Big Data is everywhere. It shapes our lives in more ways than we know and understand. This comprehensive introduction unravels the complex terabytes that will continue to shape our lives in ways imagined and unimagined.

Drawing on case studies like Amazon, Facebook, the FIFA World Cup, and the Aadhar scheme, this audio book looks at how Big Data is changing the way we behave, consume and respond to situations in the digital age. It looks at how big data has the potential to transform disaster management and healthcare as well as prove to be authoritarian and exploitative in the wrong hands.

In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences.

This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.

Pankaj Sharma