s time–space compression and the information society? First, many of them would formerly have been rural dwellers, farmers or workers and traders in villages that dotted the countryside in China, or Mexico, or Nigeria, or the Philippines. In the globalizing process, Castells writes of the ‘complexity of the interaction between technology, society, and space’ (1996: 377). And it is through this increasingly complex interaction that globalizing capital creates the megacities, as the shift to industrialization in once-rural economies forces the transfer of millions of people to places where work may be found in the now easily exploitable pools of cheap labour in the South that underpin the relative wealth of the North. The process is truly global. As Deane Neubauer puts it:

Throughout the world, the rural poor flock to cities as the only practical solution to endemic rural poverty. National governments support intra-country migration for the urban economic development it supports. Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Taipei, Seoul, and Yokohama are older industrial and commercial cities that have exploded into global production centers built largely on migratory growth. Other cities – Lagos, Cairo, Mumbai (Bombay), Lima, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Shanghai, Shenzhen-Pearl River Delta, Manila, and Jakarta – owe even more to their magnetic pull of labor from the agricultural sector into contemporary globalized industries in transportation, communication, manufacture, finance, and the like. (2004: 22)

Second, the fact that 1 billion slum-dwellers would have relatively little access to networked computers, and would not enjoy the ‘connected’ life of the denizens of New York or Tokyo, does not mean that they are not directly connected to the logic of the information society. They are a consequence of its logic, in that the time–space compression the information society creates assigns megacities to function as ‘nodes’ of production and exploitation in a global economy. They constitute what Marx identified in the nineteenth century as the ‘reserve army of labour’. In Marx’s time this ‘reserve army’ was locally or regionally based. But by the end of the twentieth century, it had, according to the economist Andrew Glyn, ‘gone global’ (Glyn, 2006). Moreover, the importance of global communication systems, even in the slum megacities themselves, is shown in the burgeoning rise of mobile phone ownership (or rental), even amongst the poorest, as well as access to the Internet, because both are seen as a means with which to escape the poverty trap (Slater and Kwami, 2005). We can perhaps see that the former ‘first-world/third-world’ divides, or the ‘North–South’ geographic appellation that it was sometimes given, no longer accurately depict what happens under globalization. These were supposedly distinct worlds where the first world (the North) exploited and colonized the third world (the South). The information society and the particular form of globalization it has engendered have meant that the ‘death of distance’ has brought the whole world into a closeness where each is affected both positively and negatively by the other. The balance of this effect, as my discussion of Cairncross and Harvey has indicated, seems to be in the negative.

These thinkers give us two very different causes and effects of the shrinking of the planet. Cairncross accentuates the positive in ways that are laudable and reveal a genuine hope and belief that the world may become a better, more literate and more peaceful place through the possibilities that the information society brings. Harvey, for his part, relies upon a more sceptical political-economy tradition that sees capitalism and its ‘forces of production’ such as computerization and the Internet as being inherently undemocratic, having the interests of production, profit and ‘efficiency’ above those of ordinary people. Crucially, the latter perspective looks at the role of ideology, the role of dominant ideas that rightly or wrongly help to determine and shape the paths that economy and society take. We have already seen in the previous chapter how the ideas of neoliberalism fail to match up against the empirical reality of some of its effects. The environmental crisis is another such empirical reality, one which amounts to a terrible dilemma for humanity: how can we advocate the kind of limitless material world the information society encourages and seems to make possible, against the limits of what our planet can physically sustain?

This rather depressing thought leads us to a consideration of all that ‘material stuff’ that fills our contemporary lives. We produce and consume commodities, and societies have done so on an increasing scale since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But, thanks to the processes of globalization and the information society, we have never produced and consumed to such a gigantic extent. To get some idea of how this process works and what it means for our world we need to think some more about the nature of the commodity and our relationship with it.