#36: Maps Gone Wild
The euphemism of "confusing the map and the territory" points out the most essential quality of the map while understating and maybe even muddling it: Not only do maps depict a simplified version of reality, they purposefully distort it in service of some specific objective. A map isn't just a lower-resolution image of what it maps that would be more accurate if we only had time to add all the details. The map of New York City's subway system, for example, shrinks the massive borough of Staten Island into a tiny corner inset, despite its 500,000 people and rich history, because it's low on the one category of information that matters for a subway map.
Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that “we are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality.” The gap between the map and the territory, full of intentional omissions and exaggerations, is where everything important happens, for better or worse. As a product of both its creators' agenda and its users' needs, its distortions are sometimes beyond the scope of the latter, often political and not always innocent. James Bridle, invoking Jacobs' observation, gives a fascinating account of "trap streets," the fake places that cartographers include in their maps to watermark their work (Oxygen Street in Edinburgh runs through two houses, for example). Similar quirks appear in digital maps now, maybe due to bugs or user mischief: In the early 2000s the British town of Argleton appeared and then disappeared from Google Maps without ever actually existing.
As digital maps go "under the API," I have written before, their audience will increasingly be other computers, not people. All their quirks, biases, and errors, well-intentioned or not, will appear as experienced outcomes, not amusing visual flourishes. Just this week, the LAPD instructed Los Angeles motorists to stop using Waze because it was routing too many through neighborhoods that were on fire. As maps evolve beyond their limited paper origins, their ability to realize Jane Jacobs' prophecy increases, and maps will more directly reshape reality to make themselves true.
Reads (Internet of Shit edition):
Researchers quantified the increase in car accidents that happened due to Pokémon GO, estimating that the game has caused hundreds of deaths.
The flood of spammy "broetry" on LinkedIn and where it came from.
Machine learning algorithms think that hovering meme text is part of what a cat looks like.
Until next time,
Drew