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.
Luis F. Alvarez Leon is Assistant Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. He researches the political economy of geospatial data, media, and technologies.
"The Map in the Machine deconstructs the spatial architecture of the new digital economy, uncovering its deeply geographical foundations. Synthesizing geographical political economy and critical approaches to information technology, Luis Alvarez Leon offers an original framework for understanding processes of location, valuation, and marketization across the variegated worlds of digital capitalism."
—Jamie Peck, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia
"Despite the persistence of abstract, fluffy metaphors like the cloud and Ethernet, The Map in the Machine conclusively demonstrates that digital information is—and always has been—intimately intertwined with our physical and material world. This is a must-read book for anyone looking to understand the place-based underpinnings of digital capitalism."
—Catherine D'Ignazio, Associate Professor and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, MIT, and coauthor of Data Feminism
222 pp.6 x 9Illus: 15 b/w illustrations, 5 maps, 1 table
9780520389328$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2024