The Road Map to Brave New World: Cartography and Fordism from Gulf Oil to Google
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1793307Keywords:
Abstraction, cartography, capitalism, Fordism, Google, technologyAbstract
This paper explores the shifting practices in and between cartography and capitalism. It compares two road maps of the same territory created one-hundred years apart; a Gulf Oil map from 1915 and a Google Map from 2015. These representations of space serve as entry points into examining some of the larger transformations that have occurred within capitalism over the century. I am interested in how the classic world order of Fordism has been reconstituted by cybernetic capitalism. I argue that the world order has been intensified and reorganised on a more abstract level, with profound subjective and material consequences.
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