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Before the Covid-19 pandemic forced most office workers to indefinitely take their work home, the New York-based WeWork had a dramatic rise and fall. With a widely-reported, botched IPO in 2019, the office space company’s ascent was emblematic of an unprecedented alliance between data, finance.
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Keller Easterling is an architect, designer, and author whose works traverse a wide range of spaces. I came to her work as someone interested in complex systems a topic that Easterling, a professor of architecture at Yale, has been writing about for decades. She has written about everything from the Appalachian Trail (in
Organization Space) to North Korea’s demilitarized zone (
Enduring Innocence) to special economic zones and broadband infrastructure (
Extrastatecraft).
Medium Design, Easterling’s new book, can be read as a corollary to her prior work.
Extrastatecraft, for instance, provides detailed descriptions of various sprawling, techno-solutionist systems that prop up capitalism and their negative impacts but readers didn’t find explicit guidance concerning what to do about them. To be fair, a lot of books about capitalism do this; there’s plenty of cultural currency in being the most right about how bad things are. And factori