"Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space" by Keller Easterling
DeTnk Bookshelf
Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century.
Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraft will change how we think about cities—and, perhaps, how we live in them.
An extraordinary guidebook to the politics of infrastructure in the contemporary world.” —Stephen Graham, author of Cities Under Siege
“Extrastatecraft is an essential text for anyone with a stake in the built environment, architect and citizen alike, in articulating the forces that shape our nation-states, and cataloguing—in a precise and readable style—the strategies of an otherwise unaccountable global order.”
– Jack Self, Architectural Review
“I have long admired Keller Easterling’s talent for extracting a space, a shape, a marking, from mixes of elements rarely brought together—whether materially or conceptually. In Extrastatecraft she does it at a grand scale, cutting across fields of meaning and of practice. A must read.”
– Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
“An extraordinary guidebook to the politics of infrastructure in the contemporary world, Extrastatecraft is a pivotal and beautifully written excavation of the hidden geographies of globalisation. ‘Free’ trade zones, optic fibre networks, credit cards, mobile phones, economic and financial rules … all emerge as charged elements within an often invisible geography that could not be more important. Extrastatecraft works to politicise and expose the prosaic and taken-for-granted hardware of our world.”
– Stephen Graham, author of Cities Under Siege
“This book is a breathtaking journey along the material and immaterial infrastructures that continuously shape contemporary global space. Information flows of financial, legal or military nature congeal into wide arrays of strange ‘spatial products,’ extraterritorial ‘zones’ and building nodes. From within the logic of these pervasive systems, Easterling poses the most urgent political challenge facing spatial activists today, and shows how the search for justice must retool to outsmart the immanent violence of Extrastatescraft.”
– Eyal Weizman (author of Hollow Land) and Ines Weizman
“Extrastatecraft establishes Keller Easterling’s growing reputation as the savviest student of postnational spatial and infrastructural forms. Bringing together architecture, coding, digitalization and logistics, she exposes the nervous system of the new logics of domination through information and proposes a cunning counter-politics of humor, discommunication and disguise. A must read for all varieties of critical students of space and sovereignty in this emerging century.”
– Arjun Appadurai, author of The Future as Cultural Fact
“This is a remarkable work. Keller Easterling has written one of the most original works about the American environment I’ve ever read.”
– Michael Sorkin (in praise of Enduring Innocence)
“A provocative study of infrastructure, the operating system governing everyday life.”
– Jay Owens, Icon
