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The Speed of Collapse: The Space-Time Dimensions of Capitalism's First Great Crisis of the 21st Century
Robert Hassan Crit Sociol 2011 37: 385 originally published online 7 March 2011 DOI: 10.1177/0896920510380946 The online version of this article can be found at: http://crs.sagepub.com/content/37/4/385

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Article

The Speed of Collapse: The Space-Time Dimensions of Capitalisms First Great Crisis of the 21st Century
Robert Hassan

Critical Sociology 37(4) 385402 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0896920510380946 crs.sagepub.com

University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract The essay analyses the global economic crisis from a critical perspective on the function of capital accumulation in space-time. It argues that the relative speed of collapse is a historically new phenomenon that has been generated through the neoliberal and ICT driven mode of capitalism that has dominated since the 1970s. The speed of collapse, I argue, will be followed by a rapid financially led recovery that signals not that the system is self-stabilizing and durable, but that the system is out of control. This lack of control and the irreconcilable effects of space-time upon a constantly accumulating capital with fewer and fewer profitable outlets mean that a future system crisis is both inevitable and will carry greater destructive resonance. Keywords capitalism, critical theory, Fordism, Marxism, neoliberalism

Introduction
On August 10, 1996, a single power line in western Oregon brushed a tree and shorted out, triggering a massive cascade of power outages that spread across the western United States. Frantic engineers watched helplessly as the crisis unfolded, leaving nearly 10 million people without electricity. Even after power was restored, they were unable to explain adequately why it had happened, or how they could prevent a similar cascade from happening again which it did, in the Northeast on Aug. 14, 2003. (Watts, 2009)

The above quotation acts as a simple but effective allegory for neoliberal capitalism, an economic system that now spans the planet, reaching its logic into every realm of culture, politics and society but which is now, in its contemporary phase of crisis, set upon a permanent knife-edge. Moreover, this chronologic vignette will act as something of a guide to the logic of the argument I will make here. It mirrors a narrative of past, present and future that I want to explore in order to show that
Corresponding author: Robert Hassan, Senior Research Fellow, Media and Communications Program, John Medley Building (131), University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia Email: hassanr@unimelb.edu.au

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unless we temporalize the problem of capitalism we shall never understand why it today races at an historically unprecedented pace; why it is so permanently volatile and present oriented; and why we shall never fully understand that similar economic crises will happen again, and with increasing frequency and destructive resonance. Through a space-time analysis of capitalism, I will show why the global economy is now so drastically vulnerable, and that the global earthquake of 20079 tells us more than (simply) that the global economy is marked by its complexity that it is indeed out of control. Let us begin by framing the crisis in the context of its temporality.

We Are at Stall-Speed
Paul Virilio, a philosopher, sometime architect, and long-time theorist of speed, noted that an effect of his so-called dromological law (the laws of motion in society) is that increase in speed the real-time perspective of telecommunications inevitably causes a distortion of appearances (1997: 3). This, one could argue, is something we know intuitively anyway: consider speeding through a built-up city in a train and trying to make sense of the close-up images before us as they flit past the retina. Barbara Adam shifts key slightly in her interpretation of Virilios dictum when she writes that increase in speed increases the potential for gridlock (2004: 131). Note that the interpretive shift from distortion and confusion moves us to slowing down, to congestion, to standstill. Again, we are able to intuit that this is how things often are in the social world. Think, for example, of how increase in road-building to ease traffic gridlock tends to attract more traffic, leading to more gridlock; or when faster networked computers lead to increased usage, which lead to networks slowing down or failing altogether. And so it is with a fast moving and always accelerating global economy. The real-time perspective through telecommunications that has driven and expanded the financial economy since the 1980s began to crack and crumble with the sub-prime mortgage detonation of 2007. Its radiating aftershocks spread throughout the global financial system, bringing bank lending almost to a halt; the tremors had their inevitable effects upon the real economy in the production of goods and services. Speaking in March 2008, Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, surveyed the topology of disaster and used a more accurate metaphor than he perhaps realized when he declared that: We [the US and world economy] are at stall speed. (Reuters, 2008) It is apt that the cliche economic shock has been employed as the ready-to-hand label by journalists, economists and politicians to tag the events that had so agitated Greenspan (Blackburn, 2008). Economic shockwaves had indeed spread quickly across the planet to engulf it with chaos and uncertainty. Moreover, the speed of economic collapse experienced what is termed in physics a phase transition that was expressed in a loss of momentum, then in a slowdown, and then in some sectors a complete stop. Shock is a useful descriptor also, because its connotations of speed and suddenness proved accurate in that the collapse took by surprise very many people who had a responsibility to be better prepared. Indeed, hardly anyone saw it coming. The warnings of those who did see the darkening skies (e.g. Keen, 2008; Shiller, 2008) were largely ignored by policymakers, economists, traders and bankers whose thoughts, actions and rationalizations were determinedly elsewhere. However, the speed of collapse and the perceived urgent necessity to fix it meant that identified causes were inevitably unhistorical, and prescribed cures tended to look to the immediate present or what I will later argue to be an untenably foreshortened future. And so rushing to conclusions conclusions that were media driven to no small degree meant that solutions for the economic meltdown were always in danger of being the wrong ones. Most spectacular in this respect, in terms of its media salience, was the demonization of Wall Street and its high profile bankruptcies.

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During late 2008 it seemed that almost every week an over-leveraged bank or trading house would either close its doors, be incorporated into a larger entity, or be rendered eligible for the government oxygen mask. The reeling of the financial sector in New York dragged London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, and a host of second-tier financial centres into frantic rounds of governmentbusiness talks, stock market plunges, and the injection of trillions of dollars of government liquidity into the system to hopefully avert what was projected by more than a few to be global disaster on a Wagnerian scale. Inevitably, the finger of blame turned also to more identifiable and narrowly logical targets, such as the numerous bankers and corporate CEOs who drew colossal salaries even as their businesses went under. There were movie-script characters such as Bernard Madoff, whose multibillion dollar investment house vanished into the digital ether, laying bare a mind-bogglingly huge Ponzi scheme (Henriques and Kouwe, 2008); and then there was the amorphous mass of traders and analysts and advisers, the anonymous but globally prevalent brains of the system that had, over the previous couple of decades, dreamt up the various financial engineering innovations such as derivatives, credit default swaps (CDS), collateralized debt obligations (CDO) and a complex web of assorted products that allowed profits to be made in a world (and more on this below) where increasingly novel ways for investment funds to be channelled profitably had to be found. Along with such ready-to-hand causes, similarly proximate solutions swiftly suggested themselves to policymakers and analysts who had not long previously been oblivious to the existence of any problem. With the inauguration of President Obama in the USA, a general and popular motivation for a rather nebulous structural reform began to gather pace. It proceeds still. The shape and success of economic reform has still to be agreed and tested, but in the immediate context of crisis there existed a general consensus in media and policy circles that, having looked into the abyss, capitalism needed less free market and more regulation or at least a little bit more regulation, and possibly only over the short term until the present crisis had stabilized or passed (Ghitis, 2009). President Obamas Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was the first high-level US official since the 1970s to speak frankly and seriously in the language of government intervention, and demanded a tightening and extending of government regulation in the economy at both the national and international levels. Secretary Geithner took a mildly historical and leftist approach in his rationalization of the economic crisis when he announced in March 2009 that the rules of the game needed to be rewritten because capitalism has proved too unstable and fragile, subject to significant crises every few years, periodic booms in real estate markets and in credit, followed by busts and contraction (Jaffe and Mayerowitz, 2009). Big questions remain, nevertheless: how serious are world governments in their conviction to properly regulate and control global capitalism? Do they actually understand the nature of the contemporary system and its space-time dynamics? And are they able to withstand the powerful and entrenched interests of those who have benefited from this system over the last quarter-century?

Marx:The Comeback Kid?

It is perhaps significant that as the economic crisis hit so suddenly, and as the experts seemed so bereft of ideas, that growing numbers of people would seek deeper and more historically based analyses. For example, alongside the rather more curious rise in sales of Ayn Rands novel Atlas Shrugged, Marxs Capital, it was reported, was selling in record numbers as individuals hoped not so much for a socialist revolutionary transformation as for a need to understand more the nature of the world economy (Godoy, 2008). It is in this revisionist context that I want now to consider the current predicament of capitalism.

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To begin with, the boom and bust description of capitalism, as well as the stall speed of 2008 that Greenspan spoke of, do not reflect the primary logic of global capital flows. These are surface expressions of much deeper space-time processes. The essence of capitalism is to be found in the dynamics of mobility and speed (space and time). These are the linchpins not only for individual profit making, but also for capitalism as a whole. Moreover this fundamental logic, as Marx and Engels (1975: 3562) observed in the Communist Manifesto, is itself reflective of an intractable contradiction whereby the mobility and speed that capitalism craves for its survival actually brings it closer (and brings it closer more quickly) to the point of breakdown. Marx and Engels prognostications may have been impulsive in their 1848 Manifesto, but the space-time processes they illustrated so dramatically are now, through the critical interactions of neoliberalism and information and communication technologies (ICTs), reaching their limits of sustainability. Accordingly, the first major economic crisis of the 21st century stands as a looming precursor of much more destructive crises that the temporal logic I outline below suggests will occur sooner rather than later. Individual capitalists, looking only to their narrow and more immediate interests, tend not to system-analyze in this way. However, they do realize at a more or less acute level of comprehension that to rewrite the rules of the game from the perspective of government means regulation and regulation in the neoliberal worldview is an intrinsically bad thing. This reflex action quickly came into play as President Obama and other world leaders began to articulate policy proposals that were (and continue to be) actually rather modest and banal. Nevertheless, so soon after avoiding near-collapse with the help of government liquidity injections, Wall Street lobbyists immediately began massing their forces for a battle over the proposals (Ghitis, 2009). Indeed, as soon as it was able, Wall Street proper began the process of reasserting its independence, and key trading houses and banks took steps to distance themselves from what they fear to be the deadening thrall of government control. For example, in July 2009, Goldman Sachs, one of the institutions most deeply involved in the building of the architecture of neoliberal financial capitalism, and spearhead of the financialization of the system (Blackburn, 2008) reported that it was back into the black. Indeed, it had even begun to pay back the bail out billions it received from the US Treasury (Bowley, 2009). The rationale for this was blatant: it was to free Goldman Sachs from any government constraint; to allow it and eventually the whole of Wall Street to continue the unsupervised party it had enjoyed for the last 20 years. The real time nature of this analysis is further illustrated when it is noted that at the time of writing (July 2009) Goldman Sachs will post its most profitable year ever, and is unashamedly paying its senior staff the stratospheric incentive bonuses that were such a symbol of popular anger only a few months earlier (Inman, 2009). The rapid bounce-back might look to some like evidence of a resilient and self-stabilizing system, but the temporal perspective suggests instead an extreme volatility and offers a very strong indication that, in fact, there are no effective forms of economic or democratic control over the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism. Continuing to peer through the temporal lens we observe that pressure from government to (in effect) slow the economy was met almost immediately by a counter pressure to allow the economy as much freedom as possible: that is to say, to allow the immanent logic of unimpeded expansion in space and acceleration in time to become the dominant factors once more to return to business as usual, as soon as possible. This is a business logic that, as Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) have argued, represents the new spirit of capitalism, one that arose out of an earlier global crisis in the 1970s. This new spirit emanates from a management driven imperative [toward] unlimited accumulation in a context that is as free as possible from the intrusions of either the bureaucracies of government or sectional interests of organized labour (2007: 5). As we shall see this imperative reveals the true nature of capital and the temporal dimensions of this immanency are deeply instructive.

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The temporal perspective also gives the distinct impression that the institutional memory of Wall Street and, indeed, of capitalism more broadly, has not stored the lessons of the 20079 collapse. And so with the first signs of an upturn, the instinctual habit to be free of government and of regulation and impediments to accumulation of any kind begins to reassert itself. The effect of rushing to judgment to fix unexpected catastrophe has meant that the core problems of the processes of capitalism in space and time have been quickly flitted over or ignored altogether. It meant also that in the hurried opprobrium heaped upon Wall Street and certain of its denizens, we looked only to the symptoms of a terminal system, applied Band-Aids, and set the patient too early to its feet. Already there are signs that the global system looks to be once more charting its preferred course (the status quo ante). However, what we have witnessed is a space-time fix that is certain to build again towards crisis in the future. And as the following analysis will show, it will in all likelihood arrive sooner and will be deeper than most of us dare to think.

The Speed of Capital in Space-Time

Two fundamental questions need to be addressed in relation to the temporal nature of capitalism. Most basic is: why does the economy seem to speed up? And arising directly from this consideration is: what are the social and political consequences of this primary economic driving force? Let us begin with the first question. When Benjamin Franklin wrote in his somewhat condescending 1748 Advice to a Young Tradesman Written by an Old One that time is money he was articulating what people at that time were beginning to intuitively grasp anyway. This was the phase when capitalism as a social and economic system was evolving and beginning to permeate and transform previous social and economic systems that had endured for hundreds of years. Post-Renaissance science and social thought were combining powerfully with a radically new form and logic of mercantilism to create, literally, a new world. Enlightenment rationalism began to be the intellectual motive force for both perceiving the world and acting upon it. Ideas of progress and organization became the logic underpinning not only the social world, but also the new economic dynamics that were shaping it. For example, a new perception of what constitutes time began to emanate from the growing spread and influence of the clock in everyday life (Thompson, 1991 [1967]; Thrift, 1996). Famously, Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations was grappling with the equally unprecedented reality that was unfolding around him when he asked: where does all this new material wealth come from? For Smith (1965 [1776]) the key was free and open trade between individuals and businesses; and this generative state rose up from the dynamic of competition that he identified as the fundamental wealth-creating mechanism in that emergent world. As the original articulation of what became political economy, Smiths affirmative analysis would constitute a highly influential perspective on capitalism and on the nature of modern society that persists to this day. Marx, writing a century later, accepted much of this logic but subjected it to an historical and political economy critique of his own that would paint a very different picture regarding the effects of these dynamics. For Marx, the Smithean processes of wealth creation (with all its positive signifiers) could be better understood through the rather more technical framework of capital accumulation which, for him, had much less savoury (though historically momentous) consequences. Marx explains this in great detail in volume one of Capital, and its systematic articulation need not detain us here (Marx, 1973 [1864]; see also Hassan, 2009). The purpose of the argument at this point is to show that when broken down into its component parts, the basic need for the capitalist to accumulate to an unlimited degree has some very important space-time effects that are of vital relevance today. But I will preface that argument with a question: what happens to capital when finite space begins to run out, and when technological speed reaches unprecedented levels?

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The underlying dynamic of accumulation means that nothing is allowed to stand still. A businessperson, no matter what his or her business, and no matter what the state of the marketplace may be, cannot continue to be profitable over even the mid-term, without constant vigilance. If someone is seen to be making profit in a business venture, then sooner rather than later, competitors will seek to emulate the factors of that success. Capitalisms immanent logic of rationality provides for only one response: in order to survive the capitalist has to invest at least part of the profit into finding or developing new ways to make the product or service more cheaply and efficiently to undercut the competition. Moreover this process must be undertaken continually and with no respite. What does this mean in terms of the functioning of capital within space and time? In terms of space, to be able to withstand the pressures of competition and to enable them to reap the benefits of scale, businesses need to grow. In other words there is always the pressure to spatially expand. To remain profitable (indeed to simply remain in business) the capitalist must always be on the move, seeking new markets, new sources of raw materials and cheaper labour. This spatial dynamic of uninterrupted disturbance that Marx and Engels identified in the Manifesto is what was (even in 1848) hurtling capitalism to all corners of the globe. What they identified was an immensely energetic turbulence affecting social relations that ensured that nothing stayed the same or remained unaffected by the market for long. Under capitalism, as they themselves famously phrased it, all that is solid melts into air (1975: 38). In respect of time it was noted that the nostrum time is money is well understood, or at least intuitively recognized by almost everyone in a commercial context. But what are the underlying temporal dynamics at play? Time is money suggests with iron logic that to produce something faster is to produce it at lower unit cost. The emergence of the factory system, where the limitations of human physiology and its productive capacities started to be overcome through technology, was the basis of the success of capitalism, and in parallel inaugurated the problems of technological rationality and human agency that we continue to grapple with (Feenberg, 2004). Technological innovation, then, is pivotal to the speed of capital. In order to compete effectively, not only must the capitalist think spatially in terms of new markets, etc., but temporally too, by investing in technological innovations that would produce commodities and services more quickly. The logic of necessary emulation comes into force here as well. If the competitor acquires a faster method through the application of new technologies, then the capitalist is compelled at least to do likewise, or preferably, improve upon the new technology. In this dialectic, speed is forever fixed into the logic of capitalism, with competition driving constant innovation in technological development. At one level, this speed logic is open ended. There are no intrinsic limits to how fast processes can accelerate; only contemporaneous levels of technological sophistication set the limit. However, at another level of analysis there is a further limiting factor that affects not only how fast capitalism can be made to function, but also how far it can expand in space. The limiting or possibly a better term is pacing of the time-space processes of capital comes from the effects of rational organization. Capitalism and the industrial way of life it was building needed to be founded upon a rational basis for it to work. Planning and scheduling were necessary to make the system both realizable and predictable. This is essentially an organization of temporal duration, and it was achieved through the use of clock-time as the mode upon which the capitalist economy as well as culture and society more broadly would be ordered and made as regular and disciplined as possible (Thrift, 1996). It is difficult to underestimate the effects of the clock upon the success of the industrial revolution. As Lewis Mumford put it in his 1934 Technics and Civilization [the] modern industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steam easier than it could do without the clock (1967 [1934]: 10). Such temporal organization has had a braking effect upon the open-ended propensity for the technological speed that is the nucleus of capitalism. Rational organization

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produced forms of space-time predictability and constancy that constituted the social and political building blocks of the modern industrial society. Primarily this was expressed in the relative fixity of such material entities of production as plant and machinery; in communities of workers who reasonably expected a measure of stability in living arrangements that corresponded with the rise of whole towns and cities that were based upon industries such as coal or steel or manufacturing or shipping. The weight of capital was literally sunk into the soil of the land, encompassing people, systems, roads, railways, schools, houses, social and cultural institutions, and so on, that were the basis of an industrial way of life that was metered by the temporal conservatism of the clock. However it was a temporality in constant tension with the need for capital to be mobile and oriented toward acceleration. This tension between space and time was in the main a positive one for capital positive for as long as a tendency towards sinking roots in terrestrial space did not overly constrain its need to expand in the quest for competitiveness. The moderating factor in capitals space-time tension was the availability of space for expansion. What this meant for most of the history of capitalism was that the time of the clock was sufficient for both the growth of its organizational forms based upon levels of predictability and constancy and also for what David Harvey termed the spatial fix which ensured that accumulated capital could be steered away from the inevitable build up and concentration in the areas of industrial maturity (Harvey, 1983: 195). This delicate balance began to shift and wobble over the 1970s and the space-time tension within capitalism reached crisispoint. It was a crisis, we see in retrospect, which had been building since the end of the Second World War. The post-war boom from 194573 was the longest in the history of capitalism. Moreover, this was a period of globalization that prefaced our own, one where an entity called the global economy could be said to actually exist. On the surface, this boom seemed positive and rising wages and living standards across the industrial world gave the impression that the good times would last forever (Glyn, 1990: 67, 122). However, as capitalism became more comprehensive and global, space to where capital could be easily and advantageously channelled was inexorably running out. Accumulated (spatially constrained) capital began to build in the major economies, and this was having a corrosive effect upon profitability and productivity, especially in the mature centres of western Europe and North America. The crisis, as David Harvey expressed it in his The Condition of Postmodernity:
can be to some degree interpreted as a running out of those options to handle the overaccumulation problem ... As these Fordist production systems came to maturity, they became new ... centres of overaccumulation. Spatial competition intensified between geographically distinct Fordist systems, with the most efficient regimes (such as the Japanese) and lower labour-cost regimes (such as those found in third world countries) driving other centres into paroxysms of devaluation through deindustrialization. Spatial competition intensified, particularly after 1973, as the capacity to resolve the overaccumulation problem through geographical displacement ran out. (1989: 185)

The resolution to the space problem of capital accumulation after the mid-1970s created the system of neoliberal globalization that is our defining social, political and economic context and which led directly to the global economic crisis that continues to unfold today.

Nobodys Problem
We now need to consider the nature of the restructured capitalism after the 1970s, ask why it is set upon a course of open-ended acceleration, and conjecture what its rapid collapse of 20079 prefigures for the social, economic and political project of neoliberal globalization.

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The global economic crisis of the 1970s was also very much a political one, especially in the anglophone economies that bore the heavier weight of its effects (Glyn, 2005). The often rancorous political and economic debates of the time could perhaps be abbreviated to the question of: by whom, and how is the economy to be run? The post-war years of economic reconstruction had been marked by a culture based on what has been called the social contract, or in the French context, dirigisme. In this phase, business, government and labour in loose coalition were able to shape and direct major elements of the economy (Kapstein, 1996). In a longish period of high profits and continued growth there was the latitude for such compromise and concession and conciliation between a troika of social forces with historically divergent interests and constituencies. It was an intersecting of forces, however, that could function only in times of relative plenty. By the 1970s, the fact that there was no longer a painless geographical displacement solution meant that capital accumulation could not so easily function (through expansion) in the way that it had. The venerable ideas of Adam Smith (albeit in selective form) were suddenly once more in vogue in right-wing political and economic discourse (Klein, 2007). The principal (and by no means only) sage of this new spirit of capitalism was Milton Friedman, the prominent economist from the Chicago School of Economics who advocated for the new times the themes he had painstakingly outlined in his book Capitalism and Freedom (1962). The title of that book was more than usually pertinent. Individuals could only be free, he maintained, if economic life was free. Markets therefore should not be planned, as this leads only (the USSR being a case in point) toward tyranny; business should not be overly regulated, as this stunts the entrepreneurial free spirit; direct government activity in economic life should be kept to an absolute minimum and so on. The book, which made barely a ripple when it was first published, went almost mainstream by the mid1970s. And so when Friedman was chosen for the Nobel laureateship in 1976 for his work on economics, it was clear that an idea had found its time. This was clear also to the new political class who led and rode the populist wave against the old ways, and the crises they had allegedly contributed to. Thus President Reagan would identify the cause of the worlds problems as government, and chose no less a platform than his first Inaugural Address in 1981 to affirm that government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. Prime Minister Thatcher would propose the Chicago School based neoliberal project as the solution in terms similarly binary. Articulating what would become a defining neoliberal mantra for the coming decade and beyond, Thatcher rationalized her radical free market policies to American correspondents in the Commons in 1980 when she asserted that there really is no alternative (Thatcher, 1980). Free markets and free capitalism became almost naturalized concepts in what, especially after the demise of communism in 1989, was increasingly seen to be the only way forward. Accordingly, the role of the bureaucracies of government and organized labour could more readily be viewed as antithetical to this pristine state, and were systematically jettisoned. For example in the UK over the 1980s organized labour was crushed in quite dramatic fashion (Milne, 2004), whereas union influence was more quietly, if inexorably, diminished in other anglophone countries and far beyond as neoliberalism found its feet and its ideological confidence. Rather more portentous for the neoliberal project as well as for politics and democracy more generally was a conscious government self-abnegation of its historical role and its historical responsibilities. Governments, again in the anglophone economies to begin with, systematically disengaged from their social contract role, leaving market forces to influence the shape, content and trajectory of local, regional and national economic processes. On the international scale, tariff barriers began to be dismantled to allow capital to move more easily and profitably between countries; and whole key industries in manufacturing (steel making, auto manufacturing and so on) had subsidies withdrawn or reduced and were thus compelled to compete or die in the new market environment.

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The twin-track neoliberal approach created the opportunity and momentum for globalization as it is manifested today. Capital was increasingly free to move to wherever it could be most profitably utilized in a world where restrictions were being removed inexorably through bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). This process constituted the creation of new space for investment and accumulation in realms such as education, community and politics. Corporations grew fat and profitable in the spatial fix of the decades after the 1970s. Indeed corporations proliferated enormously in their transnationality during that period. For example it is estimated that the number of multinationals rose from 7000 in 1969 to 37,000 in 1994 (Economist, 1994: 64). But the colonization by corporations of every nook and cranny of life has its limits, notwithstanding the fact that capital needs to expand and markets need to be identified and developed and exploited ad infinitum. This brings us to a commonly overlooked facet of both neoliberalism and economic globalization and that is the indispensable role played by information technologies. It is no coincidence that the ICT revolution arose in conjunction with the neoliberal political revolution. Freeing up industries and making capital as mobile as possible was enabled by giving maximum leeway to the introduction of information technologies in order to allow businesses to be more productive, more nimble and much, much faster. The commercial potential of computer based automation had been known since at least the early 1960s (Denise, 1962) but the moderating force of the social contract tended to see computerization as a threat to jobs, and in the context of prosperity that marked the decades after 1945, the use of computers and the development of computing was therefore left to grow fitfully as a niche industry and hence at a much slower pace. The rise of the network society is now a common enough tale, analysed in some detail by authors such as Castells (1996, 1997) and Schiller (2001, 2007), and need not detain us here. However, an important effect of the network society for capitalism is that it created many new markets, products and consumers out of thin air. Microsoft Corporation, for example, an entity that makes nothing tangible, and deals only in ideas and information, became the largest corporation in the world during the early 2000s, eclipsing General Motors, the weighty behemoth and archetype of a fast-fading age. For Jeremy Rifkin this signalled a new phase where economies of speed replaced economies of scale (2000: 22). The new driving forces of capital had made themselves weightless, built for speed, at home within digital networks where transactions can be fleeting and devoid of any durable commitment, and are far more flexible and better suited to the volatile nature of the new global economy (Rifkin, 2000: 23). Importantly this networked economy and society had created a potentially limitless virtual space wherein capital could be directed into realms such as the burgeoning finance economy, and the growing NASDAQ list of companies, and into previously unimaginable businesses from eBay to Google, and from social networking to virtual learning. The role of computing, and the computer revolution is too often viewed as just another industry, a by-product of the competitive forces of capital that pursues speed of production through technological innovation. But it is much more than this. The computer, as J. David Bolter maintains, is the new defining technology and the key to understanding our age (1984: 8). It is undermining the dominant clock time logic of the industrial revolution that Mumford saw as so important. Networked computing creates virtual social space that contains within it many of the attributes of real space (Kellerman, 2002: 33). This is especially the case in respect of the needs of capital whose crises of the 1970s provided the basis for it to develop. The virtual space of the networked economy functions as what Joseph Choonera (2009) terms a counteracting tendency that is akin to Harveys more apt term, the spatial fix. This is new space into which potentially over-accumulated capital can be syphoned and made to yield profit. Finance capitalism is almost wholly conducted in this realm and its borderless and limitless writ has accommodated and driven the expansion of this section of capitalism since the

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1980s. It serves as the basis for much of the productive basis of capitalism too, as computers and computerization has become an almost integral part of any business, from the corner shop to the multinational conglomerate (Schiller, 2007). And in this context of ubiquitous computing, millions of individuals are drawn (and drawn for longer periods) into this essentially commodifying space. Fredric Jameson expressed this cogently when he observed that an important element of this new form of globalization was the increasing commodification of everyday life, where the cash nexus seeped into those spaces of culture and society that had been hitherto sheltered from it and indeed for the most part hostile to and inconsistent with its logic (1996: 9). Commerce and its imperatives now saturate culture and life more generally to an unprecedented degree: from the ads that follow our every move when using Google, or reading almost anything online, to the data trails that our online life leaves for companies to construct consumer profiles for us, to assist in their encouragement of us to consume yet more, whether we need to or not, or can afford to or not. Virtual space and the information technology revolution is not therefore just another phase in capitalisms innovative trajectory in technological development but is a defining element that has added a whole new realm to the logic of capital accumulation and expansion. In that sense, it is an effect of the space-time contradiction of the accumulation logic, and not a cause of its present predicament. And so it seemed for a time that the virtual space of the networked economy had the optimal environment for capital accumulation. The necessity for capital to expand (in space) and accelerate (in time) appeared to have been solved by neoliberalisms apparently limitless virtual space, and by a rate of computer driven acceleration that is constrained only by the level of technological innovation at any given time. The problem with this view is that it describes an economic system, a form of globalization, which is essentially out of control. By stepping back from its role in the functioning of the economy, by deregulating industries and markets, by creating the competitive environment through the weakening of labour organizations, by taking Schumpeters economic concept of creative destruction to unsurpassed levels, and by letting the social chips fall where they will from the inevitable upheaval from continual economy change, neoliberal governments essentially let capital create its own optimal context for functioning. The democratic oversight of capitalism, in other words, had been gradually discarded as neoliberal globalization grew to dominance; an active abnegation that was exemplified in the insouciant repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Governance of the globalizing system became nobodys problem nobodys business to restrict, or control or otherwise thwart the natural business of business. This form of globalizing capital has positive articulations, mainly in terms of its widening of the availability of the accoutrements of consumerism. But it is not too dogmatic to suggest that the economic, social and environmental negatives outweigh the easy possession of a mobile phone or availability of cheap processed foods. What I have tried to show, and will now restate, is that the basis of both positives and negatives are the new social and economic engagements with space and time. Since the 1970s rise of neoliberal globalization and the revolution in network computing, virtual space has provided the necessary freedom into which capital accumulation could be profitably fed; and networked technologies have provided the temporal force for the necessary acceleration of capitalism demanded by the imperatives of competition moreover, the time of the clock as the baseline meter for economy, culture and society, is being displaced by what I have elsewhere termed network time, a time that is volatile, multidimensional, and oriented towards increasing acceleration in ways (and with effects) that the rigidity of clock time could not achieve (Hassan, 2009). In a context where the abstraction of profit is the overriding principle, then constant economic activity, incessant commercial transactions at every turn, the immense production of information swirling around increasingly pervasive networks, become the environment wherein people are increasingly compelled to spend their everyday existence. And this is the context in which the

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financial crisis exploded in our faces in 2007. The bomb was ticking and we literally had no time in our speed filled lives and in the speed filled economy that dominates it, to adequately pause and consider and reflect upon where we were going and what, collectively, we had been a part of. What had previously been nobodys problem was now urgently looking for an owner; and there was only one candidate. As Joseph Stiglitz (2008) put it, It is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that [the] misguided economics and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works. One important part of the rescue plan that has not been sufficiently recognized was the obfuscation and anesthetization of the general population by labeling the propping up of a fatally flawed economic system a stimulus package. The other is that in such a system that rests upon the evanescent human traits of belief and confidence, then politicians, economists and others, simply hoped that things would get back to where they were not too long previously and that all the recent unpleasantness would soon be a fading memory.

Some Conclusions: Speed and the Tyranny of the Algorithm

By 2009 the new new spirit of capitalism was, as we have seen in the example of Goldman Sachs, already stalking Wall Street and spreading its message of business as usual across the wider world. And business as usual in the broader financial sector, as recent history tells us, is to either indulge in outright illegality, or to stay within the letter of the law, but be constantly on the lookout for new ways to make money. Officially the latter is termed entrepreneurship and is lauded, but in practice it is the finding of ever more complex and abstract ways of making capital yield profit often in ethico-legal grey zones and within a constricted temporal frame wherein the longer term effects are not fully considered. And as we have also recently learned, this means that individuals only understand what they are doing (if at all) in relative isolation, and not as part of a vast and tightly interconnected system. If, as seems likely, the system is to continue on the basis of its neoliberal configuration, then the priorities of capitalism and the unfolding logic of capitalism will be predictable. The not yet future, in other words, is already imprinted in our collective past and present, and if it is not consciously recognized, managed and made, then the scope of our potential futures is significantly narrowed (Adam and Groves, 2007). Space and time, then, remain central to the trajectory of capitalism. And given what has been argued above, what may be said about what is to come? It is clear that virtual space will continue to expand dramatically as a fundamental destination for growing capital accumulation. The relentless rise of Google and the connected crises of print media are examples of the auguries of change that ubiquitous computing is bringing to the world. But even as virtual space grows, so will it crowd. The need to expand (to become virtual global) has never been so acute, or so easy. By simply having an internet presence, a business can begin life as a global entity, something never before possible. However, only a minority of capitalists are truly entrepreneurial or innovative and the rest seek only to keep up competing through emulating. Leaders are nonetheless motivated by this competition and must try to gain or keep the competitive edge as they always have through doing whatever they do faster and/or more efficiently. The followers, in their turn, must respond, and through this dialectical interaction the open-ended acceleration of the system is driven faster and faster. What this means is that in networked capitalism, speed is the key driver of profitability and the assurance of (temporary) survival. While space (both material and virtual) continues to be an important and indispensable element of capitalism, it is speed that commands a much greater premium. The recognized technological basis for business as usual is, of course, the computer; or what Theodor Roszak, with just a little cynicism, described in his The Cult of Information as a

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solution in search of a problem (1986: 51). It is significant, and indicative of our collective reliance on computers, that even in the wake of almost system breakdown, the role of computing and the constant acceleration of the speed economy are not considered as issues worth critically reflecting upon at policy levels. In our addiction to everything digital we seem blind to the possibility that a slower, more contemplative and reflexive attitude to the processes of the economy may be warranted. Indeed, the policy arguments run directly opposite. For example, Viviane Reding, a member of the European Commission responsible for the information society, gave a telling elite assessment to a forum in late 2008. Reding maintained that ICTs provide [the] vital tools to recover from the economic slowdown (2009: 2). The value of these tools, however, is adduced from the same ideological thinking that caused the information technology revolution in the 1970s: that is to say, the efficiency, rationalization and productivity logics that stem from the ineffaceable need to compete. In Redings case, it was European competition with the USA and by extension, with China and Japan that lay at the heart of her techno-rationality, and where the role of computer driven acceleration of productive processes is deemed more important than ever. A new spectrum must be made available, Reding continued, to enable the interconnection of trillions of devices at speeds beyond the hundreds of [megabits that] will change the way we communicate and access knowledge and bring radical transformations to production and distribution systems and to services in the private and public sector (2009: 3). It was the over-leveraged and over-heated finance sector that pulled the rest of the global economy down into the spirals of write-offs, credit freeze, company failures, mass lay-offs and the attendant human misery that has dominated global society since 2007. Disastrously, it is the finance sector that is at the leading edge of the hoped-for upturn in confidence and the return to free-spending consumption. Finance now dominates capital because of the space-time transformations that I have described above. In these first decades of the 21st century, the unfolding of this governing space-time logic has two primary articulations: first, in the context of the financialization (Blackburn, 2006) of capital, the finance sector is pure virtual space. It is comprised only of digitized numbers pulsing at speed through computer networks. As Greta Krippner puts it, this reflects changes in patterns of accumulation in which profit making occurs increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production (2004: 14). This potentially limitless space thus becomes a magnet for capital that has no easy or sufficiently fast outlet. Blackburn notes that finance capital now permeates everyday life, with more products that arise from the increasing commodification of the life course, such as student debt or personal pensions, as well as with the marketing of credit cards or the arrangement of mortgages (2006: 39). And financialization is, as Blackburn observes, acutely temporal wherein the entrepreneur who commits capital to a project is looking for a return tomorrow (2006: 39). But of course the sector envelops more than the entrepreneur. Hundreds of millions of individuals have funds invested in projects they likely know little or nothing about. Their stake in the financialization process is handled for them through the trading arms of banks or brokerage firms who invest their capital, or through immense pension funds that manage trillions of dollars belonging to people they do not know, are not responsible to, and are at many removes from through labyrinthine financial engineering processes. The connection (such as it is) is remote and is blandly expressed through the quarterly dividend statements. Moreover, these projects, as Krippner notes, are increasingly purely financial with no connection whatever to the material world of production and trade except when crisis hits. Second, computers allow this leading-edge sector to go where no sector has gone before in terms of the speed-profit nexus. We saw how, with the new rapidity now inherent in the system, Goldman Sachs was able to check itself out of the triage ward and set itself back to work in record

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time. This was possible because finance is uniquely able to act (to make and take profit) at speeds that approach the capitalist nirvana of so-called real time. And it is unique because finance is weightless in the sense Rifkin describes, dealing only in the processing of information (numbers) at high-speed which is of course the basis of computer logic. The real economy of making, marketing and selling consumer goods and services can (and is) being constantly speeded up, but there are always going to be significant latencies measured hours, days, weeks and longer in the realization of profit. Contrastingly, the latencies that occur in computer trading can be measured in milliseconds, and this is what makes it so immensely attractive in the speed economy of the networked society. Which brings us back to Goldman Sachs, the finance equivalent of the Leninist vanguard party, and the bearer of the consciousness of the new spirit of capitalism. It occupies this position because for the moment it is the entity most adept at exploiting economic space-time through the conjunction of entrepreneurship and the latest developments in computing technology. It is important that the impression is not conveyed that Goldman Sachs is a singularly malign force that is bent on world domination and the destruction of the old ways of doing things. Goldman Sachs merely is the most efficient reflection of an economic system that is out of control. It should be noted also, that the specific techno-logic that I will now illustrate is an example only of a far wider technologic that has grown with the ICT revolution in toto. As with creatures in nature, Goldman Sachs inhabits an environment that it partly adapts to, and partly helps to transform. And as in raw nature, it inhabits an environment (global finance) that, as Robert Guy puts it: is home to two types: the quick and the dead (2009: 24). The fight for survival, in other words, is the defining context, and in a free market environment financial entities do what they must by exploiting any advantage they can find. The present advantage held by Goldman Sachs is their ability to exploit better than their competitors the computer-based share trading system that is at the centre of Wall Streets profit making. The key to being the leader in this race is to be able to conjoin the mega-smarts and megabytes (Guy, 2009: 24) to come up with increasingly complex algorithms which can exploit the micromovements in stock prices on the global marketplace. This is called frequency trading or algorithmic trading and is a process where autonomous computer code makes real-time decisions regarding buying and selling operations. This is a growing element of financialization, and attracts increasing volumes of global investment capital. For example, Guy estimates that almost half of all trading on the New York Stock Exchange is conducted in this way, with the competitive edge being determined by the relative cleverness of their closely guarded codes. Speed is the governing logic of these algorithms. Computer-based instructions can move so rapidly that the algorithmic code can seek out and identify so-called arbitrage opportunities which are rapid shifts in stock prices and buy and sell these to harvest profit before the real world knows anything about it. As Terrence Hendershott has observed:
Before algorithmic trading, a pension fund manager wanting to buy 100,000 shares of IBM might have hired a broker-dealer to search for a counterparty to execute the entire quantity at once in a block trade. Alternatively, that institutional investor might have hired a broker to quietly work the order using his judgment and discretion to buy a little bit here and there over the course of the trading day to keep from driving the IBM share price up too far (2008)

The process is entirely computer driven, and the algorithm is free to interpret autonomously its own environment, making thousands of buys and sells around the globe and around the clock. The slower temporal qualities of information based upon knowledge such as judgment and discretion are made redundant, leaving the flesh and blood aspect unnecessary. Indeed, this is the point. Where

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speed is all, humans and their errors and latencies must be technologically driven out. Because, as Hendershott also notes: The arrival of public information renders existing orders stale and can put the free trading option into the money (2008) free trading option meaning the wider market competition. Computers trading and competing with other computers at very high speeds makes for an immensely dynamic and volatile process that governs not only the profitability of the finance sector, but the health and profitability of the real economy that is pulled into the wake of this activity. Algorithmic trading is developed to take advantage, as just noted, of the arbitrage movements in the market. These micro- and fast-moving shifts are called ripples which move on the surface of market ocean. However, subjecting these ripples to competitive algorithmic logic can fundamentally destabilize the dynamic whole. As Emanuel Derman, a risk strategy analyst notes: [algorithmic trading] works OK as long as these activities are a ripple on the surface of the ocean of normal trading. But when the volume of the ripple is the size of the ocean, then the assumptions it is based upon are less reliable and the ripple can overwhelm the ocean (cited in Guy, 2009: 25). Derman thus illuminates the risky basis upon which recovery in the new new spirit of capitalism is constructed, and the evanescent and volatile source upon which the health and longevity of the material economy ultimately depends. Hundreds of millions of people in other words, have their fates tied not to the judgment and discretion of experts, or to the sober and more rational temporal rhythms of reflection, of systematic proper analysis, of due diligence and so on but to the abstractions of computer logic functioning at the fastest possible speed. Moreover, the economic fates of millions are tied to super-secretive financial entities, and to democratically unaccountable individuals who continue to see the world and its opportunities through the same perspective they did at the height of the boom, a mere couple of years ago. And then there are the politicians, not only in the Anglo-American context, but also across the world, who in the absence of any plausible alternative to neoliberalism and with the propensity to apply computer-based solutions to any problem, seemed to have learned nothing from the crisis. Primarily this is because many are of an age where they would have no personal memory of earlier crises. Moreover, many would be former business people themselves, or would through socialization have a close ideological affinity to the economic function of business. Either way, what it means is that many would have not enjoyed the critical distance through which to try to understand the nature of capital, and more particularly the nature of capital in space-time. That they do not comprehend what they were supposed to be fixing was made apparent in late 2008, shortly after the US Senate considered the first stimulus package. Then, Senator Lindsay Graham, a Republican representing South Carolina, declared to a Fox News journalist that: The process thats led to this bill stinks. There is no negotiating going on here! Nobody is negotiating! Were making this up as we go. (Graham, 2009) There is no reason to doubt his summation. The total system of capitalism, especially the finance dimension that is at the leading edge of globalization, is beyond the comprehension of any economist or analyst and certainly beyond the ken of the advisor-dependent professional politician. This is the critical fact that needs to be recognized: there needs to be an admission of the Senators disclosure at the highest political levels and the appropriate conclusions need to be drawn. The global economy is out of control because it was felt by some powerful elites in the 1970s that the market and its magical mechanism would prove to be self-regulating and smooth. This has not transpired. Instead, through the impetus of deregulated competition and the speed-force of ICTs, the process of financialization has grown and made itself increasingly complex and volatile and dominating through previously unimaginable techniques such as algorithmic trading and instruments such as credit default swaps. That the latter has become tainted matters little, for as George Dyson notes in his essay Theory of Games and Economic Misbehaviour (2009), There is no limit to the level of concepts (including fraudulent ones) that an economy is able to comprehend. Highly paid

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and market savvy analysts will simply work out another algorithm or another financial product that will deliver short-term returns. This critical skill of turning new tricks, and labeling it entrepreneurship, is what blinds politicians, economists, analysts and others in positions of influence to the fact the financial leech is killing its economic host. However, if these elites did come to see the current constellation of capitalism as problematic, they would be confronted by an immediate and ostensibly irresolvable dilemma: on one hand it is clear that by regulating and injecting long-term patterns of predictability into the processes of capital accumulation, then the lack of mobility and freedom and entrepreneurship would soon lead to the problems of over-accumulation that we discussed earlier; on the other hand, to not regulate efficiently and to not provide for long-term economic sustainability means that the effects can only be very bad indeed for society. In the meantime the tyranny of the algorithm that keeps the world economy and millions of people on the precipice of economic and social collapse goes largely unnoticed. In part this is because we remain collectively in thrall to the supposed wonders of ever faster computing, and in part because such miracles are developed and deployed in secret. However, the narrow tyranny of the algorithm is merely an aspect, or superficial articulation, of the wider tyranny that is neoliberal capitalism. It follows that a social and economic system with no alternatives to challenge it in ways practical or even theoretical is by definition a dictatorship, a dictatorship of speed. And it was Paul Virilio who noted some time ago that the effects of the speed economy go beyond the economic and the social. He argued that: The dictatorship of speed at the limit will increasingly clash with representative democracy (1995). And a polity with neither inclination nor clue as to the fundamental problems of capitalism leaves the rest of us extremely vulnerable. Inevitably, given such a lacunae, it must fall to the social sciences and the humanities (especially political economy) to develop an array of senses that are far more attuned to the nature of capitalist development in space and in time. And so for example, if we look with the temporal perspective it must be taken as significant that the speed of collapse of the banking system is testament to its inherent and growing instability. The current crisis has been frequently linked to the Great Depression that was triggered in 1929. But that took a long and terrible decade before the US and world economy began to recover and only then with the far more terrible reality of the war of 1939 providing the necessary stimulus (Kindleberger, 1973). It must also be taken as significant, then, that the recovery of the finance sector, by contrast, is so rapid, within less than twenty-four months, with the real economy renewal expected in its wake. This recovery (if it does come) will be propagandized by its major beneficiaries as evidence that the system works, and our recent fears will be tranquillized once more by a fresh flood of new cars, new homes and new plasma TVs. Viewed temporally, the volatility created by the dictatorship of the speed economy prefigures only a space-time crisis of accumulation in the near future, when competing algorithms, complexifying instruments and as yet unthought-of concepts, will blow the system open once more. The worrying part of this almost perfectly predictable scenario is that when it comes, our growing and widespread dependence on system acceleration, on free-market competition, and the necessity for the financial sector to devise ever more intricate and comprehensive solutions to irreconcilable contradictions, means that the economic, social and (perhaps portentously) political consequences will be greater. The larger the economic problem, the more it will demand a political solution. The solution to the economic crises of the 1970s was indeed political. However, the decision was anti-political in that it was to allow capitalism to largely run on autopilot with the consequences we see today. The first major economic crisis of the 21st century has thus far had only a half-hearted political response. The elites are still too mesmerized by the idea of market forces and ICTs being the only

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way; and the rest of us have been too dazed by the speed and the shock of the collapse to reflect properly upon the crisis and develop adequate political responses to it. The speed of recovery that I have discussed will have more profound consequences than simply a return to the bonus culture for banking and investment executives. Reflecting upon the speedy return to profit for Britains HSBC and Barclays banks that followed the Wall Street trend, the Guardian Weekly noted that there is a real sense that an opportunity to tighten financial regulation has been missed (Montgomery, 2009). The evanescent moment has passed, in other words, because political institutions can no longer synchronize with a high-speed global economy (Scheuerman, 2004). One suspects that many politicians, in the context of not really knowing what they are doing, and not ideologically predisposed toward fundamental alternatives to neoliberal dynamics anyway, will now shut their eyes, cover their ears, hold their tongues and hope for the best. However, it is doubtful that there will be another 20-year boom based upon cheap money, easy credit and bountiful consumption. The speed of collapse has laid bare the fundamental space-time contradiction of capital accumulation; a contradiction that is only exacerbated by lack of regulation. The crisis next time will arrive sooner and be more devastating than the last. This negative scenario, however, may be the necessary basis of more optimistic outcomes. That is because the next economic crisis will in all likelihood be a deep political crisis too; one of legitimacy for a neoliberal political caste that is finally revealed as both ideologically motivated and economically incompetent. There is of course no way of knowing what the contours and effects of such a crisis of legitimacy will be, but what can be said with more confidence is that it will present another opportunity to replace the one that has just (seemingly) been missed. Accordingly, the most socially and economically hopeful element of the next crisis is that it will constitute the creation of the political space and time within which, and through which, actual alternatives may be posed for the first time since the 1970s. References
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