At least three layers of material supports that, together, constitute the space of flows:

(1) Medium – the physical basis of virtual communication: the hardware and software, the technology that has to be deployed in order for the network to function at all.

(2) Physical Location: the geography of its “nodes and hubs …… the network links up specific places, with well-defined social, cultural, physical and functional characteristics.

(3) Eden-Olympia (J. G. Ballard’s novel): the rarefied, homogeneous space in which the global financial and political elite lives, works and travels.

According to Castells, “the elites form their own society, and constitute symbolically secluded communities.” This is because “the more a society is democratic in its institutions, the more the elites have to become clearly distinct from the populace, so avoiding the excessive penetration of political representatives into the inner world of strategic decision-making.”