When California Was an Island: Peter Keating on the Cartography That Maps How We See the World

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. As always, I am broadcasting from my home in San Francisco in Northern California on the West Coast of the United States, the West Coast of the continental United States. However, if we were doing this broadcast, which seems relatively unlikely in the sixteenth century, many maps of the continental United States, which was then, of course, just continental America, wasn't even really America, was made by the Spanish, to look like an island. California was represented as an island, which I guess, for many people in America, California remains, at least in symbolic terms, an island, if not a literal geographical one. It's an interesting idea, the notion of California as an island. It teaches us about the power of maps, and that's what we're talking about today. There's a new book out this week, a wonderfully illustrated book with some fascinating observations about maps. It's called Power Lines: Maps That Shape the Way We See the World. In other words, reversing the traditional narrative. It's written by, a long-time ESPN journalist, the best guy on the East Coast — currently talking to us from another island, Long Island, just off the coast of New York, Peter Keating. Peter, congratulations on the new book. What do these, sixteenth century maps of California which present it as an island. What do they teach us about, the way in which sixteenth century people saw the world?

00:02:14 Peter Keating: Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. And, yeah, I think that, first and most fundamentally, they represent a jarring realization that today, maps are so functional, so utilitarian. I mean, Google Maps use maps to figure out how to drive to dinner. Right? Or maybe, you know, what the quickest flight is to get some place. Maps back then were communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. And so, they convey this imaginative energy. And, you know, go back before the sixteenth century, when Europeans were struggling with the idea that there was another landmass over where the Americas turned out to be and how to adjust your world view. You know, back in the middle ages, these maps that I look at in the book called T and O maps had Jerusalem at their center and the biblically admitted lands of Europe, Africa, and Asia, arrayed around the middle of the world. And people had to decide what to do with the fact that there was actually territory over West. And for a long time, their imaginations admitted that this could be some kind of long shaped island, and that's what California looked like. But it took a while for people to realize that this is actually a whole continent that the Americas were kind of out there in the middle of the world between the borders of their imaginations. And this gets to the question of, people using maps to say, I live here, you live there, here's the line between us. And then that leads to all kinds of maps about borders and wars and colonization and imperialism and independence. But before any of that can happen, you have to kind of stake out the dominion. You have to figure out who's where. And for a long time, the Americas themselves and then California at the edge of that seemed just like a big island as opposed to the huge territory that they really are.

00:04:30 Andrew Keen: If there's anything really changed there, of course, was that famous New Yorker cover back in 1976, actually, in the nadir, I think, of New York history, when America was portrayed essentially as New York, the Hudson River, and then the Pacific Ocean with a little little bit of territory in between. California was barely recognized. Are maps always manifestations of power, senses of superiority, Peter? Do we ever or let me reverse the question. The people making the maps I mean, obviously, the New Yorker map is a form of, humor. But do mapmakers or have mapmakers mapmakers ever underestimated themselves, made themselves less important than than they seem to be?

00:05:22 Peter Keating: Well, there's this constant tension. It's kind of a tension throughout Western history between, people centering, what they know, what they believe, where they believe their lands are from, where they believe their gods reside, right in the center of maps. That's one long tradition. What you might call a cosmographical tradition, where everything important to you is at the middle of the world, and that's how you create the maps and everything radiates out from that. But there is another tradition, both starting out in ancient China and also in ancient Greece where, scientific inquiry mattered a lot. Because if you're looking to expand, if you're a general or a king looking to expand your territory, you don't want a fantastical or allegorical representation of what you're gonna face when you get to the edge of your territory. You wanna know what's there. Right? If you're looking for minerals, if you're looking for fish, if you're looking for new land, if you're looking for places to conquer, if you're just looking for enemies that might be threatening you, you kinda wanna know in a scientific way what's out there. So there's these two traditions constantly in tension — almost a religious aspect of the world saying, here's what we know we believe in and we're going to center that, as opposed to a tradition which reaches an apex with Ptolemy. You know, something like nearly two thousand years ago, Ptolemy was doing maps of the known world that you would recognize instantly as really accurate maps of Europe. Now, he was wrong about the shapes and scales of some things, but then again, he was working at a time where there was no way to tell what was happening with the sunset three miles away. Right? So the Ptolemaic works are amazing and represent, like, this triumph of science in Greek culture. And there were great mapping projects representing that strain of thought, like, how we're gonna objectively they lay this out, the search for truth, if you will, that also happened in ancient China. Those are subsumed to what you're talking about, which is — we believe this to be true, therefore, we're going to center it and we're gonna mix in, fantasy and lore and tradition along with geographic inquiry, and that tradition dominated, what we used to call the middle ages. That was a very strong tradition. You know, once the Greeks turned into the Roman empire and the Romans were taken over by Christianity, things became a lot more allegorical. You know, geography was not really represented.

00:08:13 Andrew Keen: Yeah, I agree. We've done so many shows on the Greeks. In fact, we have one running next week on Athens and Sparta. So, in terms of the book Power Lines: Maps That Shape the Way We See the World — did this convince you, Peter, that geography does or doesn't matter? I mean, it's an ongoing debate amongst historians and geographers and cultural historians of one kind or another, economic historians. Do you think that geography matters? Does this new, wonderfully illustrated book that shows the way various maps over the last couple of thousand years have shaped the way we see the world — does it suggest that geography does or doesn't matter? I mean, there is such a thing as geography. I mean, America as a continent exists. Whatever you think of California being an island.

00:09:11 Peter Keating: Yes. Geography matters a lot. I'm not particularly deterministic about any single explanation of history. Geography is one of the things that matter a lot. One of the questions I got involved with in this, basically, out of my own curiosity was, what country has been wiped off maps most often yet remained intact or alive in imagination until it became alive again politically? And the answer which you're showing now is Poland. I mean

00:09:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So, you've got a whole section of the book. Poland is the most erased country in the world, and we did a show recently on Poland, of course.

00:09:50 Peter Keating: And so, I mean, you know better than anyone, Poland sits on this large area of plains surrounded by powerful enemies. Right? Who are culturally more aggressive and culturally and geographically better defended, who every couple of 100 years decide to just partition, divide up, conquer, subjugate Poland. Poland has managed to disappear at least three times, but has come back. So geography matters directly in that case because

00:10:25 Andrew Keen: In a sense, of course, it does because, I mean, and Germans and Russians and Ukrainians and Swedes and Danes and everybody else will argue about whether there really is such a place as Poland or what it is. But even when what we now call Poland was occupied by the Habsburg Empire or the Russian Empire or the Soviet Empire or the Nazi Empire, the idea of Poland always existed in people's hearts. They listened to Chopin.

00:10:55 Peter Keating: Yes.

00:10:56 Andrew Keen: So my point about whether geography matters is even if Poland's geography doesn't exist, it still exists in people's hearts.

00:11:06 Peter Keating: Right. So it matters, but it doesn't matter exclusively. It doesn't matter deterministically. It matters because it leads to events that matter and that shape people's lives and deaths, but doesn't necessarily kill off an idea. I mean, the triumph of the Polish idea is quite remarkable given the overwhelming force of the various places that have conquered it, yet it still exists. And the map you just showed is an interesting example. It's a map of, Poland as a carnation. And in Polish, it says — you know, we just passed May Day — it says, 'May 1, a celebration day for the entire nation.' Now, this map was produced in 1956 — when, of course, the communists are running Poland under Soviet domination. So is this map a communist map? It was produced by a publishing house that was run by the communist government. It's a May Day celebration map. It's in red. But, you know, May 1 is also the feast, day of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of workers. And red, carnations are associated with the labor movement inside and outside of socialism. And red isn't just the color of the communist, it's also the color of blood. So I think it's very easy to see this map as a subversive product, an anti-communist map masquerading as a happy face under communism.

00:12:40 Andrew Keen: And perhaps that captures Poland in 1956. Of course, there was a rebellion against the

00:12:46 Peter Keating: Right.

00:12:46 Andrew Keen: Soviets in Hungary, and there was

00:12:48 Peter Keating: In that very year.

00:12:49 Andrew Keen: A rebellion in Poland and the appearance of national communist leaders in Poland. Thinking of that one — do you include any maps of Israel, Palestine, or did you sidestep that one, Peter? It's a bit of a third rail when it comes to maps and politics.

00:13:07 Peter Keating: It is.

00:13:09 Andrew Keen: A third rail. Given the way that, at least, the idea of Palestine or the Holy Land existed supposedly in the heart of Jews throughout history. Although, of course, Zionism as a formal political ideology was only born at the beginning of the twentieth century.

00:13:25 Peter Keating: Well, I included the Sykes-Picot map —

00:13:28 Andrew Keen: Oh, brilliant.

00:13:30 Peter Keating: — which, during World War One, negotiators between Britain and France decided how they were gonna carve up the Middle East. And this happened even though, Britain had guaranteed, support for the rebels in the Ottoman Empire, which was working, on the side of the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians in World War One. They were part of the Central Powers. But there was an Arab revolt going on in the Ottoman Empire, and the British had promised support — for what was going to be broken apart, becoming Turkey — and they had promised support for the Arabs. And when the Arabs found out that the British and the French had actually secretly divided up the land instead, they were infuriated, and there are factions that have remained infuriated by that for the past hundred years. I mean, there there was a video that surfaced of, ISIS militia, warriors, blowing stuff up and saying, this is the end of Sykes-Picot. And I mean, it's interesting because the Sykes-Picot map itself with these bright lines, straight lines that these guys just drew on a table. Yeah. There's the map, and you can see the straight lines have

00:14:47 Andrew Keen: Look at me, just listening. We're looking at a Wikipedia map of Sykes-Picot.

00:14:53 Peter Keating: Right. And it's different, you know, they colored in the regions they were going to get, and they drew straight lines that didn't respect geography, and they just divvied it up. It is a wonderful example of the crass, casual callousness of colonialism, and it has become a touchstone of fury for people in the region ever since. And the interesting thing is, there were other agreements to divide up the Middle East, and the Sykes-Picot lines never actually became reality. But because this map exists and because it was leaked, the Russians after the Russian revolution, the communists had no desire to help out the British or the French, so they didn't mind that the secret map became published. The publication of the map itself has been something that has fueled —

00:15:47 Andrew Keen: Picot and Sykes were classic colonialists drawing up the map — although their bosses were probably to blame. And in terms of the Balfour Declaration — who got Palestine? Did the Jews get Palestine? Did the Palestinians get Palestine? Did —

00:16:04 Peter Keating: Yeah. Well, you'll see there's — I believe it's the red areas and the blue areas are for British and French men. You'll see a little yellow area on this map also that was for the Holy Land, and that was for a mandate for Palestine that I believe was going to be administered by the League of Nations or a separate territory. And, of course, that never exactly panned out either. But even back then

00:16:31 Andrew Keen: Balfour. Right?

00:16:32 Peter Keating: Yeah. And at the same time, the British are issuing the Balfour Declaration. They're also, you know, carving up all the rest of this land for themselves.

00:16:39 Andrew Keen: And it's not alone. I mean, after the breakup of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Tsarist empires after the First World War, Eastern Europe was also carved up — maybe not quite with the cynicism of Sykes-Picot, but the creation of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, two countries that no longer exist, the drawing of the map so that Hungary lost much of Transylvania. I mean, this is the history of the world, isn't it, Peter?

00:17:06 Peter Keating: Yes. Although, in putting your finger on that specific era, the post-World War One era is the height of: we've settled the big war. Let's let's plot out the future by all the winning leaders getting in a room and drawing up a map. The number of nations created on the maps of the drawing room tables after World War One, at an all-time high. That was when, you know, all of the western leaders got together and said, we're gonna give these folks their the nationalists in these areas, including Poland, the right to their own countries, and we're gonna carve up this and call it Czechoslovakia. We're gonna just make up some names. We're gonna call this this chunk of land Bulgaria. And, so that is kind of the peak moment where mapping itself becomes a function of, you know, the post-war settlement and peace process.

00:18:05 Andrew Keen: Well, there was always the fear of Russia whether it was Soviet Union or Imperial Russia. Another of your maps in the book is of the Russian octopus in the nineteenth century from 1877 the idea of Russia threatening Europe again. We could reproduce this map in the age of Putin in Ukraine, and it wouldn't look that different.

00:18:26 Peter Keating: No. It's really interesting. Back, you know — most of this book is presented thematically, but not by type of art, but I had to make an exception for the octopus map specifically in the late nineteen hundreds. It's kind of a boom in representing countries as animals on maps and these pictorial maps. And, there was a guy named Fred Rose who was a British illustrator, and he actually had two sons die in World War One. And in the late eighteen hundreds, he started drawing these maps, fitting together images of, you know, Corsica and Sardinia as the pope and his mitre hat and, you know, images like that. He created the first octopus map, and the octopus has been represented many times and many things in the years since. But the first and most memorable one is probably this big looming ugly ochre-colored octopus representing Russia. And in this map, Russia has one tentacle around Finland and another one around Poland, and its arms are extending. And, this looming fear of this creepy creature, has persisted basically ever since. You're right. You could do an octopus map today, and you'd probably make Russia the octopus. Right?

00:19:43 Andrew Keen: Well, some of us would. I probably would. So — we talked about the Roman and Greek ways of mapping the world and, of course, the Mediterranean, which was essentially their world at the time. Where do we, date the beginning of the modern map? Many people I know go back to the Peace of Westphalia and the creation of the famous map of Europe — is this where we can begin to understand maps in their modern, perhaps even scientific, certainly national form?

00:20:17 Peter Keating: Yes, that's the key — in their national form, it goes back to Westphalia in 1648. What's fascinating to me, what was fascinating to me is realizing, like, I looked at a lot of old maps and there's something back of my head saying something is different about these older maps before the Thirty Years' War and afterwards. And I finally realized there are maps there are plenty of political maps from the fourteen hundreds or fifteen hundreds or earlier, but they don't have interior borders. Because Westphalia essentially created the nation state, you actually have two color or multicolor maps saying, here's France with a line around France, and here's Spain with a different colored line

00:21:04 Andrew Keen: And this and this looking at this map for people just listening, you have to imagine the map of Europe at the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, or look at it on your Internet — the map of Europe looks pretty much as it is almost five hundred years later. France, England, Spain, Portugal, they're all in the form of —

00:21:26 Peter Keating: Yeah, that's what's amazing. Britain, Sweden, parts of Turkey, parts of Russia, Germany, France, all these countries, there there have been big wars fought over the specific details of where those borders are, but essentially, you know, they look very much the same as they were laid out in 1648. Now I will say there are critically important maps from before that. They just weren't for the purposes of dividing up European nation states. Probably the biggest one that I tried to make into a heroic image because it's just so beautiful and so big and so important was the Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1493 where basically, Spain just after Columbus reaches the Western Hemisphere, Columbus and, Spain and Portugal basically divvy up the entire Western world. And, of course, the draw line on this beautiful map, and we don't even really know who illustrated the map. It was it was, the research for this beautiful map from 1493, was done in Italy and Portugal. And this map is created, and the pope signs off on this because he was the only guy who could actually mediate this. Although, at that time, the pope was involved with the Borgia family, and it was all kinds of intrigue. But basically, Spain and Portugal say, here's this line. Right? And everything to one side of the line is Portuguese, and everything to the other side of the line is Spain. And, that essentially is what creates the conditions for Brazil to exist and remain a Portuguese speaking country until today. And because, again, this idea that the Americas were so much vaster than they realized at that time, it ended up giving the Spanish rights to all the rest of the Americas.

00:23:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, you could argue I'm not sure if you would, Peter. You know a lot more about this than I do, that this was the most that this Treaty of Tordesillas and the map associated with it dividing up the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese was the most consequential map in history for better or worse?

00:23:41 Peter Keating: Well, it's one of them. And, it's one of them because it dictated who had rights to what, but also by forestalling war between the Spanish and the Portuguese. The English and the French and the other colonizers of what we call the new world of the Americas, they didn't like this agreement. They didn't really want to abide by it. What it became was what we now call the doctrine of discovery. That basically, because of this agreement, the first Christians to land on a chunk of land anywhere in the Americas had the right to claim it. So this essentially sets the stage not for endless war in the Americas, although there were big wars especially between the English and the French, but, basically, if you claim to discover the land, you got there first, you could own it. And that set the stage for the English and the French

00:24:40 Andrew Keen: I mean, Drake — that was the perfect opportunity for Drake, of course. I don't know if he was the first European to set foot in California, but he certainly, quote unquote, discovered California — Drake. Yes, I think essentially as a pirate. I mean, maybe appropriately, given Silicon Valley and California as a kind of political entrepreneur.

00:25:06 Peter Keating: Absolutely. And what you might find interesting is that idea, finders keepers, basically. Right? That indigenous peoples had no right to the land unto themselves. It's the first Westerners to land there who could claim dominion over that territory. That made its way into colonial law and then into American law. And there's a court case as recently as the nineteen nineties that said, there's a Native American tribe that, didn't wanna pay taxes on a particular chunk of land. And the Supreme Court of the United States, as recently as this century or late last century, said, no. According to the doctrine of discovery, which is incorporated into our laws, even if you have certain political rights, they come basically as a gift of the federal government because the US government is the one who owns this land going back to the days when if you discovered it, you owned it.

00:26:05 Andrew Keen: So maybe in a way, Peter, the most interesting maps are the ones that we ignore, like Elizabeth the first, of course, in encouraging her pirates like — or sort of entrepreneurial pirates like Drake ignored maps, which is why they got away with what they got away with.

00:26:23 Peter Keating: Yeah. And, you know, it's funny because or not funny, but it's interesting that pattern repeats itself. It repeats — you know, you're talking about colonial times.

00:26:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah.

00:26:33 Peter Keating: That dynamic repeats itself again in Africa, in industrial times, when the Europeans are in this scramble for Africa. And again, they got together — they literally got together in a conference in Berlin and didn't divvy up the continent, but set the rules for the engagement so that, each country could go in and say, this is mine. You know? The Belgians, with their insanely avaricious king, wanted the entire basin of the Congo River.

00:27:04 Andrew Keen: Not more than avaricious, mass murdering king. It may not be an irony given what you've talked about Poland before that the guy who created at least in a metaphorical state the most dystopian map of colonial Africa was a Pole, Joseph Conrad.

00:27:21 Peter Keating: Indeed. Yes. And, you know, you're making me think of the final map in the book. I wasn't sure how many maps I wanted to include in this book, and we got to almost 100.

00:27:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I can imagine I can imagine you needed to be shackled by your editor or publisher because this could have gone on forever.

00:27:40 Peter Keating: Shackled? The, you know, the editors were always so lovely. They never said, here's the hard cap. Here's a round number. Stick to this. I'll tell you who shackled me was my family. My family reached a limit of me coming to dinner and identifying every engagement of conversation as: 'a map!'

00:27:57 Andrew Keen: We just got one more. I promise this is the last one. Right?

00:28:00 Peter Keating: The Thirty Years' War, Imperial Japan — every new discovery that I was making, learning about things for the first time, they reached enough. But I'll tell you, I always knew how I wanted this book to end, which was I wanted it to end on a map of Antarctica. Because Antarctica is a great success story in international relations because countries got together and decided to set it aside, not turn it into a mining or an atom bomb testing or a missile testing site. But by the time negotiations over that started, there were already some conflicting claims to Antarctica. And what's great about the Antarctic Treaty is it didn't settle those claims. If Chile said we own this, but the British said no, we own this, they just drew the lines and left them there. It's very much like if you and I were next door neighbors and there was a tree on our border and you and I decided, we're not gonna decide whether you own the tree or I own the tree. We're just gonna make sure the tree doesn't die. And this is a great success story. The map is cool because at the South Pole, all the lines going south converge. So all the territories are wedge-shaped. It's like a pie chart. But, of course, the only reason that works is because nobody lives there. Right? So this political division from above onto territory via maps can succeed, but only if there's no population there.

00:29:36 Andrew Keen: Right. And on the other side of the coin, your book could just as easily have ended with a map of Greenland. And I guess in an environmental sense, Peter, the interesting thing about a map of either the Arctic or the Antarctic is the fact that it's disappearing.

00:29:58 Peter Keating: Yeah. Well, that raises the question. I mean, in a global sense, people are moving toward the poles and away from the areas of the Earth that are being parched and destroyed an acre at a time, year by year. And what does that do to borders? Does it make you know? And there are two ways. These two things are going on at the same time. One is that there's an overwhelming recognition that modern problems demand more work across borders to fight climate change, pandemics, migration, the troubles that come with migration, you name it. But at the same time, obviously, right, they're also triggering this really strong backlash. Right now, there are more physical borders, fences, walls, blockades than there ever have been in human history. And as recently as the nineteen nineties, it looked like things might be going the other direction. But I don't know which way that ends up. Like, the net change, like, do we do borders eventually weaken a little bit because we need cooperation to survive, or are they just gonna get thicker and stronger and more armed and more dangerous, which is certainly the trend over the past few years? And that's the huge open question at the end of this book. Like, what do political maps look like when borders have to be in flux, but people don't want them to be, you know, just how settled are we where we live right now? It doesn't

00:31:29 Andrew Keen: But anyway, it also reflects the fact that history never ends. I mean Fukuyama famously talked about the end of history when the Berlin Wall fell And I know you've got a section in the book on the Berlin Wall But as you say with the fall of the wall the walls have come back up elsewhere and in some ways even when you go to Berlin there are different kinds of walls, neoliberal walls, gentrification walls, political walls, ethnic walls. So walls never really go away, do they? Which is why geography is so interesting and important, why it matters.

00:32:06 Peter Keating: Yeah. The Berlin Wall map is fun when you look at this book, because the Berlin Wall itself is represented basically as a thick red brick line. It's totally out of scale, but it feels right that there's a line of brick and barbed wire. It's just a fun map. And there's another map that goes with it from an East German Atlas from the nineteen eighties, where West Berlin is basically shown as a big white gap, a hole in the map. And it's funny, but it's also a lesson that these things can't really be erased. Right? And totalitarians have tried again and again to weaponize geography, weaponize the transmission of this information. And I'll tell you, nobody did it better than the Nazis.

00:32:57 Andrew Keen: I know you have a whole section — a couple of maps in the book of

00:33:01 Peter Keating: Yeah. I mean

00:33:02 Andrew Keen: Nazi German maps of 1933, which, of course, reflect not the Nazi obsession with the Jews. What do the Nazi maps of 1933 Germany tell us, Peter?

00:33:13 Peter Keating: Well, they're shockingly modern. There's a map in the book of, Hitler speaking tour in 1933 that I swear looks like a souvenir from a modern rock concert.

00:33:26 Andrew Keen: Maybe Stephen Miller designed it.

00:33:30 Peter Keating: Well, they also were expert at the manipulation of populist history for their own purposes. So, there is a fantastic map that shows the German migration into Eastern Europe, it's supposed to be a historical map, but the lines look like invasion routes. Because what it really is, is an argument that anywhere Germans went in Europe, Germany should be able to own and take by force. And so what the Nazi map evolution shows is as they took more and more control through state power of the development and publication of maps, their rhetoric as expressed through the maps got more and more aggressive and finally eliminationist. And so, it's scary actually. And at the end, when the Nazis are in their death throes, I have a map. It's the most disgusting map in the whole book, which shows, a horrible, caricatured bug with one eye as a dollar sign and another eye as a hammer and sickle devouring Europe. It was called Vermin, and it's a propaganda map suggesting — well, no, not suggesting — portraying Jewish power as an American Russian conspiracy come to kill the motherland.

00:34:52 Andrew Keen: And ironically, it's not that different from the Frederick Rose map of the Russian octopus. I mean, it's certainly more vulgar and more hateful, but it's not fundamentally different, is it?

00:35:04 Peter Keating: I think the vermin map is, you know, it's an interesting question. Like, how qualitatively different should we say Nazi rhetoric is? It stood out to me as being a particularly sharp and vulgar use. But, you know, that gets into the question of are, you know, intentionally or not — a lot of geographic portrayals of anything carry persuasive power. Right? Because somebody's doing the map for some reason. And we've seen even the most utility-driven maps — You look up Google, you see Gulf of America. I mean, Google Maps are now carrying ideological messages. So, yes, I think you're right. All maps can carry these messages, because the Nazi message was particularly vile, and they were particularly attuned to how to use state power. And also, let's face it, good graphics. I mean, there were talented mapmakers and cartographers and artists working for the Nazi regime.

00:36:07 Andrew Keen: Right. And videographers, of course. I wonder when you compare and contrast Nazi use of map in Eastern Europe where their hideous, hateful colonization and mass murder, of course, was wasn't something they were ashamed with. But the Soviet representation of the maps of Eastern Europe after the Second World War when they weren't really supposed to control Eastern Europe and they half pretended to create independent Polish and Czech and Hungarian regimes. Did you get a chance to look at Soviet maps of Eastern Europe in the Cold War period?

00:36:46 Peter Keating: Yeah. What's fascinating about that — you're right, it's a tell. The tell on these maps is that, Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and these nations that were actually under Russian domination are portrayed as democracies, but not independent. And

00:37:11 Andrew Keen: They called them I think they called them people's democracies.

00:37:14 Peter Keating: People's Republic, by the way. People's Republic of Bulgaria, the People's Republic, People's Republic of Romania. And so in one sense, you know, there's a fantastic map of, of arrows coming from all over the world to show the projection of American military power threatening the Soviet Union. And, and it represents a counterweight to some of the kind of American dominated, post-war maps. But then you see, you know, these countries of Poland and Romania and Eastern Europe were actually not free, you know. So, so it's interesting because at the same time that these maps are trying to show America threatening the world and then Russians under grave threat, they also can't help but represent the iron grip that the Soviets had over those countries. The Cold War maps are fantastic because the war was cold. These are not battle maps. Right? So the ideological battle has to be —

00:38:22 Andrew Keen: Right. And as we speak, as we're speaking of Cold War maps, I'm actually talking to you from Korea, and I'm, later this week gonna go and visit the DMZ, which

00:38:34 Peter Keating: Oh, wow.

00:38:34 Andrew Keen: Still remains the map of maps, the legacy of the Cold War. Right?

00:38:39 Peter Keating: Yes. So I got a standard old regular map. You know, most maps show the DMZ as a thick line across the peninsula, almost as though the defining feature of Korea is this line. But I was able to find a map drawn in 1969 by the CIA of a close-up, large scale detailed map of the DMZ itself. And, showing old towns, old railways, old buildings that were now ghost towns. And it's a topographical map as well as a political map, so you can tell that it's hilly and dangerous and empty. And it's great because it shows that, this must have been a terrible place to fight a war, you know. And it's and it was emptied out by the settlement of the war. So the DMZ is fascinating. And as you, I mean, you probably know all about this. There were a couple of tunnels built under the DMZ. They've now mostly turned into tourist attractions. And the DMZ itself after, and it's still very dangerous, but after being known as the most dangerous place in the world for decades, is now kind of regenerating flora and fauna and unusual animals because it's been emptied of people. So, it's a really interesting stretch.

00:39:58 Andrew Keen: Well, I'll try and get some photos and run it alongside this interview when I put it up in a couple of days. That'd

00:40:04 Peter Keating: be great. Have a great trip. How — I mean, did it take a lot of special work to try to get

00:40:09 Andrew Keen: No. We are — I'm in Korea, in South Korea, so anyone can go to the DMZ. I'm not going into

00:40:15 Peter Keating: North Korea.

00:40:16 Andrew Keen: I'm just going to the DMZ. When it comes to violence, of course, America prides itself, on not being violent, but, I know you've got some maps which reflect American violence too. You've got a fascinating map of Chicago, in which you call the map that whacked itself.

00:40:34 Peter Keating: I don't know. This is

00:40:35 Andrew Keen: How do maps reflect violence, especially gang violence in a place like Chicago, which is, of course, in some ways the central historically, the center of gang violence in the US.

00:40:46 Peter Keating: This is a great map that shows, and it's very tongue-in-cheek. You know, it's sing a song of gangsters, is a parody of a song that's printed around its edge. It shows gun runners, it shows explosions, it shows, skull and crossbones where there were massacres, it lists all of these different, Chicago lore events on the map. It's crammed with funny references to bootleggers and gun runners, and it was produced right before the World's Fair was gonna come to Chicago. And, the legend is that a lot of those maps were taken off the shelves, were destroyed, that the mayor wanted them removed. The map disappeared for years until somebody reproduced it in the nineteen eighties, and it kinda came back into popular circulation. But that's a great one — a map that says right there, flat out, mobsters are running this city. Mobsters are blowing up these spots. Let's have a chuckle about it.

00:41:47 Andrew Keen: And some maps, of course, are enormously political. You refer to the former vice president of the United States, a certain Elbridge Gerry, one of the original VPs in the United States. Not a famous man, but his name has been turned into gerrymandering. And, of course, gerrymandering is very much in the political news in America these days. This isn't an old this isn't a new story though, is it, Peter?

00:42:13 Peter Keating: No. Look, in America, gerrymandering goes back to right about 1811, 1812. The two political parties, the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists were fighting, and Elbridge and here's the here's the here's the fun fact. Elbridge Gerry's name was pronounced like Gary with a hard g, and nobody remembers. So government

00:42:34 Andrew Keen: I mean, 'Gary-mander' rather than 'Jerry-mander.'

00:42:37 Peter Keating: And, his party drew this stretched-out, crazy district around Essex County in Massachusetts. And there was a dinner party where the guests were looking at the map and one person who was there said, it looks like a salamander. And another person said, it's like a gerrymander, or a Gerry-mander. And that's how it got its name, and it stuck. I will tell you, it is easy to say this goes back forever in American politics, and everybody does it. But this researching this did bring to light a few things that I hadn't really considered before, which is United States, we have one person serving in each electoral district, one congressman, one state senator. Right? There are countries where there are four or five, let's just say, four or five, three representatives in a district. And if that district loses population or gains population, they just take away or add a representative. They don't have to redraw the lines. There are countries where when they do have to redraw the lines, the politicians aren't the ones who do them. They're independent commissions or in New Zealand, politicians from various parties get together to redraw the lines.

00:43:51 Andrew Keen: Well, that's a very New Zealand thing to do. I don't know if you

00:43:54 Peter Keating: It is. Right? It is. And — I wonder if it could ever work here, but

00:44:02 Andrew Keen: Unlikely. Unlike anything else.

00:44:04 Peter Keating: Between the winner-take-all and the one representative and the politicians in charge of themselves and the state level politicians drawing the lines for the federal districts, we have a perfect setup for abuse. And the abuse has been weaponized by software that can draw perfect lines and court decisions that say it's okay. So, it's pretty bad, and it's only gonna get worse.

00:44:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And maybe we need a book. I mean, your new book is Power Lines: Maps That Shape the Way We See the World, but we need new maps. I recently heard that there are more billionaires in Palo Alto just south of here, San Francisco, than there are in all of Europe. So maybe we need some maps of the United States, Peter, that reflect real power. Maybe there's some — carto-, how would I say? — cartographer or

00:45:04 Peter Keating: Yeah. Cartographer or a mapmaker who can —

00:45:07 Andrew Keen: We need maps that reflect real power — not just, you know, the New Yorker map, which is culturally funny, but we need maps that actually reflect the profound economic, political, technological inequalities in America today. Maybe that can be your next project. You can get in the business of making maps rather than just presenting other people's.

00:45:28 Peter Keating: Well, I would settle for this as a first step, which is that every two years, we sit around transfixed by the same old terrible election maps. You know, we're using maps that are

00:45:42 Andrew Keen: They're on CNN as well — they're all even worse.

00:45:45 Peter Keating: The newspapers and the media and the TV say they all know better, but we're using maps that are bad projections, winner-take-all, two-color maps. There's research showing that two-color maps by themselves make people more cynical, underestimate the number of people who aren't in their own party in their state, and have less faith in politics, and they repeat all the biases of the electoral college. It's time for some population-based maps. I mean, we are supposed to be a democracy — it's time for political maps to reflect actual political support.

00:46:23 Andrew Keen: Right. So as you say, maps that shape the way we see the world, we need new maps to shape the way we now see the world. I have to ask you, Peter. The book's out. It's not just a fascinating read, but a fascinating look, a wonderful project. And as you said, you always came up with new maps. Final question is an unfair one, of course, but since it's my show, I'll ask it. What's your favorite map in the book? If there's just one map that you cherish above all else, which is it?

00:46:55 Peter Keating: Well, that's a good question. Give me one second to make sure I'm not leaving anything out. I think I would go with a civil war map of the United States. As you probably know, there are many people obsessed with civil war battles. Those aren't the maps I'm talking about, but there's a map of the United States that shows the density of enslaved people populations.

00:47:26 Andrew Keen: Interesting.

00:47:28 Peter Keating: The darker the areas, the more slaves there were. And there's two things about this. One is it had a profound effect on president Lincoln, who loved maps and was deeply interested, and he would look at this over and over again. And he reasoned that if there were many enslaved people in an area, that was probably an area where when federal troops in the civil war went to, they could liberate those slaves and get some support. But if there were hardly any, right, if the area was completely white, those were areas, he reasoned, wouldn't really have an attachment to the South, and they could find support there too. And so he tried to actually make peace with and do public works projects and attract the people in the areas with few slaves and liberate the slaves in the area where there were a lot of them. So it's a map that shows the patterns of people living in these spaces actually dictated strategy during the civil war and helped lead to the emancipation of enslaved people in the country, and it's resonant in both directions, time wise, I mean. Because number one, there were a lot of enslaved people living in areas where there were river deltas. And to this day, you can look at maps of America in the Cretaceous period and see fertile soils. And in those areas, there were a lot of black Americans doing farming in the American South, which is still true today, but also because of the population settlement in those areas they created profound cultural and sectional differences that still carry over today. And so that one map showing the geographical as well as cultural roots of slavery helped determine how the civil war was fought, and it helps determine political power even today. And it was done by the coast survey. It was done as a completely non-ideological project, but it had massive ideological implications both at that time and even all the way up till today.

00:49:27 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. I don't even have that map. So if you wanna see it, you need

00:49:32 Peter Keating: You're gonna have to buy the book and see it.

00:49:34 Andrew Keen: Power Lines: Maps That Shape the Way We See the World by Peter Keating. I'm very envious, Peter, of your project. A lot of fun, and you've represented it extremely well. The book is out this week, and I'm gonna run some pictures of the DMZ alongside this interview. Thank you so much.

00:49:50 Peter Keating: I love that. That's great. Have a great trip. And thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.