Control is another way of examining power. Power is not exclusively an overt, recognizable form of violence, although it can be. Control encompasses the subtleties of culture and social organization in the exercise of power. Economic understandings of control frame it as an obstacle to the free flow of money, goods or people within capitalism.

The radical French philosopher Gilles Deleuze introduced the notion of a ‘society of control’ that emerged under capitalism in the late twentieth century. While at first this may sound Orwellian, Deleuze was interested in how social power was increasingly operating not through centralized ‘disciplinary’ institutions (militaries, police, schools, factories) but through decentralized networks, creeping through society like a ‘spirit or a gas’. Deleuze pointed specifically to the coercive power of debt and credit markets as a prime example: here power is exercised not through outright coercion but through the way it entraps its targets into exploitative and extractive relationships. Debt and credit are enforced not by some single bureaucracy or authority but by many different institutions at once (banks, retailers, credit bureaus, landlords etc.) and also by the indebted subject themselves as they endure shame, guilt and anxiety that shapes their actions. In a society of control, then, financial power operates from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The two chapters in this part challenge this established notion by expanding control to think about capitalism's built environment, which forms part of the techniques of control that modify the behaviour of society. Just think of the symbolic power of global financial centres as a specific built environment: clusters of high-rises that stand above those on the ground and dominate the skyline of the ‘global city’ (for further discussion see Aalbers 2009; Sassen 2002). Steel-and-glass towers are at once the illusion of frictionless transactions and as well an established landmark of permeance. Indeed, the building of the bourse, or exchange, was an important element of the history of building the global financial infrastructure (see Crosthwaite et al. 2014; Flandreau 2016).

Part VII examines more closely the obscure architecture that materially houses the abstract symbolic power of equity and credit. In economics or business studies, finance has no location of historical infrastructure; rather, finance is abstract capital or market of exchange. As Miranda Joseph (2014) examines in her excellent book Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism, the abstract financial balance sheet acts as a moral register of social value. Thinking about the control that financial institutions have in the present day, much of it is derived from the balance sheet. For example, the balance sheet is the frame for justifying the monitoring and surveillance capacities of financial institutions to know the incomings and outgoings of all account holders. A historical example is the building of the stock exchange as a physical space for financial trading of ownership claims across a globalizing colonial empire. Starting with the location of finance allows the chapters in Part VII to follow the trail of social control via logics and iconic market representations.

Laura Kalba (Chapter 18), in ‘The shape of the stock exchange is shapelessness’, disrupts the presumed histories of spaces at the centre of financing colonial expansion as qualitatively different than the present day. Rather, this chapter offers a succinct account of how the London Stock Exchange, at its physical creation as a marketplace, forged a space permissive of violence and promoting extraction. Crucially, the chapter locates the London Stock Exchange at the heart of financing colonial extraction and redistributing the wealth gains. In sharp contrast to the popular view of British finance as being ‘gentlemanly’ – compared to the American ‘wild West’ – it demonstrates the violent colonial extraction that built the stock exchange in the first place. As Kalba notes: ‘in the case of the stock exchange at least, violence was not simply a side-effect of financialization; it was inherent to how the marketplace operated’. By locating finance in the stock exchange Kalba makes clear that finance is not deterritorialized or disembodied, which means that we can find the Stock Exchange on Google Maps and there will be people there making it function. As Kalba says, ‘The everyday, aggressively laddish behaviour of stock exchange members at once reflected and refracted, all the while officially disavowing, the violence associated with the forcible extraction of labour, land and resources overseas.’ Importantly, the stock exchange is a powerful cultural symbol of economic self-interest and of wealth that writes the rules, one that resonates in everyday life to permit excessive extraction.

Jacquelene Drinkall (Chapter 19), in ‘Data Centre Séance: telepathic surveillance capitalism, psychic debt and colonialism’, examines the transactional symbolic violence of data surveillance and harvesting by the information and communication technology machinery of modern finance. High-speed imaginaries of complex and unknowable forces are juxtaposed with windowless buildings that materialized in urban spaces. Control exists as a series of techniques to modify human behaviour, the ways being watched, profiled and ranked, which mutates into a logic of security or insurance. As the chapter articulates, control is where ‘tele-debt-and-risk-surveillance and a form of muscular mind/body turn into behavioural control’. Here, payment and debts are categories that carry the weight of human freedom, action and psychological well-being. In other words, control emerges from the telekinetic power of finance to monitor and discipline people – finance bestows power on others to act from a distance; finance is more than a ledger of money owed and money paid, it is an interwoven set of transactions that connect to everyday life. In turn, colonial framings of financial data are the reading and writing of culture and empires. In this chapter control is found in the ‘psychic debt for humans’ that animates the cognitive framing of capitalism.

Another way of thinking of the cognitive power of finance is to consider just how integrated financial markets are in everyday life. Just imagine how many would recognize the term ‘London Stock Exchange’ and associate it with money, wealth and power. Daily reports of the volume of shares traded and their market value are broadcast across multiple media channels, integrating concerns over ‘how the stock market is doing’ into the affairs of daily life. People tend to imagine that this concern is new, or more prevalent because of social media, but this is not true – speculative finance has a long history of widespread participation (Aitken 2005; De Goede 2005; Harmes 2001). So, when we think of control in relation to the stock market, its power is historical and cultural, rather than the newest outcome of advanced financial technology.