The World According to You

Yesterday, as reported by Axios, Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario as »Lake America« produced an odd new possibility: Google Maps can show different names for the same lake, depending on where you are.¹ The lake remains exactly where it was. The map has become conditional.

»Pluralism says there are different ways of seeing the same world. Atomisation says we no longer need to see the same world at all«

During my architecture studies in Oxford, I once tried navigating that city using a map of Stockholm – a situationist experiment meant to sever the link between representation and reality.² The streets were there, just never where the map said they would be. Familiar corners turned strange. What the exercise really showed was how much of a place is the representation we carry into it rather than the place itself.

Maps simplify the world. As mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot showed, there’s no perfectly faithful coastline: its measured length changes with the scale at which you measure it.³ The map is necessarily a selection.

But maps have also been attempts to construct a shared picture of reality. Polymath Alexander von Humboldt’s great Naturgemälde assembled geography, climate, vegetation, and altitude into a single representation, making relationships visible that no observer could perceive from one location. The ambition was not to eliminate different perspectives, but to make them commensurable.⁴

Writer Jorge Luis Borges took the idea of perfect representation to its absurd conclusion. In »On Exactitude in Science«, an empire makes a map so accurate that it eventually covers the entire territory it’s supposed to survey.⁵ The map becomes useless because there’s no longer any distinction between it and the world.

Our current situation may be stranger still. Instead of one impossibly perfect map, we might end up with millions of perfectly imperfect ones, each generated for a particular observer.

Governments have always manipulated representations of the world. States have renamed cities, and empires drawn borders across territories they didn’t control. Different countries draw different maps, and there is no international board in charge of place names.⁶ The map has never been merely a neutral description. Whoever controls the representation has some control over what can be seen, remembered, and acted upon.

But there’s a difference between competing maps and a system that can generate a different map for every person. It used to be that a government had to publish a map that people could challenge because there was something recognisable to disagree about.

Digital systems can do something different. They can personalise representation at the moment of encounter. Google can show one name in one country and another elsewhere. The map can adapt to your place, language, route, interests, and assumptions.

Much of this is already benign, even desirable. Why should a wheelchair user, a tourist, and a local resident necessarily need the same map? Personalisation can make representations more useful precisely because people inhabit the same world differently. And personalised realities already exist beyond maps: news feeds, search results, recommendation systems, and AI assistants routinely give different people different versions of the same informational world.

The question is what happens when this logic extends further. What if two people ask the same system the same question and receive answers that are not merely personalised, but mutually incompatible? At the extreme, the system would no longer represent a common world to different people. It would construct different operational worlds for them. That is the point at which pluralism becomes atomisation. Pluralism says there are different ways of seeing the same world. Atomisation says we no longer need to see the same world at all.

The strange thing is that nobody necessarily has to decide this. A government can define an official name. Google can say it’s merely reflecting the relevant database. Each decision can be reasonable in isolation while the combined effect is that the shared representation quietly fragments.

Perhaps that’s the novel mechanism at play here. Not that powerful people can change the map; they always could. Not that different people can hold different maps; they always have. But that the machinery of representation can make those differences continuous, invisible, and individual.

The old map said: this is the world.

The personalised map says: this is your world.

Nobody decided this. Still, we all need to find our ways through it.

References