From the Sputnik to the Stack: Radical Cartography in the Age of Planetary-Scale Computation
From the Soviet Sputnik to Bratton's proposition of the Stack, networked infrastructures have become a global architecture of computer mediation which produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power (Zubofff 2016).
If radical cartography is the practice of mapmaking that subverts conventional notions in order to actively promote social change, the lecture explores an update of the term in the current Age of planetary-scale computational infrastructures, algorithmic governance and Surveillance Capitalism.
By contesting the Silicon Valley consensus about the future, counter-hegemonic mapping initiatives work both in visualizing the new world order complexity but also as ways of imagining and organising emerging citizen-based networked infrastructures.
Image Credits:
The Sputnik: source: https://www.trumanlibrary.org/museum/sputnik1.htm
The Stack: illustration by Metahaven in Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack, On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, 2016.
