Exploring the consumption practices of the super-rich begins to highlight that they are best described as 'fast subjects' who dwell in what Castells (2000) terms the 'space of flows' rather than the 'space of places'.

there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.

while the super-rich may move through through world cities, their cosmopolitan practices and lifestyles rarely break out of the exclusive transnational spaces which stand at the intersecting points of particular corporate, capital, technological, information and cultural lines of flow.

Given the fact that super-rich consumption is preoccupied with the importance of sign rather than use values, it is the space as much as the commodity that is consumed by the super-rich.

Developing this argument, Bauman (2000) talks of the super-rich as the 'new cosmopolitans', suggesting that the fundamental consumption cleavage in contemporary society is between these 'fast subjects' who dwell in transnational space and those 'slow subjects' whose lives remain localised and parochial. The fast world is one consisting of airports, top level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, chic boutiques, art galleries and exclusive gyms - in brief, a sort of glamour zone that is fundamentally disconnected from the life worlds of the vast majority of the world's population. Bauman thus equates power with mobility, echoing Massey's notion of unequal 'power-geometries'

it is apparent that the global elite must be regarded as transnational to the extent that they share similar global lifestyles. For Short and Kim (1999) the lifestyles of global managers present perhaps the clearest evidence that the shared consumption of similar goods and images is resulting in the creation of global lifestyles. Moving from city to city, the global managerial class characteristically occupies a series of corporate spaces designed for the international business traveller: international airports, business hotels, executive clubs, corporate health suites, restaurants and so on. The mobility of global managers is, however, eclipsed by that of the global super-rich. They are able to move easily from nation to nation by executive jet (rather than travelling by business class); they stay only in five-star hotels; they are able to access exclusive clubs and restaurants, they frequent ultra-expensive resorts in all continents, and collect the objet d'arts which can only be obtained in the most exclusive shops and auction houses. In short, their space-time routines centre on a globally-diffuse set of spaces regarded as 'the right places to see and be seen'. It is the nature of these spaces that we explore in our next section.

The preceding discussion has begun to suggest that the global super-rich need to be conceptualised as a truly cosmopolitan faction of the global elite.

the global elite (i.e. both global managers and the global super-rich) must be regarded as transnational for three main reasons, as Sklair (1997) outlines.

Nonetheless, as Sklair (1997) identifies, the super-rich play an important symbolic role in the perpetuation of global capitalism, showing that it creates the possibility of a form of consumption based on profligacy and seemingly infinite choice. We might not all chose to emulate the lifestyles of the super-rich, but we all we would all like to have the choice to consume conspicuously.

Machinoia, Machine of Multiple Me: Integrating with Past,Future and Alternative Selves