Whether it originates from statistical tabulation or remote sensors, whether it flows in real time or out of recombinant databases, whether it serves the needs of private individuals, globe-spanning corporations or government agencies, information visualization is the operative technology of the networked age, a language of vision for the control society. Infoviz proliferates on the screens of factory workstations, financial trading floors, military commands and surveillance watchspots, everywhere that decisive movements are subject to managerial scrutiny.

In 2007 the conservative English historian Niall Ferguson and co-author Moritz Schularick wrote an article entitled 'Chimerica' and the Global Asset Market Boom, in International Finance, 10:3. A new text by Hung Ho-Fung gives a lot more depth to their analysis.

About four years ago, after the disastrous US elections in 2004, a group of us meeting at 16 Beaver Street in New York launched the idea of Continental Drift. The hypothesis: a coming "tectonic" shift in the geopolitical system, precipitated by the mismanagement of neoliberal globalization under the Bush-Blair regime. What we saw on the horizon was some kind of collapse of dollar hegemony -- "hegemoney," as Arrighi puts it -- and the rise of a multipolar order, with new possibilities and challenges for grassroots egalitarian movements around the world.