17 July

There’s a famous expression, “the map is not the territory”. What people who study maps realised though, is something much more interesting: 1) the map *creates* the territory. There is no country with boundaries, for example, before there are maps of it. 2) maps have never been pictures, they get confused with paintings. They’ve never been about trying to picture a territory, they’ve been about navigation. No map really resembles much what it’s mapping, because its job is to help a person navigate, not to give them a picture of something. I love maps because they’re another window into what I see as the biggest misunderstanding we have about our world. That the world is something ‘out there’, to be ‘represented’ to us ‘in here’ (in our heads). Maps don’t represent a thing, nothing does. They re-present some information, which we use to do some thing, in the world. No picture or drawing or theory or word represents the world, it’s pictures which have created the fantasy of the world being something ‘out there’.