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The Map in the Machine

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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 tech...
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  • 30 April 2024
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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.
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Price: $29.95
Pages: 222
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 30 April 2024
ISBN: 9780520389335
Format: eBook
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Contents

List of Illustrations and Table 
Acknowledgments 

1. Introduction 
2. Assembling the Base Map: From MapQuest to Google Street View 
3. Location, Geolocation, Allocation 
4. Eyes in the Sky and the Digital Planet 
5. People, Platforms, and Robots on the Move 
Conclusion: The Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism and the Power of Place

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index