“Preliminary Notes” is an aphoristic essay that reads the late-capitalist skyscraper as a concrete-and-abstract spatial formula of capitalist enclosure, tracking verticality-for-accumulation’s sake as a logic for the commodification of urban life; the skyscraper–mine nexus as a planetary metabolic relation between city and non-city space; skyscraper-space as the “becoming abstract” of the city into a commodity in its own right; and contemporary urban enclosure as an operation that naturalizes late capitalism’s “no alternative” while actively foreclosing the emergence of postcapitalist urban possibilities.