Global power deliberately dismantles rooted community bonds to stay fluid and invincible

Evidence

Unless it is acting to remove hindrances to circulation, national and democratic political steering is, on the one hand, too time consuming and, on the other, incurs transaction costs and friction losses at the borders and thus functions as a brake on the hyperaccelerated circulation processes of global networks. These “fluid” networks are in turn certainly not free of relations of power and domination, although they embody a similarly fluid, depersonalized form of power. Zygmunt Bauman conjectures that, in order to guarantee the free flow of these “global powers,” the political project of globalization intentionally disintegrates all spatially and temporally bound communal social bonds, i.e., those located beyond the space of streams and timeless time: “For power to be free to flow, the world must be free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints. Any dense and tight network of social bonds, and particularly a territorially rooted tight network, is an obstacle to be cleared out of the way. Global powers are bent on dismantling such networks for the sake of their continuous and growing fluidity, that principle source of their strength and the warrant of their invincibility.” — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 595

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is the dismantling of social bonds properly attributed to capitalist flow or to something more like a preference for weak ties in networks — worth chasing against Granovetter?
• XREF: Bauman’s deliberate dissolution of rooted networks for power’s fluidity recalls ch15’s claim that the national state flipped from acceleration engine to braking obstacle. — connects to: Bauman’s liquid metaphor captures how modern institutions dissolve into time-governed flows — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 571; Chronopolitics makes control of rhythm a core instrument of domination. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 96; A colonial power deliberately destroyed trust relations to sustain political control. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 836 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• A colonial power deliberately destroyed trust relations to sustain political control. #exemplifies (0.92) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 836