Time zones

This is a journal of geography and the central category of Crack-Up Capitalism – the zone – seems to be self-evidently a spatial one. Geographers and sociologists have been on the trail of the zone for decades. The rollout of the Enterprise Zone in Canary Wharf in the early 1980s produced a flurry of work (Harrison, 1982; Harvey, 1994; Massey, 1982) on the politics of what my book calls the “perforation” of administrative space. The alter-globalization movement, with No Logo being only the most prominent (Klein, 1999), regularly singled out Export-Processing Zones for their abusive labor practices and evasion of environmental oversight (Neveling, 2015). The anti-sweatshop movement targeted maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexican border and shone a light on EPZs such as those in Jamaica memorably depicted in Stephanie Black’s documentary, Life and Debt (2001).

Scholars watching the liberalization and opening up of China homed in on the importance of the Special Economic Zone (Cartier, 2002; Chung et al., 2001) with the territorial concept of “neoliberalism as exception” (Ong, 2006) taking analytic pride of place. The idea of the SEZ as a “cloned” version of Singapore (Carter, 2003; Ortmann and Thompson, 2020) and Hong Kong (Peck et al., 2023; Zhou, 2021) opened lines of inquiry into what did and did not – or could not – be transported from one site to another. Scholars studied “African Shenzhen” (Brautigam and Xiaoyang, 2011), “Korean Tigers in Honduras” (Martin and Geglia, 2019), the “multiplication of Hong Kongs” (Ebner and Peck, 2022) and proposed The Zone (capitalized) as the paradigmatic late modern space (Bach, 2011) . Already by the 2010s, “zone fever” in academia had escalated enough to prompt a backlash (Cartier, 2018). Anthropologists, in particular, cautioning against exaggerating the real-world effects of zoning technologies (Cross, 2010). One should not offer too much novelty, they warned, to what was just the latest version of expropriation (Levien, 2013).

Scholarly interest in the zone may have peaked in the 2010s with the publication of Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft (Easterling, 2014) and a volume on “Learning from Shenzhen” (O'Donnell et al., 2016). The zone certainly did not feel like a fresh idea in the wake of the political ruptures of 2016 which seemed to be about almost everything but 1990s-style political economy. But I had a hunch that there was a subterranean connection to what was being called the “backlash against globalization” and the paradigmatic vessels of 1990s-style hyperglobalization. What was being described as a return to 1930s-style nationalist protectionism looked to me more like an acceleration of jurisdictional competition within as well as between nations. The stocking of Trump’s advisory staff with veterans of neoliberal think tanks gave strength to this suspicion and the fact that his only real legislative accomplishment was a colossal tax cut confirmed that the playbook was not fundamentally different from what preceded it. As I ended up describing in my chapter on Murray Rothbard and the neo-confederates, many of the more outré political forms like the alt-right also had genealogies that linked earlier projects of decentralization and secession.

My initial hope for Crack-Up Capitalism was to show how the politics of the rejuvenated far right was grafting onto politics of the zone in undiagnosed ways. Given the size of the already existing scholarly literature, I took for granted I could work from a baseline knowledge of the zone in some of its most familiar manifestations. But one of the experiences of writing a trade book is being told by a trade editor what “we” (the imaginary average non-fiction reader) know and don’t know. My editor informed me that the zone was still an unknown geography to most. Therefore, as an obedient author, one of the functions of the book became an attempted synthesis of the work of the many scholars before me. In this effort, I was traveling with other historians of the zone, who have begun to focus variously on libertarian exit (Craib, 2022), tax havenry (Ogle, 2017), warehouses (Orenstein, 2019), ports (Khalili, 2020), and urban development (Wetherell, 2016).

I require little persuasion to indulge my tendency to be (as one geographer teased me) “a wannabe geographer.” This is why I found it intriguing when fellow historian Miranda Johnson called me back to the special topic of our shared discipline: time rather than space. In ways not entirely spelled out in the book, the zone is attractive to market radicals and everyday practitioners of global capitalism not just because it is out of space but because it is out of time.

To transform a patch of national territory into a zone is to self-consciously bleach out and strip it of those claims that a particular population might have on it. It is also, a bit less obviously, to remove it from “the world” – or an encompassing planetary space to which humanity at large might have some kind of claim. Making zones is a self-conscious process of making spaces without history.

Looking at zones in terms of time reminds us how some of the more creative thinkers in the libertarian tradition saw the zone not only as outside of history but as a potential wormhole back to a previous era. Johnson writes of this as an ahistoric move that seeks to claim a kind of reactionary version of coevalness. I accept this insight but would ask whether it’s less a rejection of historicity and more an embrace of prehistoricity. Those who discover usable pasts in the zone tend to go back to before the modern era and its pernicious categories of popular sovereignty, national self-determination, and perhaps the biggest one – the “s word” – not socialism but society as such.

Indigenous forms of organization are attractive to zone enthusiasts because, in the older, unreconstructed anthropological mode, they are seen as frozen versions of life and rules that supposedly persisted through the disruptions of the modern era. The fixation of Spencer McCallum and Michael van Notten on the Somali herders followed a tradition of interest by I. M. Stone, E.E. Evans-Pritchard and others in the people of the Horn of Africa. Critics of development theory and modernization, including Mont Pelerin Society members Sally Herbert Frankel and Peter Bauer were similarly drawn to this form of what they saw as self-organization without the interference of the centralizing or tax collecting state (Cornelissen, 2023; Toye, 2009).

If we think of zones this way, not so much as spatial zones, but as time zones, a new way of understanding the pixelated decentralization of politics comes into view. By explicit intention, the zone is designed to punch people out of a shared horizon or a space of capture in the quintessentially modern metrics of per capita growth or standard of living. The zone is a better iconic scale for the end of history in the grand sense than the nation or even the world in its sloughing off the injunctions of mass politics and the promise that a “rising tide lifts all boats.” We have a tradition of political demands within the nation and the level of the globe. But the temporality of zones intentionally disrupts coevality. The Open Zone map reproduced at the beginning of Crack-Up Capitalism is intended by its cartographers at the Adrianople Group consultancy as a kind of handbook for investors or manufacturer seeking to outsource but is also a map of a new kind of time, the one produced by the era of high globalization and only partially open to central coordination.

This vision of multi-temporality was very much a topic of conversation in the 1990s that my book seeks to historicize. One of the better-known examples is the journalist Robert Kaplan who, while speaking of “the coming anarchy” forecast an “epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged glass pattern of city-states, shanty states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms.” Francis Fukuyama had borrowed “the Last Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche to describe post-historical subjectivity. Kaplan proposed a “Last Map,” three-dimensional and holographic: “In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop the merely two-dimensional color markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving ‘centers’ of power, as in the Middle Ages.”

“This future map,” he concluded, “will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.” (Kaplan, 1994). The goal of Kaplan’s map, described in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, was to contain and control the chaos. The Last Map recalled the oversized maps of Cold War thrillers from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to WarGames (1983). It had another echo in the Japanese anime mega-hit of the 1990s, Neon Genesis Evangelion. The series is set in 2015 in Tokyo-3, the site of the headquarters of the military wing of the United Nations, NERV. Their command center features its own Last Map in three dimensions, attentive to the arrival of invading alien “Angels.”

The Last Map’s vision of anarchy was dystopian – a future to be avoided at any cost. Bruce Sterling’s novel Islands in the Net (1988) featured a global simulation called Worldrun, used “as a forecasting tool for development agencies” which was also a game. In the interface, “long strips of the Earth’s surface peeled by in a simulated satellite view. Cities glowed green with health or red with social disruption.” This is the dominant perspective one gets from the volumes on current events that fill airport bookshelves: documentation of the anxieties of those who perceive themselves to have access to the levers of power, those who need to figure out how the dials can be tweaked to return order from disorder, the grievances of the mapmakers. Implicitly and often explicitly, panic over disintegration is a proxy call for the reassertion of American dominance. In a phrase he would repeat variations of for decades, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1988 that “the only alternative to America is anarchy” (Brzezinski, 1988).

So these are indeed capitalist strategies as Melinda Cooper points out, but the exit is not just a terrestrial one. Rather the zone is an exit from a shared timeline. As the literature on combined and uneven development always reminds us, capitalism works through arbitrage across different time scales. Whether it’s Neil Vallelly’s quaint village on the New Zealand coast being used for its charm and out-of-time status or sites of low-paid work cast as somehow more rudimentary even if their underdevelopment has been actively produced by state policies as I describe in my chapter on Bantustans, the goal is the same: inter-temporal arbitrage.

After I had begun drafting this response, the heir to a multibillion dollar fortune who read Crack-Up Capitalism remarked to me that he had also been thinking of my book in terms of time zones. For him, the prime example was the use by ultrawealthy families such as his own of dynasty trusts which allow large amounts of money to be kept from taxation until they vest some time in what can be the very distant future. Over the last few decades, states in the U.S. have competed with each other to offer longer and longer timelines. Twenty-one years stretched to ninety-nine years and in Wyoming and Florida, to 999. In South Dakota and Delaware, there is no limit: trusts can last forever. Forbes called this “providing for the year 3000” (Turrettini, 2001). This struck me as perfect supporting evidence for the zone’s charisma to both the speculative-minded science fiction fan and the plutocrat – and the many brokers that traffic between them. As my interlocutor put it, the zone is being used to buy the future.