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Global governance after the analog age: the world after media piracy

This chapter emerged after Craig Calhoun, former President of the SSRC (New York) and current head of the LSE, initiated a series of workshops on the implications of the global financial crisis. A series of well-known global scholars across the disciplines reflected on the structural and governance issues in the world system following the financial crisis. Scholars who contributed chapters included Immanuel Wallerstein, Saskia Sassen, Fernando Coronil, Craig Calhoun and others. Sundaram contributed the media chapter for the volume. He suggests that the global crisis and the events of September radically transformed the relationship between the spheres designated as that of the media and that of the social, a model that had existed since the coming of celluloid in the early 20th century. Sundaram’s essay looks at what he calls the crisis of the ‘analog age’, dominated by Hollywood and large horizontal media infrastructures, and the link to US power. He looks at the high point of this era and the slow decline in the late 1970s, after the US defeat in Vietnam resulted in production sites moving outside the US. The emergence of video led to proliferating media ecologies outside the authorised sites of distribution and exhibition that Hollywood had depended on. After video, media piracy became a constituent part of the global debate on sovereignty, leading to wars of enforcement and evasion. Sundaram’s essay maps the links between sovereignty, media technology and the post crisis constellation. This volume includes papers by leading scholars in the field of the social sciences and has circulated widely.