Communication, Synchronicity and Counter-Power

Abstract

Part IV provided a bleak diagnosis of global capitalism. National, international and transnational attempts to resolve the global financial crisis helped to re-establish the preconditions for another such crisis. Time conflicts which were constitutive of financialized capitalism, national and pan-regional economies, worker exploitation and social exclusion were reproduced. And, crucially, the interrelatedness of these conflicts was tightened. Thus, the detemporalized presentism of the financial markets also afflicted those governments caught between the requirements of debt servicing and the forced conditionalities of austerity policies. The effects of such policies throughout many countries, along with the worldwide repercussions of the financial crisis itself, swelled the number of coevally unrecognized others within informal social economies. Subcontracted labour within global supply chains remained subjected to the real-time–clock time tourniquet of Taylorist production. On this account, the crisis of global capitalism derives precisely from the incapacity of financial, corporate-transnational and national elites to create new ways of understanding the global circumstances which prevail. Publicly thematizing the recurring pathologies of financialized and global capitalism seems to be precluded by the mediations of real-time enabled by global television, internet platforms and, more recently, social media networking.