Financial liquidity and debt loading are the means of modern sovereign power. A logistical sovereignty of flows superseding borders and national communities[1]. Less a global village, more a mass containerisation where the elements of economic sovereignty (a national currency, bond markets, capital investment, the regulatory environment) are commoditised and exchangeable. The banality of globalisation as a homogenising force is a well-worn tale, whether as global inevitability or a horizon that empire-states are beginning to overcome.

With it comes new elites with a variety of monikers (post-industrial, cosmopolitan, post-national, globalists, jetsetters, etc.) and a new governing architecture with unique logics. The power of speed in the network, a logic of logistics dromoscopic in its event horizon. Senses of distance and time overcame by a science of flows and arrays to monitor them. A point at which descriptions and identities are ephemeral, containerised and prepackaged into discreet variables. The landscape of internet media and credit scoring (Chinese or American) as an intermediary of individuality, if not a creator of it. Mythologies of future financial security, the long-term goal of being debt-free and becoming a fully realised entrepreneur of the self[2].

Financialised mythologies that scale upward from the micro- to the macropolitical. The limitations of a property-owning democracy expand into the politics of an ever-expanding middle class, defying a historiography of collapse and extreme disparity to maintain the post-war dream of mass production and consumption economies. The micro-myths of escaping the debt-stagnation spiral become nationalised as balanced budget proposals and welfare reform, fruitless attempts to reverse state expansion. All the while, private and national indebtedness soar, with these debts becoming tradeable on repo markets to facilitate secondary market liquidity and securitisation. Logistical sovereignty as mythmaking on a global scale, as an unstoppable force of modernity, the progressive curtailment of tribal and national attachments into a post-identity melange of trades, scores, gates and hedging.

If a sovereign is one who decides the exception, then this financial sovereign (a sovereignty of flow over fixity) spreads the exception as a hedge fund spreads its risk. The exception is no longer war or catastrophe, the suspension of legal norms and doctrines to allow for immediate action in the face of imminent threats, but the constant indeterminacy of accessibility/liquidity. If there is not a constant flow of money, immediatised by accelerating fibreoptic connectivity and the heat-space of stacks (taken to extremes with cryptocurrencies), there is crisis. A politics of the business cycle, with its own myths of long-term equilibrium.

Figures like Trump, representing a regression to a populist nationalism predicated on the strength of the sovereign, finds the will to power not as an executive agency but as a disparate series of trades and stock flows disturbed by alternative powerbases. Financial crises and their political implications are nothing new, but the pre-eminence of an industrial state above financial flows (through protectionism, imperialism and colonialism) was an established logic of geopolitics. Logistical geopolitics, or geopolitical logistics (as aspects of sovereignty are themselves turned into exchangeable flows in a matrix of probabilities), is a new sovereign with its own logics.

Limitations, in the form of economic weapons like tariffs and capital controls, political ones like anti-trust policies and executive authority or military ones like nuclear warfare and the information battlespace, are calculable risks that can be subverted via investment strategies. Tariff pauses and deindustrialisation are reflections of financial sovereignty and its placelessness and timelessness. Politics isn’t dead, it’s alive and well as a probabilised space of endpoints and known (un)knowns. What is identity politics and wokeness other than a reflection of indebtedness? If the self is entrepreneurialised, then identity is another configurable part that can be advertised and exchanged. We are all in debt, members of ethereal communities with shifting obligations. The politics of regulation is now the minutes of committees and boardrooms, a corporatised linguistics of specialised knowledge and lobbying efforts.

Financial is itself a limiting word, failing to capture the full panoply of this new sovereignty. It is better described as the sovereignty of the array, constant flows of information through logic gates and security architectures. Mass telesurveillance (both private and public) constructing the outlines of probability spaces/phases. We are accelerating into a slow death future. The growing logics of artificial intelligence only add to this, creating its own powers of description and ascription that further assign positions in a numerological array.

If “Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway”[3], then it is in the moving to a new order defined by the parameters of technocapital, specifically within a matrix of expansive arrays that give the illusion of pre-defined possibilities. Remember, we’ve never had it better. There can be nothing more conservative than the technological will to calculate and hedge. If we are accelerating toward anything, it is a Children of Men future of foreclosed potentials. Moving away from the industrial logics of the Holocaust and Dekulakization to the logistical forms of immigration replacement and a global diaspora of permanent refugees and enforced placelessness.

Hope then becomes violent and chaotic, wishing for the collapse or ultimate accident. “The emergence of the accident to end all accidents, in other words, the traffic of the generalized accident which will then largely outdo the limited traffic accident of the transport revolution”[4]. Accidents following on the back of globalisation, of information superhighways and the ubiquity of international mobility as vectors for disaster. Virilio notes Chernobyl’s global reach parallels information’s same capacity. Modern examples include mass immigration and viruses as accidental vectors, known unknowns that create innate risks. Future accidents could involve the ultimate fragility of the electromagnetic waveband and the chip architecture, or the eventual heat death of landscapes pockmarked by computer stacks and rare mineral refuse.

The acceleration of technocapital does not appear to be the innovative chaosophy of teleoplexic extension, “the wave-length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the cosmic rays”[5]. Rather, a Kurzweilian totality[6] of civilisational expansion through the techonomic singularity of mass surveillance, interface integration and quantum computing confining scalar intelligence to a project of the absolute, encompassing the post-human age. But the absolute is arbitrary, as the integrity of the accident encompasses it, forming the two-faced nature of technological evolution and scaling returns – its evolution always contains its outside. As Virilio states with the accident, the invention of the train invents the train crash. The car invents the pile up. Logistics, and its elemental flows, invent their own outside in the process of their operations – delays, overproduction, mismatching, flash crashes, overvaluation. The only end is disequilibrium, entropic decay as information degrades, pricing formulas fail and systems bifurcate.

Accelerating to the accident is a contradiction in terms. The accident presents the end of acceleration by its nature. To accelerate then is to continue the foreclosure of possibilities, moving toward probabilities[7] and their architectures of calculation, risk tolerance and prediction. Neither is the accident an escape, but rather an opening that can be closed as previous accidents have been integrated into the governing logic. The new sovereigns accelerating up to intelligence maximisation attempt to become masters of the accident, understanding its tolerances and mitigating its potentials by foreshadowing and closing off, expanding the refugee camp, the hyperghetto and the enclosed city as spaces of foreclosure (instantiating a spatiotemporal exile).

Information and logistic flows striate the globe, the extensions of controlled experiments and governing logics. The big bang of finance would be nothing without the sovereign power necessary to deregulate and reformulate the international financial system. There is no end of politics, only its limitation in the probability space. New sovereigns are here and their futurity will be defined by their attempts at order. Whatever is being accelerated toward signals a bifurcation between the human and post-human ages, two forms of chaos born from totalities of control.

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[1] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2022/04/29/the-logistical-state/

[2] Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man

[3] http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

[4] Paul Virilio, Open Sky

[5] Nick Land, Teleoplexy

[6] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

[7] Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I