Mapping the power, mapping the commons
AN ATLAS OF AGENDA’S is a political, social and economic atlas: informing the public about socio-political power structures and activating opportunities for the self and the commons.
The French research and design group Bureau d´Études has been producing maps of contemporary political, social and economic systems that allow people to inform, reposition and empower themselves. Revealing what normally remains invisible, often in the shape of large-sized banners, and contextualizing apparently separate elements within new frameworks, these visualizations of interests and relations re-articulate the dominant symbolic order and actualize existing structures that otherwise remain concealed and unknown. This large-size hardcover book, panoramic in scope and theoretically both profound and accessible, is THE atlas for an emancipatory new citizenship that utilizes the opportunities of info-graphics from the local to the global and back again.
Brochure d’accompagnement en français à télécharger
Commander l’Atlas des agendas
ISBN 978-94-91677-25-0
Possible to order the book on this website
hardcover
230 mm x 300 mm / 9 x 11 ¾ inches
270 pages, of which 86 pages in full color. All other pages are in black + 1 PMS.
Extra: a fold out page integrated in the binding.
World government is described here as an intellectual complex, which is able to coordinate, accumulate and concentrate the means for defining the norms and determining the development of capitalism. This complex is made up of financial cores, strategic and diplomatic think tanks, scientific and technical research planning offices, political-influence networks, mafias, intelligence-gathering services and legal and accounting consultants. It is premised on the conviction that a government made up of old families and new brainpower is preferable to peoples’ right to choose their own destiny.
The American military network ARPAnet was conceived as a way to maintain uninterrupted communications in the event of nuclear war. Ancestor of the Internet and foundation of the Global Information Infrastructure, ARPAnet springs from exactly the same source as the “push-button war” that lay behind it: the change of scale provoked by the early 20th century discoveries in physics, within an industrial society capable of organizing the productivity – including the scientific productivity – of thousands of agents. Here, no doubt, is the real birthplace of the information society: a society massively penetrated by the sciences and technologies of information and telecommunications, using them to carry out the design of the planet or at least, that of its components (with design replacing politics). A society whose governmentality entails the knowledge of the real, that is to say, the transformation of reality into information. A society whose governmentality unfolds between its smallest common denominators (atomic, electronic, magnetic, genetic, chemical) and its largest common denominators (climate, planet, solar system), by way of laws, formulas and norms that determine its productivity, means, and possible destinies. (…)