The Road Map to Brave New World: Cartography and Fordism from Gulf Oil to Google

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Abstraction
• cartography
• capitalism
• Fordism
• Google
• technology