This is an article I originally wrote for Ymag.

Ion Bitzan, Map (1978)

It's no surprise Polis has recently opened one of their articles with the same Jorge Luis Borges quote as Jean Baudrillard did in his introduction to "Simulacra and Simulation". The quote comes from a story about an insanely detailed 1:1 scale map of an empire, eventually shredding apart and leaving scattered remains on the very soil it used to discipline.

The reason why Borges' vision is so important today is not only the recent popularization of mapping, especially on the internet, but its evolution into a virtualized and pervasive layer overlapping with both our online and offline experiences. If Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", although focused on architectural design and civil engineering, has also influenced software writers, augmented space and virtuality make the conceptual relationship between city design and network design intersecting rather than isomorphic.

Not only have mapping aesthetics – especially urban – evolved into a more seductive 3d form (in both games like GTA or softwares like Google Earth): with the emergence of augmented reality, mobile applications, and the evolution of online gaming communities (like the recently launched Monopoly City Streets), it's also becoming more and more relevant in terms of economic investment. Further proof of this are the recent launch of Google Building Maker (which on the long run – who knows – might probably evolve into a user-generated resource for Google to create a spectacular and geo-referenced advertising environment) and the many procedural 3d modeling tools being launched in these days, allowing automatic design of virtual cities for both leisure and commercial purposes.

Cartography is no longer just a category of visualization with merely practical implications, but has gained the status of a new dimension, where both ludic and commercial needs can be fulfilled. To borrow concepts from Pierre Levy and Baudrillard, it has virtualized into a simulacrum.

For Levy, virtualization means a focus shift from actual to virtual, from solution to problem, from tree to seed. It's a structural change in the approach to things, from reading to the management of work and communication. And like Levy's virtual, Baudrillard's simulacrum also matters despite its immateriality. Even though it's not actual, it is as real to us as if it were tangible: "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." Simulacra are the symptom of the disintegration of reality into its representation, now impossible to distinguish from the original: "it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map."

Prostitutes on Second Life

Urban aesthetics have successfully plugged into our imagery, but, along with the subversive and recreational claims of Debord and the Situationists (whose psychogeography is now carried on by iPhone apps like Phantom City and the Mental Map Flickr Pool), they are now also legitimized by the market. The intersection of today's internet maps with our reality, the reason why they matter just as they were real territories, is the way they can be interwoven with advertising. As long as we can spend or earn money inside an environment (Steven Shaviro's analysis of the economies of virtual environments like Second Life in his paper Money for Nothing is definitely worth reading) it is real for us, and it generates real relations with the rest of the world. I'm far from saying maps are becoming just another form of advertising (there are so many different applications today it wouldn't make much sense), but there is no doubt that, more than their imaginative and creative potential, it's their growing economic appeal to make them more and more real this days. For now, let's just keep Baudrillard's simulacra in mind.