Society, Culture, Economy International

Weekly dispatches reading the news through a critical-theory lens — geopolitics, economics & culture, in plain language. Free newsletter ↓

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🧶 To buy an object of craft is not to buy a mere relic or a diplomatic token. We stand on a coastline where the weight of human labor and historical continuity still resists the leveling currents of a weightless century.

Full dispatch: https://t.co/SiTCK8mp50

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🏺 Under late liberalism, globalization's dominant script was one of radical dematerialization—value migrating entirely upward into speculative finance, intellectual property, and proprietary algorithms. But that consensus runs aground on real chokepoints, broken canals, and fragile coastlines.

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

💻 Artisan labor along strategic trade corridors is increasingly concentrated in designated economic zones and Creative Cities. The digital interfaces promising direct access ultimately replicate old brokers—extracting data, taxing margins, and enforcing proprietary terms.

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🇻🇳 In a quiet northern Vietnamese village, a wooden handloom clatters, throwing raw silk thread across a warp that has survived three political regimes. This physical craft is a geoeconomic currency challenging the weightless hegemony of financial capitalism, digital media, and disembodied spectacle.

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🚢 The fantasy of a weightless digital capitalism inevitably runs aground on concrete geography. Algorithmic trade and silicon supply chains remain bound to physical maritime chokepoints. Sovereignty is dictated by the coastline. https://t.co/EH7hIcwoeV

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🏛️ Algae on the Lincoln Memorial and the volatility of tech markets expose the same structural truth—spectacle is not maintenance. Late liberalism decays from the edges when we neglect the physical substrate. https://t.co/ioErN9XteE

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

📜 Modern trade agreements are not mere legal documents—they are operational codes writing geopolitics. Behind the talk of open markets stands a system of tribute, where sovereignty is written in critical minerals. https://t.co/FVk40phbIS

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

📉 Greenspan's monument was never a policy but a reflex — the market's faith that someone always catches the fall. He dies as the Put expires, into a world with no guaranteed floor. Moral hazard was late liberalism's last social contract.

https://t.co/P19X0JV3OA
https://t.co/U2O9BQoL57

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

Alan Greenspan passes at 100.

Leaving behind a Federal bailout machine where bankers get the profits, taxpayers get the losses, and plebs get to dumpster-dive for groceries.

The only fix is a bank purge that makes 2008 look like a picnic.

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🏺 From Mariachi bands to gallium supply chains—global trade is not written in free-market laws, but in hidden, technogeopolitical agreements. Contracts function as secret codes of modern empire. The treaty is the code that writes the machine.

https://t.co/W3Uxe35gvU

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🌊 Weightless transactions run aground on real coastlines—the reality that geographic chokepoints govern global architecture. Data cannot outrun deep water. Sovereignty remains maritime.

https://t.co/JwZJnHI1wC

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🖥️ The server farm is the modern cathedral. We worship not the digital, but the infrastructure of neon spectacle—the last faith late liberalism has left to build.

https://t.co/XsmdR1Zmve

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

📉 The 'Greenspan put' was never policy — it was theology: the faith that the state would always catch the market before it hit the ground. He dies as that faith expires. Moral hazard was the cathedral late liberalism built. https://t.co/adh4wSLWxX https://t.co/ks3FYpE6aI

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

Alan Greenspan passes at 100.

Leaving behind a Federal bailout machine where bankers get the profits, taxpayers get the losses, and plebs get to dumpster-dive for groceries.

The only fix is a bank purge that makes 2008 look like a picnic.

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🌊 Geography always reasserts itself over the projection of power — whether in a green Washington pool, a strategic chokepoint, or the cost of capital.

Full dispatch: https://t.co/wR7ENYhswF

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

🏛️ A walk past the Lincoln Memorial reveals a surreal spectacle: a $16.4M no-bid renovation has left the Reflecting Pool peeling, blooming with green algae, and patrolled by the National Guard. Geopolitics is rarely about grand strategy — it is about the decay of maintenance.

[Society, Culture, Economy International @sceinternatnl]

⚽ Lionel Messi sets Men's World Cup records while data annotators in Manila manually feed the neural networks. The spectacle of the core relies entirely on the invisible, exploited precarity of the periphery. Late liberalism operates on a substrate it refuses to see.