RE: Human History X: The Mapmakers
Wouldn't be surprised if you knew this, given the above, but Peter Thiel on maps is fun. In Zero to One he says that he thinks the absence of terra incognita on maps is harmful. It used to remind us that we didn't know everything about the world, but the absence of geographical frontiers lets us forget how many of the things in the world remain hidden, not merely from a few, but from everyone. So in a chapter about how it's unfortunate for society when people simply exploit existing knowledge rather than seek new knowledge:
Why has so much of our society come to believe no hard secrets are left?
It might start with geography. There are no blank spaces left on the map anymore. If you grew up in the 18th century, there were still new places to go... today explorers are found mostly in history books and children's tales. Parents don't expect their kids to become explorers any more than they expect them to become pirates or sultans."
Of course, given that this is Thiel, the plea to search for secrets and hidden knowledge is implicitly followed by the command to seek dominion.
Also, Borges is the best.
Interesting. Never really followed Thiel's work, just hearing of him in asides from stuff about other people. It all seems to be negative; like some kind of petty vindictive billionaire supervillain. Interesting parallels on dominion and maps -- and yes, he makes a valid point about us thinking that because we have satellites now that the entire world is mapped and known. For one thing, the entire fricking ocean is still right there but even aside from that, there are many parts of the map that are bigger or smaller or out of position compared to the dirtspace equivalent. Then of course, there's the simple case of being misled by GPS to prove the algorithms are far from perfect.
Maps, much like our own cognition, are an imperfect but fortunately-good-enough hack for navigating reality. Treating them as truly perfect is folly.