An Economic Geography of Complicity and Control

About this episode

Brad Weed returns from a hiatus to discuss the intersection of economic geography and digital systems, exploring their impact on urban value and control.

Hello Interactors, I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography. My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography. The presentation I prepared for the Lisbon conference, and which I hint at here, traces how the technical optimism of early desktop software evolved into the all-encompassing power of Platform Capital. We explore how digital systems like Airbnb and Google Maps have become more than just convenient tools. They are the primary architects of urban value. They don’t just reflect economic patterns. They mandate them. They reorganize rent extraction by dictating interactions with commerce and concentrating control. This is the new financialized city, and the uncomfortable question we must face is this: Are we leveraging these tools toward a new beneficial height, or are the tools exploiting us in ways that…

People in this episode

Host: Brad Weed

Topics covered

• economic geography
• digital geography
• urban value
• platform capitalism
• financialized city

Keywords

• economic geography
• digital geography
• platform capitalism
• urban value
• rent extraction
• financialized city

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Airbnb, Google Maps

Places: Southern Europe, Northern Italy, Lisbon, Spain

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