ON EXACTITUDE IN SCIENCE
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suarez Miranda,
Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Jorge Luis Borges (1946); translation by Andrew Hurley.
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It was 2551 BE (2008 in the Western calendar), and I was teaching at a school in Bangkok.
I wasn’t enjoying it much. A top-dollar international school, but behind the slick PR it was an educational mess. Eight forty-minute periods in a day, and class sizes way too big. The school had a proudly advertised ‘one-to-one’ computer policy — in other words, every student had their own school-issued tablet computer, which they carried around with them. This created real classroom-management issues — too much electronic distraction for any normal teenager to resist. Later they would bring in a surveillance system so that the teacher could check on what each student was looking at, but I never used it. There were cameras on the corridors and lanyards swinging from every adult neck. Turn-styles at the gates, with electronic scanners at waist-height, necessitating a bend at the waist or knees to bring your ID to the eye; a bow or curtsey to the gate in order to enter. The plan was to have all curricula, records and assessment data online. “UN-related,” boasted the billboard outside the gate. The school’s triangular logo weirdly resembled a pyramid with an all-seeing eye.
I’d been there a year or so and my mood wasn’t improving. Head of Secondary was a smooth-talking managerial type whose background was in elementary physical education. My head of department was an ignorant, domineering man who’d read little and never heard of half the concepts I used in my literature teaching.
Deus ex what? he asked.
Machina.
?? Never heard of it.
I would never fit in to this brave new educational world where what mattered was the machine-to-student, not student-to-teacher ratio. Such a school values machines above teachers, I thought. More than that, it aspires to the condition of a machine. It wants to become one.
One day in a free period I walked outside to smoke a cigarette. Sukhumvit Soi 15 is a long, winding urban lane cut off by a stinking canal that bounds the school on one side. That’s where I was headed, to smoke a dirty cigarette by the dirty canal.
As I turned right out of the gate I was confronted by a strange vehicle, a car with an ungainly robotic turret attached to its roof. Google Maps Street View, said the logo on the side. It had just turned around at the sock-end of the soi and was heading back down, taking in the buildings on this side. The windows were black, so I couldn’t see the occupants — but it saw me. Within a day or two, someone sent me a screenshot from Google Earth. There I was, walking in front of the school railings, reaching into my shirt pocket for my smokes, my face blurred out, at this obscure spot on Google’s digital globe.
Keyhole, the company set up to develop the interactive global map, became famous during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was kept afloat with In-Q-Tel (CIA) and National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency money and then acquired by Google in 2004. It used imagery from United States Geographic Survey Landsat 8 satellites and NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. By April 2008 it was integrating its Street View facility, displaying 360° panoramic street-level photos of select cities and their surroundings. Its camera cars, crawling all over hundreds of cities in more than forty countries, would eventually cover more than ten million miles — enough to circle the globe more than 400 times — capturing images of every street and building and courtyard and alley of every city and every obscure little village on the planet.
And me, walking up the soi, brow furrowed, reaching into my pocket for a pack of cigarettes.
∆
Google Earth. What does that remind me of?
Oh yes.
In her book No Logo (1999) Naomi Klein alludes briefly to a plan entertained by the Pepsi corporation to project its logo, using lasers, onto the moon.
Imagine that. Looking up into the night sky, you’d see not ‘the moon’ but ‘the Pepsi Moon’.
Like the Barclays Premier League.
Or the Google Earth.
“CLIMB THE TALLEST MOUNTAINS,” says Google.
“DIVE INTO THE WORLD’S DEEPEST CANYONS.”
“DISCOVER THE WORLD’S CITIES.”
Since its coverage of the earth’s surface is a composite of images taken at different times, Google Earth is a temporal as well as spatial mosaic. Despite its fancy 3D views and fractal zoomscapes, Google Earth is by definition two-dimensional, superficial. But in 2008 when I was captured, loitering without intent on an obscure street in a sprawling metropolis on the face of the Google Earth, much deeper mapping projects were in progress.
Use the arrows; drag and drop the little yellow figure that dangles from the cursor like a hanged man.
I’m still there, captured in the map.
And guess what? So are you.
∆
Jorge Luis Borges published his ultra-short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ in 1946. He could have called it ‘The Perfection of Cartography,’ but the title he chose widens the context. He is mocking the human drive to map and measure everything in existence. Borges exemplifies the artist’s sacramental attitude to representation: that it can never rival the real, nor should it try to. It is the reflection of a profound reality. The map is not the territory, and therein lies the value of the map: in its simultaneous difference from and similarity to the original.
A few decades later, the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard used Borges’ story as the starting point for what became his most famous work. His seminal treatise Simulacra and Simulation (1981) defines reality as “that which can be simulated”, and concerns the point at which representation loses connection with reality, and ultimately displaces it, trapping humanity in a closed circuit of artificiality, where that word loses all meaning since it’s all there is. Such a world is neither real nor unreal, but ‘hyperreal’.
A first order simulacrum — of ‘the order of sacraments’ — takes any of the traditional forms of representation: a map, a diagram, a work of art. It is aware of its own artificiality, referring and deferring to a reality which is irreproducible, acknowledging the ineffable uniqueness of the original. A map which achieved perfect accuracy and detail would be identical to the territory in every way including size, and thus utterly useless. That’s why the vast map of the Empire is abandoned to rot away in the Western deserts, scavenged by beggars for clothing and animals for their nests. We are left with a lingering image of human hubris; shreds and rags of the unconscionable map littering the desert, stirred by the wind.
Baudrillard, however, thinks that Borges neglected a more interesting possibility. Rather than the map, in his vision it is the territory which fades away and is replaced by the map; the simulacrum usurps the reality. This is ‘the precession of simulacra’. In a world saturated with maps, models, images, effigies, representations and simulations of every kind, primary experience dies, and we can no longer access the real. Reality no longer forms the basis of our experience. We live in the map.
“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.”
∆
It is not only physical geography that gives rise to unconscionable maps. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt describes the filing system invented by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police in pre-revolutionary Russia, to monitor potential revolutionary activity in the Empire and abroad.
“… Every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect’s friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles. Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police.”
The thing that caught my eye about this wry little paragraph is the way it echoes in real life precisely the absurdity of Borges’ fiction. Arendt’s subtle ridicule of the Okhrana’s utopian goal is identical to Borges’ amusement at the ‘disciplines of Geography’: the idea of a ‘gigantic single sheet’ big enough to diagram all relationships within a society or jurisdiction is as absurd as a map the size of an empire.
Or it was.
That absurdity has, in time, become void. The fantastic map now exists; the gigantic sheet of paper scrolls endlessly and forever. Unlike the inhabitants of Borges’ fictitious Empire we have not yet seen its uselessness and cast it pitilessly into the desert, leaving no relic of it in our lives. The opposite is true. Instead, we have embraced it with narcissistic enthusiasm.
In Baudrillard’s inversion of Borges’ parable, rather than rotting away in the deserts of the West, the map becomes the territory, and we live in the map. By the same logic, Baudrillard would presumably argue that the Okhrana’s map of relationships and affiliations would eventually replace society itself; we would live inside the filing system, meeting each other and conducting relationships through that medium. We would live in, or on, the gigantic sheet of paper.
Around this time I had an interesting conversation with a software developer who told me about a meeting he had attended nearly a decade earlier, at which he learned about a project to create a detailed biography of every living person on the planet. He thought it was rather a wonderful idea, as long as people were allowed to see and collaborate on their own biographies. But he was told that this would not happen, and that no one would get to see the log of their own life.
I don’t know how much that man understood; that they were talking about social mapping, about a surveillance project growing directly out of the Okhrana’s utopian goal; a DARPA/Pentagon attempt to make Arendt’s gigantic sheet of paper a reality. Only it wouldn’t be paper, of course. War turbo-charges technological creativity, and what neither Borges nor Arendt could know in the years immediately following the second world war was that a radical technology had grown out of the demands of that conflict which would eventually create a new type of space in which the gigantic sheet of paper or the Empire’s vast maps were no longer an absurdity — or at least, no longer an impossibility. The technology had created a new dimension, orthogonal to every physical direction; a cloud of knowing; cyberspace.
The DARPA project was called ‘Lifelog’, described as ‘an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates / assistants and other system capabilities.’
According to a contemporary article in Wired Magazine, ‘LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.’
Rather surprisingly, the Lifelog project was discontinued early in 2004. But about three weeks later, on the 4th February, Facebook was launched, and we all started collaborating on the secret life-logs we would never be allowed to see.
To a degree, then, we’re already living through the map, some more than others. But at some point we may really find ourselves living inside the map. Our doppelgängers already are.
∆
In 2008 when I was captured, loitering without intent by a dirty canal in a sprawling metropolis on the face of the Google Earth, the ultimate mapping project had already been announced. It was to be the most ambitious of all — a project without end, limit, or stasis — a dynamic map, not just of the physical but the human terrain; not just of the world but of the future.
The ‘Sentient World Simulation’ (SWS) grew out of the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), a sophisticated strategic planning tool developed by Purdue University on behalf of Fortune 500 companies. SEAS devours huge quantities of data from any source it can — economic indicators, climactic events, census data, breaking news — in order to run strategic simulations for sixty-two countries. The model of each country constitutes about five million nodes representing, for example, hospitals, mosques, pipelines, organisations and people.
In 2004 SEAS was absorbed by the ever-expanding Revolution in Military Affairs — war being just another business model, after all. The US Joint Forces Command was interested in its potential to simulate ‘the non-kinetic aspects of combat, things like the diplomatic, economic, political, infrastructure and social issues’. It was evaluated by JFCOM’s Joint Concept Development and Experimentation unit during ‘Breaking Point’, an ‘environment-shaping war game’ and adopted for its ability to ‘move us from the current situation where everyone comes together and sits around a table discussing what they would do, to a situation where they actually play in the simulation and their actions have consequences.’
In 2006 JFCOM-J9 used SEAS to game warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015. In April 2007 another country was added — The Homeland itself — when JFCOM-J9 began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces on a second-generation synthetic environment subsuming all other maps and models, including something called the Synthetic Psychological Environment (SPE). In 2006 the founder and the Director of SEAS Laboratory, Dr. Alok Chaturvedi, had outlined his vision for its development. The Sentient World Simulation (SWS) would be a ‘society’ of simulations, perpetually constructing and configuring new models and modifying existing ones, and incorporating these changes into the continuously running synthetic world.
“Modeling and simulation quickly becomes out of sync with new events, the emergence of new forces, and newly proposed theories. The goal of the Sentient World Simulation (SWS) is to build a synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information, such as major events, opinion polls, demographic statistics, economic reports, and shifts in trends. The ability of a synthetic model of the real world to sense, adapt, and react to real events distinguishes SWS from the traditional approach of constructing a simulation to illustrate a phenomena [sic]. Behaviors emerge in the SWS mirror world and are observed much as they are observed in the real world. Basing the synthetic world in theory in a manner that is unbiased to specific outcomes offers a unique environment in which to develop, test, and prove new perspectives. SWS consists of components capable of capturing new events as they occur anywhere in the world… In other words, the set of models that make up the synthetic environment encompass the behavior of individuals, organizations, institutions, infrastructures and geographies while simultaneously capturing the trends emerging from the interaction among entities as well as between entities and the environment. The multi-granularity detail provides a means for inserting new models of any temporal and spatial scales, or for incorporating user-supplied data at any level of granularity. Therefore, SWS can be continuously enriched and refined as new information becomes available.” — Dr. Alok Chaturvedi: Sentient World Simulation (SWS): A Continuously Running Model of the Real World. Concept Paper, version 2.0. 22 August 2006
In the same paper Chaturvedi devotes considerable space to the design and testing of “new types of agents along with the DNA and memory these types of agents will have using the design interfaces of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The design interfaces also allow the DNA and memory of existing agent types to be modified.”
Thus the simulation aims to model the tendencies and motivations of individuals in the real world closely enough to render their actions predictable.
Agent behaviors can be mathematical models based on variables that the agents sense from the environment or can be described procedurally using a workflow engine, a customizable system composed of states, transitions, and messages. The behaviors describe how agents interact with their environment and other fellow agents.
The Sentient World Simulation, then, is a sentient map of the world, or a map of the sentient world, the human world at least. It’s more than the Okhrana police and their contemporaries could ever have imagined in their most utopian dreams. A dynamic, constantly updated, real-time psychological map of the human terrain, populated by the digital twins of living people; once these simulacra are enriched with individual DNA and memories, the map (in their theory) will be capable of predicting what each individual will do, perhaps before they even know themselves. All threats, criminal, terroristic or revolutionary, will then be anticipated and neutralised before they can manifest. The SWS is a crystal ball for totalitarians, infinitely more sophisticated than any paper map or filing system: a representation of the world to control the world — of Baudrillard’s second order of simulations, then, the order of malefice. The creation of a simulacrum with the intent of using it to control the entity on which it is modelled — isn’t that the essence of sorcery?
It’s easy enough to imagine how the DNA of every person on the planet could be acquired — by nasal swabs in a global pandemic, for instance — but their memories? Surely that’s impossible.
Not a word much favoured by totalitarians.
Agent-driven, continuously updated, the Sentient World Simulation is a mirror-model of reality from multiple perspectives, mapping nuanced causal flows to enable not just analysis of the present but prediction of the future.
A living map of the Empire of the Mind.
Dynamic. Integrated. Responsive.
Holistic. Fractal. Granular.
Semantic. Sentient. Prescient.
Who knows the present knows the future.
The Perfection of Cartography.
∆
In 2008 when I was captured, it was already 2551.
What does the scanner see?
Not just the disaffected teacher, but the disaffection of the teacher. Why the teacher is disaffected. What the disaffected teacher will do next.
How many cigarettes left in that pack, and where he smoked each one.
Not just his name, his contacts, his history: his genetic code, his health, his teeth; his obsessions, his anxieties, his addictions, his ambitions; his beliefs, his pain, his threat potential.
Everything he thought only God knew about him.
Not that he believes in God.
Not yet, anyway…
Crazy, right? Just another Dr Strangelove fantasy, scientists and generals reeling drunk on the intoxication of data.
Could never happen.
Could it?
I don’t know. Better ask the Sentient World Simulation.