That is why the issue of debt relief necessarily raises historical and political questions about the way such debts have been contracted, enforced, and unequally imposed across whole societies and the whole world. There is, to say the least, always a disparity between the official parties who contract debts and the multitude of people who try to live under the burdens of sovereign indebtedness. In the contemporary global economy, indebtedness should not be viewed as the accidental product of bad luck or poor planning: as we have seen, it functions everywhere as a regime of top-down control and network discipline, designed to replace older forms of social negotiation and political autonomy. As this regime becomes entrenched, every dimension of social life will be restructured according to the wishes of the creditors and their local enforcers, rationing access to everything from work and education to clean water and air, subjecting every component of the local economy to increasingly direct pressures from the global markets. [...]

[...] More people did indeed receive anti-retroviral drugs than before, because the US government brokered a patent-protection deal with the Big Pharma companies. Surely this strategy has its costs. Should we count the number of people “saved” by the pro-patent approach against the number of people who might have been saved if the patents had simply been broken by the endangered countries? And who can quantify the damage done by narrowly moralizing public health campaigns? As long as the standard of performance begins with “better than nothing,” there will always be a semblance of progress even if nothing really changes. But it is difficult to celebrate the number of people “alive today” because of President Bush’s policies—which is Bono’s constant refrain—without asking whether more people might be alive if different priorities had prevailed. Or to put it another way: whenever a superpower trumpets the lives it has saved in one place, it is absolutely necessary to ask about the lives it has taken elsewhere.

the impression that there is only one way to address global poverty (let’s call it messianic neoliberalism)

From moment to moment, television has an ineluctable way of making connections, sometimes surprising and sometimes not surprising at all.

The so-called Washington Consensus, confidently enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and other economic institutions since the 1970s, has been comprehensively challenged from within the ranks of its own practitioners.

It is hard to avoid the impression that the “new paradigm” is essentially the same as the old one, now pursuing global free market restructuring in the name of morality rather than economic efficiency. [...] Above all Sachs wants to argue that the end of poverty can be accomplished without diminishing, let alone threatening, the accumulation regime organized by the rich world. Thus the accent of guilt has been switched from the past to the future: the rich should no longer feel guilty about the historical processes that brought about impoverishment and suffering, because that had nothing to do with the accumulation of their wealth, but they should henceforth feel responsible for ameliorating the suffering of others, because their security demands it and, in a pinch, their surplus can afford it.

In order to start thinking about the relationship between indebted- ness, visibility, and space, we can turn to an essay by Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies” (1990).