5 August

The greatest difference between Western culture and everybody else is that they know maps are only navigational tools, and we think of them as descriptions of reality itself. We think we live in 'space', defined by maps. Maps aren't pictures. The spaces and distances inside maps relate only to navigation, they're not the baseline of reality itself. Place is not a space, that's what we don't understand. When we talk about space, we're thinking about maps, how they apportion place. That's because we're old empire cultures, and empires use maps as tools to accumulate places and the resources in them. We're so used to using maps we don't even realise where they came from.