Intelligent Environments

Abstract

Glossy globalization is the picture of globalization as a benign and inevitable process sweeping unstoppably over the world, with here and there an unwanted side effect that sensible policies arrived at by the exchange of ideas among sensible decision-makers can avoid. Glossy globalization is glossy both in its glossing over of the shadows in the Panglossian picture of globalization it presents and in its concealment of the sources of those shadows. The contrast between the glossy globalization and the existing globalization or the real globalization is striking. This chapter presents a good example of the loaded discourse of the glossy globalization that is taken from the brochure of a recent Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference in Melbourne. The contrast between it and a realistic view of globalization―trying to unpack that term and see what it is really made of―is illuminating. Such a contrast also illuminates the distance between the existing globalization and what might be called “potential globalization”; globalization in the form that it might be envisaged if it were in fact to improve the living conditions of the vast majority of humankind.