Deterritorialisation names the process whereby the very basis of one's identity, the proverbial ground beneath our feet, is eroded, washed away like the bank of a river swollen by the waves of globalisation. The process of change happens even as our society reproduces itself, and it is no longer seems possible to either de-link oneself from the network of relations we call globalisation or find a place out of the way enough not to have been penetrated by it.

Although most of us embrace the opportunities globalisation affords us, we nonetheless continue to sense and long for a past none of us has actually known when the connections were local not global. The local is the world that we have been evicted from by our own success in transforming our space and habitat through the process of globalisation.

We increasingly find that way of thinking about the world is at odds with the ever changing world. The longing underpinning this feeling of exile manifests itself in the form of disorientation, we can't seem to get our bearings in this brave new world without borders. Disorientation brought on by the disembedding process requires in its turn a compensating process of re embedding to accommodate us to the alienatingly 'faceless' world of late modernity/postmodernity.

Ours is now a world of rapid change and momentous shifts that we as increasingly mobile subjects are immersed in, and have have trouble in both getting our bearings in these historical shifts and making sense of the changes in the way that we now experience space.

Chain stores, like Starbuck's, but also Borders, combine global corporate trading practices with cornerstore ambience and tap into this feeling of strangeness (emptiness or placelessness) in which I find myself. It's a fakes and we willingly embrace the copy as the higher form of originality.