Luis Felipe Alvarez León's "The Map in the Machine"

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

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Map in the Machine captures one important dimension of the book’s key arguments: geospatial technologies (such as Earth observation satellites) are embedded in broader geopolitical and economic frameworks, and we must understand the geographic information they produce in close relation to such frameworks. However, page 99 alone may give the reader the impression that the book is primarily focused on satellite technologies, since the discussion centers on the strategic partnership between China and Venezuela for the development and launch of the South American country’s satellites Simón Bolívar (2008-2020), VRSS I (2012 – present) and VRSS II (2017- present). This partnership was significant because it represented China’s first steps in into the space sector as a technology provider for international customers.

To understand why page 99 discusses this satellite partnership, it is necessary to place it in the broader context of the book’s structure and arguments. Chapter 4, which contains page 99, explores the rise of a new ‘satellite ecosystem’ shaped by private companies, the availability of miniature satellites, and the expansion of launch capabilities to a wide range of countries and institutions. This must be understood in relation to other chapters which focus on Internet mapping services like MapQuest and Google Maps (Chapter 2), the rise of geolocation technologies like IP geolocation and GPS (Chapter 3), and ridesharing and autonomous driving (Chapter 5). Together these cases illustrate a wide variety of domains that have been transformed by innovations in navigation, mapping, and other geographic information technologies.

The cases discussed above weave the central idea of the book, which is that through the interconnected processes of location, valuation, and marketization (the LVM framework at the core of the book), geolocation technologies have become instrumental in the construction and operations of a new kind of digital capitalism. This is a particularly important reminder in the context of our digitally mediated world, because the spatial, material, and grounded aspects of the platforms and applications we use every day are often hidden from view. Yet, this spatial architecture is not only essential to the construction of digital technologies, but it is central to how they create economic value, to how markets are built around them, indeed to how we can regulate, repurpose, or reimagine them.

Visit Luis Felipe Alvarez León's website.

--Marshal Zeringue