In today’s frenetic globalism, the rusty steel girders of the industrial age have now become barriers themselves and are being hurled down and scrapped. From the ruins of our rust belts, fiber optics cables are spinning the web of a new networked global society radically different from our own.
Such advances break down not local but national trade, political and economic barriers and create ever bigger global networks and structures. At the same time, the cables that connect also bind since all are tethered to these giant networks and are subject to their rules.
Thus, we see the framework of a global economy being built where huge markets are opened, but the regulations of new supranational structures impose themselves upon the nations as can be seen in global trade rules, monetary unions or even the Kyoto protocols.
Likewise, the same technologies that supposedly empower the individual to pursue his own happiness, also power the massive databases of intrusive government that pry into the private lives of individuals, record his every movement and monitor the operation of markets.