2008

Sassen Saskia

New York City's Two Global Geoghraphies of Talk

http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte./book_sassen.pdf

Scritto per l'evento NYTE - New York Talk Exchange Two 24-hour geographies.

Both are actually rolling, but one is the same actors as they move across the globe, the other is a geography of countries of origin, a roving talk machine that moves across the globe. They capture globalization in action – talking. Global talk happens largely among those at the top of the economy and at its lower end. This point is one of the striking pieces of evidence coming out of the data analyzed here. The vast middle layers of our society are far less global; the middle talks mostly nationally and locally, albeit in highly variable geographies. Occuring at the top is increasingly, though not fully, a permanent twenty-four hours of talking, with rapidly shrinking ‘nights.’ This is the network of the forty or so global cities around the world where financial instruments are traded, new accounting models devised, mergers and acquisitions executed, and new ways of extracting profit invented. Traders today start at 04.00 or go on until midnight in some parts of the world so as to catch the end or the beginning of the day on the other side of the globe. The idea of the 24-hour financial center, awake and ready to trade with the whole world, took much longer to take shape than forecasters expected. In fact, it is still only a partial reality. But night-time as downtime is definitely a much shorter part of the 24-hour cycle than it used to be. And daytime as the time when all systems are going is definitely a brutally extended part of the cycle.