CONCEPT
Global Hubs
The command nodes of the space of flows — cities where disproportionate influence over the global network concentrates through the density of its connections.
Global hubs are the cities that serve as command nodes for the space of flows: New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, San Francisco, and a small number of others whose connectivity to the global network gives them disproportionate influence over what happens in every place connected to them. They are not the largest cities by population, nor necessarily the wealthiest, but the most connected — the nodes through which global flows pass at highest density, producing the specific kind of power that comes from being indispensable to the network's operation. In the AI economy, global hubs have been joined by a specific subset — the cities that host the foundation model companies and the data centers that run them — whose concentration reproduces and intensifies the hub structure Castells documented in earlier network transitions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The hub structure of the network society reflects what network scientists call preferential attachment: new connections prefer nodes that already have many connections, producing a power-law distribution in which a