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We conceptualize the global political city as having emerged through the sudden, rapid, interactive transformations in technology, society, and geopolitics that have been reconfiguring the world since the late 1970s, radically changing the systemic role of global cities within that worldwide system. This sea change toward a paradigm within which city political events are both more integrated with and more consequential for global affairs has occurred through a holistic, discontinuous transformation of geography and geopolitics, and has been facilitated by technological and financial change as well as geopolitical peace. There have been many similar transformations across world history, such as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Other important technology-driven transformations have included the agricultural revolution, the nuclear age, and the space age, although these transformations did not take place in times of geopolitical peace. Few if any of these transformations have been more sweeping or momentous than the one unfolding today.

The global political city, as we conceive it, has evolved through a multidimensional, holistic political-economic transformation much broader than the “connectivity” increases recently emphasized by popular authors.⁴ This sea change behind the wholesale emergence of global political cities involves three interrelated and equally important dimensions: the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution, financial transformation, and geopolitical change. This transformational triad of key causal relationships, and the resulting profile of the sea change behind the rise of global political cities, are presented in figure 3-1. In aggregate, this multifaceted sea change resembles the “Shock of the Global” that Niall Ferguson and fellow historians have identified in global political-economic transformations of the 1970s.⁵

The digital revolution that has fostered the synergistic fusion of high-speed computing and high-volume, long-distance communication, together with vastly accelerated flows of globally consequential information, lies at the heart of post–mid-1970s global transformations. Its effects were magnified by the synergistic emergence during the 1980s and 1990s of increasingly global capital markets. The development of those markets benefited greatly from high-speed, high-capacity computation and telecommunications. This most recent global reconfiguring also included a geopolitical dimension—for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China, which are only indirectly related to technology.

Figure 3-1. The Anatomy of Sea Change (1975–1995)

Source: Author’s illustration.

The following details testify to the momentous scale and explosive spread of the digital transformation:

 In the late 1980s, less than 1 percent of the world’s technologically stored information was in digital format. This proportion grew to 94 percent by 2007, and 99 percent by 2014.6

 The world’s capacity to store information increased by almost 200,000 percent between 1986 and 2014.7

 Internet use grew from 0.05 percent of the world population in 1990 to 48.6 percent in 2017. Mobile cellular subscriptions also experienced a discontinuous change in the mid-1990s, rising from nothing to more than 102 subscriptions per 100 people in 2017.8

The sea change of the past three decades is a critical juncture of historic importance for global cities, decisively enhancing their capacities as it simultaneously erodes the dominance of the nation-state. The sea change in information flows and their geo-economic consequences is profoundly influenced by the ICT revolution just described, yet transcends ICT alone.⁹ Global political cities have profoundly geopolitical as well as techno-economic antecedents.

The story begins in the late 1970s, a period of uncommon socioeconomic importance, at the very dawn of late twentieth-century globalization.¹⁰ Geostrategic imperatives of the nuclear age, including a costly missile race and a tense confrontation in Central Europe over Pershing missile deployment, enhanced the central political importance of the nation-state at the time. Meanwhile, however, historic changes in technology and finance during the 1970s and 1980s were quietly eroding the political-economic foundations on which that seemingly vital nation-state dominance rested.

Much has been written about the ICT revolution itself, which allows people around the world to communicate much more rapidly and intensely than ever before. Many of the revolution’s implications for specific sectors have been considered individually. Yet the holistic and discontinuous nature of the historic global changes of the past three decades—and their links to both geopolitical transformation in world affairs and to global finance—have gotten less attention. It is these holistic, discontinuous, and geopolitically-linked dimensions of technological change, and their impact on the political-economic role of information, that we explore in this chapter by examining the relationships among the information revolution, financial reform, and geopolitical change to capture the interdisciplinary determinants of the global political city.