Concluding thoughts - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 216

same way as modernity linearized time; similarly, railroads, steamships, and
automobiles, inter alia , generated transport surfaces that were remarkably
ubiquitous. At scales ranging from the local to the global, the surfaces of
modernity unfolded with predictable regularity. This notion found its way
into the discourses of social science, particularly geography and urban plan-
ning, during the post-WWII boom, in which spatial relations tended to be
portrayed in static, geometric terms (e.g., isotropic planes).
Postmodern capitalism, that unplanned child of the 1970s crisis of Fordism,
was marked by many things, but above all by the digitization of information
made possible by the computer. High-technology post-Fordist regions sprang
up to facilitate networks of creativity and innovation, rede ning the industrial

geography of production. Overnight, in historical terms, a vast network of
telecommunications arose, linking millions, then billions, of people instant-
aneously, most explicitly through the Internet. For many, the virtual and the
real have become so shot through with one another as to be di

fi

cult to dis-
tinguish. Similarly, television, whose universal appeal is undeniable, sedated
and homogenized billions with its bland diet of pabulum, generating a global
simulacrum in which fantasy and reality blur to the point of becoming essen-
tially synonymous. With a seamless network of

fi fiber optic lines in place, the

globalization of finance, which concerns the most mobile of commodities—

money—deepened and accelerated. Functions that continued to require face-
to-face “buzz” (Storper and Venables 2004) centralized in global cities, while
low-wage services (e.g., back of

fi

ces) began a series of decentralizing spirals
much as branch plants in manufacturing had done a generation earlier. With
capital achieving unprecedented hypermobility, class war on a global basis,
the crux of neoliberalism, pitted people of di

erent communities against one
another in an unending race to the bottom that annihilated the Keynesian
state. Flows of capital and information across national borders—but not
labor—as well as the gradual emergence of transnational mechanisms of
governance gradually eroded the Westphalian system of nation-states and,
in the process, give rise to new, as yet not well understood, geographies of
power.
In contrast with the surfaces of modernity, postmodern capitalism gave
birth to complex geographies in which proximity and transport costs played
relatively marginal or even insigni

ff

cant roles. The airplane, satellites, televi-
sion, and telecommunications, including the Internet, for example, steadily
led to forms of social interaction in which physical distance was rendered
irrelevant. The result has been a series of convoluted landscapes marked by
wormholes, tunnels, and other omens of enormous time-space compres-
sion, complicated spatialities of which globalization is the dominant but by
no means only indication. Postmodernism, it would appear, has elevated
Leibnizian relative space to an historically unprecedented level of signifi-

fi

-
cance. Such a transition in no way indicates that “geography has become
obsolete,” only that the meanings of space (and time) have changed, as they
have done so many times in the past.

fi