Editor's Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons

Abstract

How Liquidare We? the Metaphors Defining Contemporary world systems can be thrillingly fluid. Dark pools is the mysterious term financial traders use to describe outsize transactions hidden from ordinary investors. Liquid modernity describes a post-Fordist world where the site-intensive factory machinery and fixed capital of “heavy modernity” dissolve into outsourcing, batch production, and hypermobile capital (Bauman 1-90). Arjun Appadurai defines global “flows” as forces of transglobal acculturation and communication that exceed the boundaries of localities and states: a metaphor that supersedes the core-periphery model (which imagines sharp cultural differences between haves and have-nots). Global flows invites scholars to reconceptualize far-flung geographies as multiply connected via techno-, media-, idea-, ethno-, and finance-scapes (6-7).