Geopolitical Arbitrage¶
… things will get very ugly in London when the Square Mile and investment banking sector ups and decamps for Frankfurt, leaving the service sector and multiethnic urban poor behind.
The specifics of this prediction are nutty, if only because mainland Europe is going down the tubes much faster than the UK, but the abstract anxiety is spot on. The globalization of the right is entirely about geopolitical arbitrage (while that of the left is about homogenizing global governance). All the critical trends point towards the exacerbation of the ‘problem’. The 21st century is the epoch of fragmentation — unlike anything seen since the early modern period — shifting power to the footloose, and away from megapolitical systems of territorial dominion. Being left behind is the rising threat, and we can confidently expect to see it consolidating as the subtext of all leftist grievance. You can’t just leave. Watch.
The obstacles to geopolitical arbitrage — i.e. spatial Exit pressure — are security constraints. It requires defensible off-shore bases (and Frankfurt most certainly isn’t going to provide one). Eyes need to be fixed firmly on secessionary dynamics (fragmentation), techno-commercial decentralization of hard security, crypto-anonymization, artificial intelligence, and the emergence of capital outposts in the Western Pacific region. More exotic factors include opportunities for radical exodus (undersea, Antarctic, and off-planet), facilitated by territorial production (artificial islands). The machinery of capture needs to keep all of these escape routes firmly suppressed in order to perpetuate itself. That simply isn’t going to happen.
Capital is learning faster than its adversaries, and has done so since it initially became self-propelling, roughly half a millennium ago. It’s allergic to socialism (obviously), and tends to flee places where socialist influence is substantially greater than zero. Unless caged definitively, eventually it breaks out. Over the next few decades — despite ever deeper encryption — it should become unmistakable which way that’s going.