William Rankin. After the Map

How do we come to know where we are? Or, for that matter, how to get to where we want to be? The terms of location have changed dramatically over the past century due to technological innovation, cartographic standardization, and global infrastructures of communication, navigation, surveillance, and command and control military systems. The technologies of “location” are not simple. But for many today it is difficult to imagine a moment before the smartphone, before immediate precision location technologies or automated systems connecting people, places, and things in real time on close to a planetary scale. What would it be like to return to that long-lost world of analog systems, of paper maps, verbal directions, and guesswork for location rather than following the dot on a handheld computer connected to a world wide web, a chain of geosynchronous satellites, and dedicated imaging applications? For those with access to commercial information systems, the sheer force of technological revolution has produced a remarkable resetting of everyday sensibilities, formed out of an accelerating reconceptualization of communication, travel, and commerce via the overwhelming power of immediate precision location. Pause here, just for a moment, to consider major innovations of the past decade tied to location—the smartphone, social media platforms, and drone warfare, each of which is now a vital structure inside of advanced globalization, creating new forms of connectivity, communication, and violence. These technical systems have emerged without serious public debate, absorbed into a Euro-American everyday life, seemingly without either collective worry about their disruptive effects or anticipation of the new forms of violence or inequality that they enable around the world. Such projects participate in a longue durée effort by industrial military powers to create precision location capabilities and new cartographic sensibilities, to connect people, places, and things with increasing accuracy and real-time situational awareness—to make place easy and fast, and territorial vision precise, instant, and utilitarian.

Data science · Emerging technologies · Geography · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies