Context: Mapping for a sustainable world
Reflection: Whenever cartography is mentioned, I am reminded of the Tom Stoppard play in which Guildenstern asserts England as “just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?”
Question: Granted that science and rational analysis (as much as constructive disagreement) depends quite implicitly upon metrics, measurements, differences and distances as the constitutive formulation of a concept of information without which our current era could hardly be (or become) intelligible, does the endless iteration into branching definitions and simulation as taxonomies of scale and categorical diversity have an entirely unexpected and rarely acknowledged effect of driving us all quite palpably further away from any kind of unified or unifying conceptual vocabulary?
Coda: We find ourselves inhabiting a hyper-inflating referential space of measurement and analysis. The aggregate (and swelling) entropy as combinatorial complexity of all of this provides value and utility to civilisation in inverse proportion to that extent that it incurs the costs of thermodynamic waste, cognitive alienation and environmental disassembly. There is a conspicuous absence of unifying comprehension here. Unity is not a technical artefact, it is an ontological intuition
Daedelus Kite 