UC Press Blog

By Luis F. Alvarez Leon, author of The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism

The Internet, digital technologies, and the informational ecosystems they create are too often understood in abstract, immaterial, and (particularly) aspatial terms. While this mythology is not as prevalent as it once was, terms like “the cloud,” “cyberspace,” and even “ethernet” underscore a sense that our digital communications, interactions, and exchanges take place “somewhere else” —somewhere that exists in a separate plane, away from the mundane geography of our everyday surroundings. 

However, over the past two decades, researchers and journalists have diligently pointed out how our digital environments are thoroughly built on material foundations, ranging from undersea cables to server farms, cellular antennae, and even satellites. What may appear as disembodied pixels on our screens is generated, directly and indirectly, through the human labor of workers in spaces as disparate as a corporate park in Palo Alto, California, a semiconductor factory near Taipei, or a click farm facility in the outskirts of Manila. Similarly, increased awareness of the gargantuan energy demands of blockchain operations like cryptocurrency mining, and increasingly sophisticated AI models, has helped dispel the notion that the digital realm lacks a material footprint. 

These are only some of the most salient factors that illustrate the degree to which digital technologies have both transformed the workings capitalism, and deeply affected its spatial organization at all scales. It is now more urgent than ever to investigate the spatial and geographic dimensions of the resulting digital capitalism. In The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism, I argue that to understand how digital technologies have taken center stage in our contemporary political economic system, we must also understand how they have leveraged spatiality for capital accumulation purposes. Through the conceptual triad of Location, Valuation, and Marketization, I analyze how pinpointing information flows in concrete physical space (through technologies like IP geolocation and GPS) has been crucial to endow information with value. This, in turn is a necessary step to building geographically differentiated markets that form digital capitalism, from social media to streaming platforms, ride hailing, advertising, and, more recently AI services. In the book I examine these processes of location, valuation, and marketization across a range of cases that highlight the enduring relevance of geospatial data, media, and information, including the development of the geoweb (from MapQuest to Google Maps), the ongoing mobility revolution (including ride hailing platforms and Autonomous Vehicles), and the emergence of a new satellite ecosystem for Earth Observation and telecommunications.

Ultimately, understanding the spatial and geographic dimensions of digital capitalism is both analytically and politically valuable. After all, it is by establishing where activities take place that they can be better governed, collectively deliberated upon, and even regulated. In The Map in the Machin, I show that asserting the power of place to reframe digital capitalism in geographic terms is a way to reclaim the digital as part of our social world. This, in turn, can help us steer digital technologies and the environments they enable, toward alternative logics, values, and priorities that better respond to how we live our daily lives, how we may want to organize our social and political world, and how we want to confront some of the most urgent collective challenges that lie ahead.