Space is a technology. Buildings and the cities they inhabit have become infrastructural - mobile, monetized networks. For the world's power players, infrastructure space is a secret weapon, and the rest of us are only just beginning to realize. If Victor Hugo came back to give a TED talk, he might assert that architecture, which he once claimed had been killed by the book, is reincarnate as something more powerful still - as information itself. If this space is a secret weapon, says Keller Easterling, it is a secret best kept from those trained to make space - architects. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in economics, the social sciences, informatics and activism are developing what might be called spatial software as a political instrument to outwit politics as usual.

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world.

Yet, looking more closely at the familiar field of mass-produced suburban houses, the organisation embodies a distinct activity that is very apparent. The developer is not making 1,000 individual houses, but a kind of agriculture of houses - 1,000 slabs, then 1,000 frames, 1,000 roofs and so on. The house, as seen in pictures or stitched into needle-work, is akin to McLuhan's content; it distracts us from what is really being made. The field of houses is enacting a propensity to organise all activities across a population of houses. It privileges these repetitive activities and renders the act of making an individual house into a marginal gesture. What is really being made is something like a protocol or a non-digital spatial software that is both shaping and generating the activity of making houses.