What is sometimes misunderstood is that though new communication technologies, exemplified by satellite-linked internet cafés in small cities in Africa and South Asia create an equality of access to information at the level of the subject, the socio-structures and cultures of circulation also, and at the same time, engender an objective dependence that inhabits the very conditions of connectivity itself, so that individuals’ acts of subjective freedom are always self-annulling at another and higher level. The conditions of connectivity, which permit someone, living almost anywhere, to download medical information to help diagnosis for a relative in need of medical care, to read a report on human rights and political detainees that the state would better like unread, or to correspond regularly with a friend living overseas, are also the conditions of encompassment and domination by circulatory capital and the infrastructure of the metropole generally.
–Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (2004)
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