Decades ago, I read: “The world is an anarchy of nation-states.”
The nation-state has, hitherto, been the largest formalised grouping of people. This has now changed, with both consumer & ‘social’ networks. Nation-state networks, hitherto, coordinated consumer, pre-internet ‘social’, & Corporate, networks; this coordination function is now shifting, to an indeterminate ‘state’, interstitial to all three.
The anxiety of this shift, is causing a lot of attention-seeking, in all of those networks; as they attempt to secure positions of imagined dominance, usually by replaying the nostalgic cultural detritus of histories of perceived authoritarian success. Such nostalgic replays are, of course, the dream-stuff of advertising & propaganda, & it is this oneiric substance which is being accelerated, now through all networks, not just through those of commerce & entertainment. The acceleration enabled by public elctronic networks, accelerates the fluxions of desire, leading to a libidinal directness obviating alienating mediations through the archaic convolutions of administration belonging to past cultures of political specularity. ‘High Frequency Trading’, begets ‘High Frequency Politics’, with concurrent loss of depth considerations that could effectively question any systematics of production concerning this festival of accelerations.
The Occident is getting the ‘world order’ it deserves, the mundane mirror it cannot bear to look at, the demonic reflection it accelerates away from.