Map Neutrality #mapneutrality

Given our current climate with regards to net neutrality, in the vein of my last post, I’ve been thinking about what I’m calling map neutrality.
I confident we’re much closer to a large-scale deployment of vehicles equipped with assisted/automated driving experience than a fully autonomous world of vehicles cruising around. That being said, if you walk around the streets of San Francisco and Mountain View, you’ll encounter LiDAR enabled vehicles rapidly scanning surroundings, mapping the territory at a 1–1 scale, enabling our oncoming/encroaching/inevitable future.

One is reminded of Alfred Korzybski’s axiom on the subjective nature of the map:
A map is not the territory it represents.
In this case, the maps that are generated are massive point clouds, the in-take of the entirety of the urban landscape in 3d. Further, the map is rapidly becoming the territory, or will be, and not only that, but it will dictate the physical world. The imagined and desired can be manifested and made real. The axoim flipped on its head.
Jean Baudrillard, from Simulacra and Simulation:
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
But these maps — really tracings — in the lexicon of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (read on) — are institutional constructions, with a perspective that reduces information and complexity, and not only inhibits the aleatory and the emergent conditions, intersections, and meanderings of the urban condition, but sets operations in place to homogenize landscapes. These new maps will emphasize,possibly omit, or reduce of information along the translation of signal to recognizable data streams such as a/r overlays and road maps.
The operator who makes the make controls the map, and at a 1:1 resolution, what is left out is as important as what is left in. Google/waymo, Uber, GM/Cruise, et. al. are seeking to control the data points that make the map/tracing a complete but critically useful territory. That which is not represented on these new cartographies cannot be seen, visited, responded to. Our landscape can and will be edited according to corporate structures and power dynamics.
In Dennis Cosgrove’s Mappings, James Corner’s The Agency of Mapping (warning PDF) is essential reading.
The function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live.
The map is an ideological construct, and should be treated as such. But the cityscape, though fractured according to lines of class and race, should not be cartographically bent. Infrastruture — the built world — will respond to these maps, for trends follow capital (I’ll talk about this in another upcoming post). The landscape will respond to the cartography in a reverse process of building and remapping, not by the inhabitants of the city, but by global corporate entities.

What I’m calling for here is a map neutrality. Similar to net neutrality, the map — the physical environment represented as such — should not be an ideological construct, subject to allegiances and fealty. We should be looking to create constructions that, as Deleuze and Guattari would describe as true maps — that is, the idea of a non-institutional non-hierarchical conduit for information.
Pulling from my favorite philosopher duo from their seminal A Thousand Plateaus:
[The map] fosters connections between fields…The map is open and connectible in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.
What exists and what disappears, what is omitted in digital space can and will become mirrored in physical space. Once can imagine info-cartographic warfare waged in and across corporate campuses. Routes, buildings, neighborhoods erased or hierarchized with respect to the movements of market and capital flow, all in real time and real space. The digital engaged in a retracing of the land, with agency is what is seen, what is experienced.
I may be getting carried away. But the thrust here remains constant. The futures that are being manifested are ideological, and the conduits for the information that we receive have vectors, trajectories, and energetics that we neither elected to participate in consciously, nor have control over once instituted.. The landscape should be open, not closed; adaptable, not rigid; create different, not homogenization and the blurring of detail and grain. The reemergence of the real in the face of the digital Empire.
