Above all, when neoliberalism is reduced to economic policy or rationality, it blinds us to three tectonic shifts in the organization and consciousness of space that both spur certain political reactions today and organize the theater in which they occur. The first of these shifts is the lost horizon of the nation-state consequent to globalization. From capital flows to immigrant flows, from digital networks to supply chains, the world has invaded the nation, weakening its borders and its sovereignty, redistributing production and consumption, and transforming the existential conditions and prospects of every kind of population—rural, suburban, and urban. If this shift has incited rancor against both new immigrants and the politics and politicians held responsible for allowing them into the West, it is also producing a divide between those accommodating the shift and those furiously rebelling against it.

The second spatial shift involves the neoliberal destruction of the social discussed in chapter 2. As neoliberalism dissolves that sphere into a market order, on the one hand, and a familial one, on the other, the space of civic equality and concern with the common good that democracy requires disappears. At the same time, the rise of the digital generates a novel, radically deterroritalized and dedemocratized sociality. This sociality features no clear protocols of power sharing, enfranchisement, or commitment to negotiating diverse views and needs, inclusion, or plurality. Whatever their merits, digitalized “societies” are detached from the challenge of sharing power equally in order to rule ourselves. They may have other democratizing potentials, but they are not themselves substitutes for democratic practices and the political equality they require.

The third spatial shift pertains to the rise of finance capital and the modality of value that it ushers into the world. Multinational corporations and global assembly lines of post-Fordism already challenged the visibility and tangibility of capital ownership and control. However, the vaporous powers of finance, which rule everything, but live nowhere, are akin to a Copernican revolution for subjectivity in relation to the powers making and governing the world. Indeed, just as the round earth cannot be seen, but can be known only deductively, through its effects, rule by finance involves a transformation of spatial consciousness that paradoxically hinges on the despatialization of power as such, not only the deterritorialization identified with globalization in its early decades.