The city of cognitive–cultural capitalism

Allen Scott's theorization of “cognitive-cultural capitalism” is a landmark contribution that situates today's urban-economic transformations in the long history of capitalist frontiers of uneven development. Yet Scott is a bit too cautious, too deferential to the monster he's mapped. In this essay, I develop a more critical analysis of cognitive-cultural capitalism as the co-evolutionary culmination of planetary urbanization and technological change, in a ‘noosphere of neoliberalization.’ A new social physics is under construction with the planetary commodification and colonization of the global attention span.