The technology of representing spatial relationships on a surface — one of the oldest cognitive and political tools in human history, a technology that does not merely describe territory but creates it: setting borders, asserting sovereignty, enabling navigation, organizing colonial space, and shaping how people understand their place in the world.
Every map is an argument. The Mercator projection — still the default in most online mapping applications — makes Europe and North America appear much larger than they are and Africa much smaller. This is not an error: it was a useful distortion for navigation. But when it became the default image of the world in schools and offices, it encoded a geography of relative importance that had nothing to do with area. Maps have always been made from somewhere by someone for some purpose. Understanding them requires asking who made them, who they were made for, and what they were made to do.