Recrafting the Future of Flow

Part III attends to the varied ways in which flow is or can be manipulated, for both benign and malign purposes, and redirects critical attention both away from notions of dark experiences of flow to the economic and political context for flow experiences so described, and up from the (inter)personal psychological to the global societal level. Each discussion foresees a dystopian future of increasing exploitation, whether of individual workers and gamers or of Western consumers of eco-experience tourism and non-Western recipients of such tourism development schemes. Yet each chapter also serves to forearm flow researchers with respect to this depressing future by encouraging the adoption of a critical moral geography of flow that can target and work against such deleterious outcomes of the ongoing commodification of flow. This concluding chapter pulls together the arguments emerging from the discrete discussions to highlight the inequalities inherent in the outcomes of the growing manipulation of flow as a means to neoliberal and neocolonial ends, whereby gains primarily accrue for corporate and hegemonic bodies and losses mostly amass for workers, consumers and those peoples and places targeted for eco-experience tourism projects. In signposting scalar, spatial, classist and racial axes of oppression at play in this shift towards the manipulation of flow as a biopolitical and geopolitical tool, this brief chapter reinforces the need for a critical moral geographical perspective within flow research from the local psychosocial to the global geopolitical level.