Data Power: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance

This book proposes a radical rethinking of the history, present, and future of our relations with digital, spatial technologies, which offer visions of integrated, smooth, and efficient societies but conflict with the ways users experience them. Activists are subverting, resisting, and repurposing geographic technologies to create new spaces of affinity and a new politics of change.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 176 pages
\n Publication date: 20 December 2021
\n Publisher: Pluto Press
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In recent years, popular media has bombarded audiences with sensationalized headlines that recount data breaches, new forms of surveillance, and other dangers of our digital age. Despite their regularity, such accounts treat each case as unprecedented and unique. This book proposes a radical rethinking of the history, present, and future of our relations with the digital, spatial technologies that increasingly mediate our everyday lives.

From smartphones to surveillance cameras, to navigational satellites, these new technologies offer visions of integrated, smooth, and efficient societies, even as they directly conflict with the ways users experience them. Recognizing the potential for both control and liberation, the authors argue against both acquiescence to and rejection of these technologies.

Through intentional use of the very systems that monitor them, activists from Charlottesville to Hong Kong are subverting, resisting, and repurposing geographic technologies. Using examples as varied as writings on the first telephones to the experiences of a feminist collective for migrant women in Spain, the authors present a revolution of everyday technologies. In the face of the seemingly inevitable dominance of corporate interests, these technologies allow us to create new spaces of affinity and a new politics of change.

\n Weight: 182g\n
Dimension: 135 x 215 x 19 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780745340074\n \n