Few things are relied on more than maps. We drop pins so our friends can find the right pub. We use Google Maps to make sure we know the way home after the pub. We look at maps to plan trips and post them on our socials to brag about where we’ve been.
But do maps deserve our trust?
Or are maps like our buddy Ryan, who absolutely swore he was at the right pub despite having received the same pin six times, but instead was at a place called the Rusted Dog, where he proceeded to lose his phone and wander around Hackney for six hours because…wait for it…he wasn’t able to navigate without a map despite having lived in Hackney since COVID.
Ryan’s excuse when he resurfaced on his socials a day later: “I wasn’t lost. Lost means ‘not knowing where I am.’ I knew bloody well where I was, I just wasn’t sure where my ‘was’ actually, you know…was.”
But more than Ryan’s adventures in East London, are we right to trust maps so much?
Historically, maps have been spectacularly unreliable guides to where we are going, where we’ve been, or even where we are right now. Nations go to war over lines on a map, Temu Mussolini refuses to use the words “Ontario” or “Mexico” when referring to various bodies of water, and some of Jeremiah’s books were recently pulled from a shipment to his home in China because the customs service felt the maps didn’t conform to the Chinese Communist Party’s idiosyncratic view of where its borders should be drawn and in what color. Colonial powers renamed places, drew maps that benefited their own strategic purposes while ignoring on-the-ground realities or the input of the people who lived in the places being mapped, and the consequences of these maps reverberate today.
We discussed the Mercator Map in the episode, but we have a feeling this won’t be the last time this podcast brings up how to render a round Earth on a flat map with artificial (and often arbitrary) lines drawn across it.
That said, we will never do maps as well as these two blokes who run what is now one of our favourite YouTube channels: Map Men. I’ve linked to some of their posts above, but do check out their other episodes.
In the meantime, check out the bits we saved from the episode just for paid subscribers, plus images of the maps we discussed, so you get a sense of how crazy cartography can get.
