It is easy to forget that (0) MAPPING (MAP) the world has never been a purely technical exercise. Any cartographic 1REPRESENT inevitably embeds a set of 2POLITICS choices about what to show and what to omit, and maps have therefore been 3DECEIVE persuasive instruments of statecraft for centuries. The very 4PROJECT used to flatten a spherical earth onto a page — Mercator, Peters, Robinson and the rest — are anything but 5BIAS: each exaggerates certain landmasses at the expense of others, subtly shaping the mental geography of everyone who grows up looking at them. Even the most 6SELECT choice of which borders to draw in solid lines and which in dotted ones carries diplomatic weight. Historians of 7COLONY mapping have shown how such decisions were often openly ideological, and modern digital cartographers readily admit that the 8NEUTRAL popularly ascribed to their online successors is, at best, a convenient fiction.