By showing the territories from above, the cartographer takes an artificial “objective” point of view. He/she stops being just a “regular inhabitant” who lives in the world to become an observer, as well as a reporter. Just like the photographer or the painter, the map maker turns into a messenger bringing back data “from above” to the people “on the ground”. Its not meaningless, and its certainly never purely objective.

First maps were used more to conquest and distribute resources than for anything else. There is something very powerful about being the one to draw everybody’s land, to trace borders, to delimit people’s possessions. The one looking from above has more visibility. He gets the “big picture” of things. When human beings began to map their world, they start to act like “planet’s managers” and not just as passive creatures.

Humanity shifted then from the scale of immediacy (what you…