The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism

Alvarez Leon, Luis F.

ISBN 10: 0520389301 / ISBN 13: 9780520389304

Published by University of California Press, 2024

About this Item

First Edition NO-PA16APR2015-KAP.

Seller Inventory # 26398834714

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520389301
• ISBN 13: 9780520389304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez Leon shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.

About the Author

Luis F. Alvarez Leon is Assistant Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. He researches the political economy of geospatial data, media, and technologies.