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

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping in the process our societies and economies. To understand how digital capitalism works, 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: a new vantage point to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. Alvarez Leon argues that by centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, we can reframe this system not as the expansion of seemingly intangible information clouds, but rather as a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.