The Blue Dot

On the night of 31 August 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 flying from Anchorage to Seoul with 269 people on board, began to drift north of its planned track. Over the next five hours it strayed hundreds of kilometres off course, across the Kamchatka Peninsula and towards Sakhalin Island, through some of the most heavily defended airspace of the Soviet Union. A Soviet interceptor shot it down in the early hours of 1 September, local time. Everyone on board died. An investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization concluded in 1993 that the crew had probably failed to notice that the autopilot was not following the inertial navigation system it was meant to follow.¹

Sixteen days later, on 16 September, the White House announced that the Global Positioning System, a military satellite network then under construction, would be made available for civil aircraft once it was operational.² The promise was vague, and the system was years from working. But it marked the moment a weapons programme began to become a public utility. Today the receivers that descend from that promise sit in several billion phones. An official study for the US government estimated that GPS had generated about $1.4 trillion in economic benefits for the American private sector between the 1980s and 2017, and that losing it would cost the country about $1 billion a day.³ Google Maps alone, built on GPS and on a digital map of the world, has more than two billion users a month.⁴

This essay follows how a way of guiding submarines and bombs became a small blue dot that tells nearly everyone where they are and which way to turn. It follows the decisions that shaped it: the design of the satellites, the opening of the signal, its deliberate blurring and unblurring, the race to digitise the world’s streets, the moment navigation became free, and the discovery that every position fixed is also a position recorded. Its deeper subject is what happens to people when knowing where they are stops being a skill and becomes a service, and who comes to know where they have been.

Before the blue dot: a problem of time

For most of history, finding your position meant combining what you could see with what you remembered. On land, people used landmarks, paths and the accumulated knowledge of a place. At sea, latitude could be found from the height of the sun or the pole star. Longitude, the position east or west, was much harder, because the earth turns. A navigator who knew the exact time at home and the local time where the ship was could compute longitude from the difference, since every hour of difference corresponds to fifteen degrees. But no clock could keep accurate time on a rolling ship for weeks.

The cost of not knowing was counted in wrecks. In 1714 the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering up to £20,000 for a method of finding longitude at sea to within half a degree. The answer came from a self-taught clockmaker, John Harrison, whose fourth marine timekeeper kept time well enough on a voyage to Jamaica in 1761 and 1762 to meet the standard, although the Board of Longitude was slow to pay him in full.⁵ Navigation had become a problem of keeping time. It still is. GPS is, at bottom, a system of extremely precise clocks.

Maps, meanwhile, were largely projects of states. From the late seventeenth century the Cassini family spent four generations triangulating France. Britain’s Ordnance Survey began in 1791, for military reasons. A map made a territory legible to those who governed it, a theme the philosophy section returns to. In the twentieth century radio added a new tool. During the Second World War, systems such as LORAN let ships and aircraft find their positions by measuring the difference in arrival times of signals from pairs of ground stations. They worked only within range of the stations, and the stations were few.

A signal from Sputnik

On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. At the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, two young physicists, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, rigged a receiver and a tape recorder to listen to its signal. As the satellite approached and receded, the frequency of its beeps shifted, the Doppler effect familiar from a passing siren. Within weeks they found they could work out the satellite’s entire orbit from the shape of that shift during a single pass.⁶

In March 1958 Frank McClure, a senior physicist at the laboratory, asked them a question that turned the problem around. If you could find a satellite’s orbit from a known point on the ground, could you find a point on the ground from a satellite in a known orbit? The answer was yes, and it had an obvious customer. The US Navy was building Polaris submarines that would launch nuclear missiles from under the sea, and a missile is only as accurate as the submarine’s knowledge of where it is. Inertial navigation drifted over weeks submerged. The laboratory designed Transit, a system of satellites in low orbits broadcasting their positions; a receiver measured the Doppler shift as each passed overhead and computed its location. Transit began providing navigation to the Navy’s submarines in 1964, was later opened to civilian ships, and served until 1996.⁷

Transit worked, but it had limits that would shape what came next. A fix took several minutes of listening and was available only when a satellite passed, sometimes more than an hour apart. It gave position in two dimensions, which was fine for a ship and useless for a fast aircraft or a missile. The services wanted something continuous, three-dimensional and precise.

The lonely halls

By the early 1970s there were several candidates. At the Naval Research Laboratory, a team led by Roger Easton had developed Timation, which put precise clocks on satellites so that a receiver could measure distance from the time a signal took to arrive. The Air Force had Project 621B, which proposed coding satellite signals with pseudo-random noise, so that receivers could pick out faint signals and measure timing precisely. Each service wanted its own system.

In late 1972 Colonel Bradford Parkinson, an Air Force officer with a doctorate in astronautics, took over the Air Force programme. In August 1973 he presented it to the Pentagon’s Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council, which rejected it, unanimously by one account. The deputy secretary for research, Malcolm Currie, told Parkinson to come back with a design the services could share. Over the Labor Day weekend of 1973, Parkinson gathered about a dozen people, officers and engineers from the Air Force, the Navy and the Aerospace Corporation, in a nearly empty Pentagon and worked out a joint design.⁸ Participants later called it the Lonely Halls meeting. Historians have argued over how much it invented and how much it combined; one critic points to documents showing that key elements came from the Navy’s earlier work.⁹ What is not disputed is the shape of the result.

The design put atomic clocks on a constellation of satellites in medium orbits, each broadcasting coded signals stamped with the time and its own position. A receiver that hears four satellites can solve for its three coordinates and for the error in its own cheap clock. The receiver never transmits. That choice mattered more than anyone then needed it to. A two-way system, in which users send signals and are located by ground stations, would have been limited in the number of users it could serve and would have revealed every user’s position to the enemy. A passive system could serve any number of users at no extra cost, and could not be overloaded or used to track them. The trade-off was cost in orbit: every satellite had to carry precise and expensive clocks, while receivers could be simple. The system was approved later in 1973, under the name NAVSTAR.

The first experimental satellite, Navstar 1, was launched on 22 February 1978 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.¹⁰ The programme had to survive budget cuts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when its value to anyone other than navigators was hard to see; the satellites also carried sensors to detect nuclear explosions, a second mission that strengthened their case. The loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 delayed the launch of the operational satellites, and the first of them flew in 1989. The system was declared fully operational on 27 April 1995.

The promise of 1983

The White House statement after Flight 007 came during a confrontation with the Soviet Union over the shootdown, and part of its purpose was to show that the United States would act to prevent such tragedies. It said only that the system would be available for civil aviation, and a museum history of navigation notes that it did not promise the signal would be free or open to other uses.² The direction was nevertheless clear. A second, less precise civilian signal had been part of the design from the beginning. After 1983, the question was no longer whether civilians would use GPS but on what terms.

Deliberately blurred

The military’s answer, for seventeen years, was Selective Availability. From 1990 the satellites deliberately introduced errors into the civilian signal, so that an ordinary receiver could locate itself only to within about 100 metres, while military receivers with decryption keys could correct for it. The fear was that an adversary would use precise GPS to guide missiles against the United States.¹¹

The policy quickly ran into its own contradictions. During the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991, the military had far too few GPS receivers of its own, and units bought thousands of commercial ones, from companies such as Trimble and Magellan, to navigate the featureless desert; some soldiers asked relatives to send them. Several accounts from the time say Selective Availability was turned off during the war so that those commercial receivers would work well, though official confirmation is lacking.¹² Meanwhile civilians engineered around it. Differential GPS used a receiver at a precisely surveyed location to measure the error and broadcast a correction, which removed most of the degradation. The US Coast Guard built a network of such stations for mariners, and surveyors and farmers used their own. A degradation meant to deny accuracy to enemies was mainly taxing friends, who were spending money to undo it.

In 1996 a presidential directive declared GPS a dual-use system and committed the government to ending Selective Availability within a decade. In the early hours of 2 May 2000, eastern time, the degradation stopped across the whole constellation. President Bill Clinton’s statement said that civilian users would be able to locate positions up to ten times more accurately. Ordinary receivers went from errors of up to about 100 metres to 10 or 20 metres overnight.¹³ The government later said it had no intention of using Selective Availability again, and built its newest satellites, GPS III, without the capability. The signal that had been a weapon was now an exact, free gift to the world, paid for by American taxpayers.

Maps that move

Position is useless without a map to put it on. The first car navigation systems came before GPS was usable. Honda’s Electro Gyrocator of 1981 tracked the car’s movement with a gyroscope and showed it on a small screen behind a transparent paper map. In the mid-1980s the Etak Navigator, an American aftermarket system, stored digital street maps on cassette tapes and corrected its dead reckoning by matching the car’s path to the roads on the map. Etak sold only a few thousand units, but it established the two ideas car navigation still rests on: a digital map of the roads, and software that snaps an uncertain position onto it.¹⁴ In 1990 Mazda offered the first car with GPS navigation, the Eunos Cosmo, sold only in Japan.

The maps were the hard part. A navigation map needs every street, its name, its direction of travel, its turn restrictions and its address ranges, and the world changes constantly. Two companies came to dominate: Navteq, founded in California in 1985, and Tele Atlas, in the Netherlands, both of which sent survey vans along every road and employed people to digitise what they recorded. After Selective Availability ended, portable navigation devices became a mass product. Garmin, founded in 1989, and the Dutch company TomTom, whose first GO model appeared in 2004, sold tens of millions of devices that stuck to windscreens.

In 2007 the two map makers were bought within months of each other. TomTom agreed to buy Tele Atlas, and Nokia, then the world’s largest phone maker, agreed to buy Navteq for about $8.1 billion.¹⁵ The logic was that maps were a scarce asset controlled by two firms, and that whoever owned one would control navigation on phones. Within two years the asset would stop being scarce.

The web becomes a map

Maps reached the web early. MapQuest, launched in 1996, let people print directions; every movement of the map loaded a new page. In 2004 Google bought two small companies: Where 2 Technologies, a Sydney start-up founded by the Danish brothers Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen with Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, and Keyhole, which had built software for viewing satellite imagery of the earth. On 8 February 2005 Google Maps launched in the United States. It looked simple, but it felt new: the map could be dragged smoothly in any direction because it loaded small image tiles in the background, and search, directions and businesses appeared on it directly.¹⁶ Google Earth, built from Keyhole’s software, followed that year.

Developers immediately began taking the map apart. Within months a programmer had combined Google Maps with housing listings from Craigslist, and Google responded by publishing an official programming interface, so that anyone could put its map on their site. The map became a platform. Street View, launched in 2007, sent cars with cameras down streets to photograph them at eye level, and the photographs would soon serve a second purpose.

Another answer to the cost of maps came from volunteers. In 2004 Steve Coast, a student in London frustrated that Britain’s official map data was expensive and restricted, started OpenStreetMap, a map of the world that anyone could edit and use freely, built by people walking and cycling with GPS receivers and later tracing aerial imagery. It grew into the main open alternative to the commercial maps and is used today by many companies that do not want to depend on Google.

Free

The decisive turn came in 2008 and 2009. Google had licensed its street data from Tele Atlas. Starting in 2008, it began building its own map, an effort it called Ground Truth: it combined public data with imagery from Street View cars, from which software could read street signs, and an operation in which people corrected the map by hand.¹⁷ On 28 October 2009 Google announced Google Maps Navigation, free voice-guided turn-by-turn directions for Android phones, starting with the Motorola Droid. Shares in Garmin fell about 16 percent that day, and TomTom’s fell by between 13 and 21 percent, according to different reports.¹⁸ In January 2010 Nokia announced that it, too, would give navigation away free on its phones.

The decision followed a logic seen elsewhere on this site, in the essays on search and on app stores. Navigation was a product that others sold. For Google it was a feature that kept people using its services and fed its local search and advertising. Owning the map removed a dependency on a licensor that was now owned by a competitor, and made the feature costless to each new user. Dedicated navigation devices did not disappear, but their market shrank year after year, and Garmin moved towards fitness watches, aviation and boats. Nokia’s investment fared worse. As its phone business collapsed, it renamed its mapping division HERE and in 2015 sold it to a consortium of Audi, BMW and Daimler for €2.8 billion, a fraction of what it had paid.¹⁹ The German carmakers bought it to avoid depending on Google for the maps in their cars.

Apple’s map

In September 2012 Apple replaced Google Maps on the iPhone with its own maps in iOS 6. Google was by then a rival in phones through Android, and its maps on the iPhone lacked features, such as voice navigation, that Android users had. Apple assembled its maps from licensed data, including TomTom’s, with satellite imagery and its own software. The results were widely ridiculed: misplaced towns, missing landmarks, melted-looking bridges in its three-dimensional views, directions that led drivers astray. On 28 September Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, published an apology, saying the company had fallen short of its commitment, that it was extremely sorry for the frustration caused, and suggesting customers use rival map apps while Apple improved its own. A month later Apple announced the departure of Scott Forstall, the executive in charge of iOS; the Wall Street Journal reported that he had refused to sign the apology.²⁰

The episode showed what maps are. Software can be shipped and improved. A map is also a record of the physical world, accumulated over years of driving, photographing and correcting, and users judge it on the first day they rely on it to get somewhere. Apple spent the following years building its own survey operation, with vans and backpacks, and in 2018 began replacing its maps with data it had collected itself.

The crowd as sensor

Phones turned their owners into sensors. Waze, founded in Israel in 2008, built a navigation app whose users’ phones reported their speed and location, so that the app could see traffic jams forming and route around them, while users reported accidents, hazards and police. In June 2013 Google bought Waze for about $1.1 billion. The deal fell below the size that required review by US competition authorities. Britain’s Office of Fair Trading investigated, noted that Google was buying a close competitor, and decided not to challenge it; the US Federal Trade Commission said in 2020 that it would look again at past acquisitions, including Waze.²¹

Routing by real-time traffic created its own conflicts. Apps that sent drivers down quiet residential streets to save a minute turned those streets into commuter routes. In December 2017 the borough of Leonia, New Jersey, near the George Washington Bridge, announced that from January it would close some sixty streets to non-residents during rush hours, with fines of $200, blaming navigation apps.²² The map had become an actor in the world it described. In 2016 the augmented-reality game Pokémon Go, built on Google’s maps and the location of its players, sent millions of people walking to places chosen by a game company, an early demonstration of a map that directs movement rather than recording it.

Where you have been

Every fix of position on a phone could also be stored. The legal system took years to face what that meant.

In 2012, in United States v. Jones, the US Supreme Court ruled that police had conducted a search when they attached a GPS tracker to a suspect’s car and monitored it for 28 days. The majority relied on the physical trespass of attaching the device, but five justices wrote that long-term monitoring of a person’s movements violated expectations of privacy. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about their associations. In 2018, in Carpenter v. United States, the Court held that police generally need a warrant to obtain historical location records from a phone company, because those records give an intimate window into a person’s life.²³

Commercial collection grew alongside. In December 2018 the New York Times showed that apps on ordinary phones were selling precise location data to advertisers and brokers, from which it could identify individuals and follow them from their homes to work, doctors and lovers. In January 2018 an Australian student, Nathan Ruser, noticed that the fitness app Strava’s public heatmap of its users’ runs revealed the outlines of military bases around the world, from the paths that soldiers jogged.²⁴ In 2022 the US Federal Trade Commission sued the broker Kochava for selling data that could track people to reproductive health clinics, places of worship and shelters, and in December 2024 it reached orders with Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla barring them from selling data on visits to sensitive locations, such as medical facilities, places of worship and military sites.²⁵

Police found a new use for the data held by large companies. A geofence warrant asks a company for every device that was in a given area at a given time, such as near a robbery. Google, which stored years of location history for users who had turned the feature on, received thousands of such warrants a year. In December 2023 Google announced that it would move users’ location history onto their own phones and stop storing it on its servers, which meant it would no longer be able to answer geofence warrants for that data.²⁶ In August 2024 the Fifth Circuit appeals court ruled that geofence warrants were unconstitutional general searches; the Fourth Circuit had reached the opposite view. On 29 June 2026 the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States. By a vote of six to three it held that obtaining a person’s Google location history through a geofence warrant is a search under the Fourth Amendment, without deciding that such warrants are always unconstitutional, and sent the case back to decide whether the warrant was reasonable.²⁷

Other skies

The United States built GPS and gave it away, but other powers did not want to depend on it. The Soviet Union built GLONASS, which reached a full constellation in 1995, decayed with Russia’s economy and was restored to global coverage in 2011. The European Union, after years of argument about cost and about whether Europe needed its own system, built Galileo, a civilian system that began initial services in 2016. China built BeiDou in stages, and on 31 July 2020 Xi Jinping formally commissioned its global system.²⁸ Modern phones listen to several of these systems at once, which makes them more accurate and harder to disrupt. The existence of four global systems is itself a judgement about trust: no state wanted its armies, power grids and economy to depend on a signal another state could switch off.

A jammed sky

GPS signals travel about twenty thousand kilometres and arrive weaker than the background electrical noise in the receiver itself, which must dig them out with its knowledge of their codes. They are easy to drown out. In the 2020s jamming and spoofing, which feeds receivers false signals so that they compute a wrong position, became routine in and around conflict zones, from the Baltic Sea to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Airliners over the Baltic and Finland reported losing satellite navigation; in January 2026 thirteen European countries and Iceland issued a joint warning to shipping about interference in the Baltic and North Seas, and in September 2026 two airline flights over Sweden lost satellite navigation and landed using older systems.²⁹

The vulnerability goes beyond navigation. GPS satellites carry atomic clocks, and receivers that know their position also know the time to within billionths of a second. Mobile phone networks, electricity grids, financial exchanges and data centres use GPS time to synchronise their equipment. The study that estimated GPS’s economic benefits warned that an outage could cost the United States about $1 billion a day, and that a 30-day outage during the planting season could cost as much as $45 billion.³

The system itself has aged unevenly. The tenth and last GPS III satellite was launched on 21 April 2026. Days earlier the Space Force cancelled OCX, the next-generation ground control system meant to operate the newest signals, after sixteen years of development, cost overruns and failed tests, and chose to keep upgrading the existing ground software instead.³⁰

The answering map

The newest change is to the map itself. On 12 March 2026 Google added Ask Maps, a feature built on its Gemini AI models, which lets users ask questions in ordinary language, such as where to stop for coffee on a route with parking and a view, and receive an answer rather than a list, together with a redesigned driving view it called the biggest navigation upgrade in over a decade.⁴ The map is becoming a conversational guide, choosing on the user’s behalf from what it knows about places and about the user, the same shift from a list of results to an answer that the essay on search describes.

What GPS and digital maps are today

Today satellite positioning is ambient. Phones, cars, watches, tractors, ships, aircraft, delivery robots and parcels know where they are, usually to within a few metres, from four global satellite systems and from the Wi-Fi networks and phone towers around them. Above that sits a small number of global maps: Google’s, Apple’s, HERE’s and the volunteer OpenStreetMap, each a constantly updated model of streets, buildings, businesses and traffic. Navigation is free to the user and paid for by advertising, by phone sales, by carmakers or by volunteers. The record of where devices have been is held by phone makers, app developers, mobile networks and data brokers, under rules that courts and regulators are still writing. And the signals that make it all work are faint, easy to jam and run by governments.

How the blue dot changed the way we move and decide

From reading a map to following a voice

A paper map asks its reader to locate themselves, plan and translate the map into the world. Turn-by-turn navigation does all of that and asks only that the user obey the next instruction. The effort that once built a mental map of a place has become optional.

From scarce position to ambient position

Knowing one’s exact position was once the privilege of navies and surveyors. It is now a default property of objects, which has made possible ride-hailing, delivery, precision farming, fitness tracking and logistics on a scale that did not exist before.

From the surveyor’s map to the crowd’s

Maps were made by states and specialist companies. Now they are made partly by their users, through their phones’ movements, their reviews and their corrections, and they change by the minute.

From a record of the land to a record of people

Old maps recorded places. The new ones also record movements, and so they record lives: where people sleep, worship, work and seek care.

From a gift to a contested utility

A system given freely to the world by one government is now shadowed by rival systems, by deliberate interference in war zones and by debates over who may see where everyone has been.

What the history suggests

The history repeats patterns seen across this site. Open infrastructure out-reached closed alternatives, as GPS became the world’s standard once its signal was opened and unblurred. Who pays shaped what got built, as free maps funded by advertising displaced paid devices and licensed data. An incumbent absorbed a challenger’s best idea when navigation became a free feature of phones. Permissive defaults were borrowed time, as broad location permissions fed a trade in data that regulators later had to rein in. And making something cheap moved the cost elsewhere: the effort of finding the way moved from the traveller’s mind into the device, and the risk of exposure moved from the traveller’s actions into the traveller’s records.

GPS also shows something more particular. Its designers made a system that tells everyone where they are without knowing who is listening, a rare case of a technology built for silence. The maps and phones built on top of it reversed that property: they tell the user where they are and, at the same time, tell someone else. The blue dot is both a gift of knowledge and a confession. That double nature, and what it does to the mind that relies on it, is where the philosophy begins.

Understanding the philosophy

The rest of this essay examines eight ideas beneath satellite positioning and digital maps, one at a time. Each is explained in plain terms, placed in the tradition of thought that has examined it, traced in the history above, tested against its strongest objection and related to how people and organisations decide today. Two of them are psychological. The connections to philosophers, psychologists, economists and legal scholars are interpretations offered to make the ideas clearer. The engineers who built GPS and the companies that built the maps were solving practical problems, and did not, as a rule, set out to answer these thinkers.

1. The map is not the territory, until it is

The idea in plain terms

A map is a simplification. It leaves out almost everything about a place in order to show a few things clearly: roads, borders, heights, names. That is what makes it useful, and also what makes it dangerous, because people act on the map rather than the world. When nearly everyone uses the same few digital maps, and the maps decide which routes and businesses people see, the simplification begins to shape the territory it was meant to describe.

The tradition

In 1931 the Polish-American scholar Alfred Korzybski told a meeting of mathematicians that “a map is not the territory,” a phrase he repeated in Science and Sanity (1933). His point was about language and thought generally: words and models are abstractions, and confusing them with what they represent leads to error. A map is useful because its structure resembles the structure of the land, and only to the extent that it does.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges turned the idea into a parable in 1946, in a one-paragraph story called “On Exactitude in Science.” An empire’s cartographers, dissatisfied with every map, made one at the scale of a mile to the mile, which covered the empire exactly; later generations found it useless and left it to rot in the desert. A map that leaves nothing out is no longer a map.

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard took Borges’s fable in the opposite direction in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). In the modern world, he argued, it is the territory that decays across the map: representations come first, and reality is increasingly produced to match them. Baudrillard wrote in a deliberately provocative register, and many critics regard his claims as overstated. But his reversal names something real about maps that people navigate by.

Where it shows up

Apple’s maps of 2012 showed how much depends on the match between map and world: a misplaced town or a wrong turn is a small error in a database and a large one on a road. Google’s Ground Truth project made the map a hand-coded model of what one engineer called the logic of the road. Then the dependence began to run the other way. When navigation apps routed commuters through Leonia’s side streets, the town changed its roads to change the map’s behaviour. A shop that does not appear on the map, or appears with the wrong hours, loses customers, so businesses manage their map listings as carefully as their signs. With Ask Maps, the map chooses among places for the user, so the map’s model of what a person wants begins to decide where that person goes.

The strongest objection

The objection is that maps have always shaped the world, and that this is mostly good. Road atlases guided traffic, railway timetables organised towns, and the Ordnance Survey’s maps guided planners. A better map, which digital maps generally are, produces better decisions: fewer wrong turns, faster ambulances, less wasted fuel. The territory changing in response to the map is often exactly the point, as when a correction makes the map accurate again. This is persuasive for most uses. What is new is concentration: when a handful of companies maintain the maps nearly everyone follows, their simplifications become shared assumptions with no obvious alternative, and their errors and priorities become the world’s.

What it means today

Organisations should treat the digital maps that customers use as part of their storefront and their infrastructure, and check what the maps say. Product builders who make maps, rankings or models of the world should remember that users will act on the model, and that the model’s omissions become the users’ blind spots. The useful habit is to ask, of any map, what it leaves out and who decided.

2. How the mind knows where it is

The idea in plain terms

People do not only follow routes; they build internal maps of the places they know, which let them take shortcuts, recover when lost and imagine places they cannot see. Building such a map takes effort and attention. Satellite navigation removes the need for that effort. The question is whether, by removing the need, it also removes the skill, and whether that matters.

The tradition

In 1948 the American psychologist Edward Tolman published “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men.” Against the behaviourists of his day, who held that animals learn only chains of responses to stimuli, he showed that rats explored mazes and formed something like a map, which let them take novel shortcuts when a familiar path was blocked. He suggested that people form cognitive maps too, broad ones or narrow, strip-like ones, depending on how they learn.

In 1971 the neuroscientist John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky found cells in the rat hippocampus that fired when the animal was in a particular place, which they called place cells. In 2005 May-Britt and Edvard Moser and their colleagues found grid cells nearby, which fire in a regular lattice as an animal moves and act like a coordinate system. The three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 for discovering what the Nobel committee called the brain’s positioning system.

In humans, the neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire and colleagues reported in 2000 that London taxi drivers, who memorise the city’s streets for a famously hard exam called the Knowledge, had larger posterior hippocampi than controls. A longitudinal study in 2011 followed trainees and found the growth only in those who qualified, which suggests that the training caused it.

Where it shows up

Researchers have since asked what following directions does. In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Hugo Spiers and colleagues found that activity in the hippocampus tracked the structure of the street network when people navigated a virtual Soho for themselves, and that this activity disappeared when they were told which way to go. In 2020 Louisa Dahmani and Véronique Bohbot reported in Scientific Reports that people with more lifetime use of GPS had worse spatial memory when navigating without it, and that among thirteen participants retested three years later, more GPS use predicted a steeper decline. The anthropologist Claudio Aporta, working with Inuit hunters in Igloolik in the Canadian Arctic, described in 2005 how younger hunters’ use of GPS units was replacing a sophisticated tradition of wayfinding by snowdrifts, winds and stars, with some dangerous results when the devices failed.

The strongest objection

The evidence is thinner than the headlines suggest. The longitudinal part of the 2020 study had thirteen people. The taxi driver studies concern an extreme form of training, not ordinary life. Cross-sectional correlations cannot rule out that people who navigate poorly choose GPS more, although Dahmani and Bohbot found no evidence of that. Most people did not build rich cognitive maps of the places they drove through before GPS either; they followed road signs and memorised a few routes. And human skills have always shifted with tools, as memory did with writing. Perhaps the effort once spent on navigation now goes to something better.

The reply is not that GPS damages the brain, which the evidence does not show, but that a skill unused weakens, and that the skill of building a mental map is also a way of knowing a place: noticing it, remembering it and feeling at home in it.

What it means today

Individuals who want to keep the skill can use navigation selectively: look at the map before setting out, follow it with the voice switched off, walk without it in places they care about. Designers could make navigation that teaches, showing the overall route and landmarks rather than only the next turn. Organisations that train people in any skill now handled by software face the same choice: whether the tool should replace the competence or support it.

3. Wayfaring and being transported

The idea in plain terms

There are two ways to move through the world. One is to find your way as you go, attending to the landscape and adjusting as you learn. The other is to be carried from point to point, with the journey between reduced to a gap to be crossed as efficiently as possible. Turn-by-turn navigation turns the first kind of movement into the second, even when people walk. The question is what is lost when the journey becomes a sequence of instructions.

The tradition

The British anthropologist Tim Ingold drew this distinction in Lines (2007). He contrasted wayfaring, in which a traveller’s knowledge grows along the path, through continuous engagement with the surroundings, with transport, in which movement is destination-oriented and the traveller is carried across a surface without needing to perceive it. For Ingold the wayfarer knows the world by moving through it; the transported passenger merely arrives.

The French thinker Michel de Certeau made a related argument in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), in an essay called “Walking in the City.” He contrasted the view from above, the planner’s map that shows the city as a totality, with the tactics of ordinary walkers, who take shortcuts, wander and make their own sense of streets in ways the map does not capture. Walking, he suggested, is a kind of speech act: people compose their own paths through a grid laid down by others.

The American philosopher Albert Borgmann, in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984), described what he called the device paradigm. Modern technology delivers a commodity, warmth, music, transport, while hiding the machinery and removing the engagement that the old way demanded. A wood stove required gathering, splitting and tending, and drew a family around it; central heating delivers warmth and asks nothing. Borgmann did not reject devices, but he argued that people need focal practices, activities that demand skill and attention, to keep a meaningful life.

Where it shows up

The history of navigation follows Borgmann’s paradigm closely. The navigator with a sextant and chronometer, the driver with a road atlas, and the walker who knew a neighbourhood all engaged with their surroundings in order to move through them. GPS and digital maps hide the machinery, satellites, clocks and databases, and deliver position and route as a commodity. Pokémon Go is an odd exception that proves the point: it got people to wander through their cities again, but along paths chosen by a game. The Inuit hunters Aporta studied were wayfarers in Ingold’s sense, and GPS offered them transport.

The strongest objection

The objection is that this is nostalgia. Most journeys are not voyages of discovery but trips to work, school and shops, and making them easier frees time and attention for other things. Being lost is stressful and sometimes dangerous, especially for people with disabilities, newcomers and those who do not speak the local language, for whom navigation apps have opened cities. Wayfaring is available to anyone who chooses it; GPS merely makes it optional. All true. The concern is what happens when the option is rarely chosen, and when the design of the tools, with their constant instructions, makes choosing it harder.

What it means today

The distinction gives individuals a question to ask of any trip: is this one to be transported through, or to find my way in? For designers it suggests an alternative to optimising every journey for speed: modes that show context, encourage exploration or hand back control. For organisations, Borgmann’s idea applies to any work that software has made frictionless: some engagement is waste, and some is where understanding comes from.

4. Trusting the voice

The idea in plain terms

People tend to trust automated systems, sometimes more than their own eyes. A navigation voice that has been right a thousand times is followed the thousand-and-first time, even down a road that looks wrong. Over-reliance on automation is not a sign of stupidity but a predictable response to a system that is usually reliable, and it creates characteristic accidents.

The tradition

In 1983 the British psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge published “Ironies of Automation.” Automating a task, she observed, leaves human operators with the job of monitoring the system and taking over when it fails, which are exactly the tasks humans do badly: people are poor at sustained vigilance, and skills that are not practised decay, so the operator is least capable at the moment of greatest need.

In 1997 Raja Parasuraman and Victor Riley distinguished the use, misuse, disuse and abuse of automation in the journal Human Factors. Misuse is over-reliance: failing to monitor an automated system, or following it when it is wrong. In the 1990s Kathleen Mosier and Linda Skitka named a specific form, automation bias: the tendency to use automated cues as a substitute for vigilant information seeking, leading both to errors of omission, missing problems the system did not flag, and errors of commission, following its incorrect advice. The site’s idea Trusting the Machine Too Much follows these findings further.

Where it shows up

The story of GPS begins with an automation failure. The crew of Flight 007, by the investigators’ account, trusted that their autopilot was following the inertial navigation system and did not notice for five hours that it was not. Satellite navigation has its own pattern of such accidents. Rangers at Death Valley National Park began speaking of “death by GPS” after travellers followed device routes onto abandoned roads in extreme heat; in 2009 a boy died after his mother’s navigation system led them onto a remote track. Drivers have followed directions into lakes and onto railway lines. Spoofing exploits the same trust deliberately: a receiver fed false signals reports a confident wrong position, and crews who rely on it may not notice.

The strongest objection

The objection is that these cases are rare and memorable, while the benefits are diffuse. Satellite navigation has almost certainly reduced the number of people who get lost, wasted fuel and driven dangerously while reading paper maps. Automation bias is a cost of a system that is, on average, much more reliable than the human it replaced, and the right comparison is not perfect vigilance but the errors people made before. This is largely right. The point of the research is not that people should distrust navigation, but that reliability itself erodes the attention needed to catch the rare failure, and that systems should be designed with that in mind.

What it means today

Designers of navigation and other automated advice should make uncertainty visible, warn when the system is outside the conditions it knows, and keep users’ attention engaged at critical moments rather than demanding it continuously. Organisations that rely on automated positioning or timing, from airlines to logistics firms, should train for its failure, as aviation now does for GPS jamming. Individuals can keep a simple rule: when the world and the voice disagree, believe the world.

5. A public good made by an army

The idea in plain terms

GPS is used by billions of people who pay nothing for it. No one can be excluded from receiving the signal, and one person’s use does not reduce anyone else’s. Economists call such things public goods, and markets usually fail to provide them because no one can be made to pay. GPS exists because a government, for military reasons, paid to build it and then chose to give it to the world.

The tradition

In 1954 the economist Paul Samuelson gave public goods their modern definition: goods that are non-rival, so that one person’s consumption does not diminish another’s, and non-excludable, so that people cannot be prevented from consuming them. Because people can benefit without paying, private markets underprovide such goods, and they are usually funded by taxation, if at all. A lighthouse is the textbook example, though the economist Ronald Coase showed in 1974 that many British lighthouses were in fact financed by charges on ships in port.

The economic historian Charles Kindleberger, in The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (1973), argued that the international economy needs a stabiliser that provides global public goods, such as an open market and a lender of last resort, and that the Depression deepened because Britain could no longer play that role and the United States would not yet. This became known, in the work of later scholars, as hegemonic stability theory: a dominant power provides public goods because it benefits from the system they support. The economist Mariana Mazzucato, in The Entrepreneurial State (2013), cited GPS among the technologies developed by governments that private companies, such as smartphone makers, later turned into products.

Where it shows up

GPS fits Samuelson’s definition exactly, by design. The passive architecture chosen in 1973 made it non-rival, because any number of receivers could listen, and non-excludable once the civilian signal was opened. The decision of 1983, the end of Selective Availability in 2000 and the promise of free access made it a global public good provided by the United States, much as Kindleberger’s theory would predict: the US benefited from an open world economy built on its standard, and from the industries that grew up around its signal. The private value was enormous, about $1.4 trillion in the United States alone by the government’s estimate, and none of it was captured by the provider directly.

The strongest objection

The objection is that a public good provided by one power is not a gift but an instrument. It creates dependence, and what one government gives it can degrade or deny, as Selective Availability showed and as regional denial in war still does. That is why Russia, Europe and China built their own systems at great cost, duplicating a good that was already free. On this view GPS is less a public good than a soft form of power, and the existence of four systems shows how little the world trusted it. The objection is strong, and it explains much of the history after 2000. But it also shows the limits of the alternative: a public good provided by many rival powers is more resilient and also more expensive, and the duplication is the price of a world without a trusted stabiliser.

What it means today

For governments, GPS is a model of how public investment can create value far beyond its original purpose, and a warning about the risks of depending on someone else’s infrastructure. For businesses, the lesson is to know which of their operations rest on free public goods they do not control, from satellite signals to open-source software, and what they would do if the provider changed its mind.

6. Making the world legible

The idea in plain terms

States and companies can manage only what they can see and measure. To govern people, tax land or deliver parcels, they need standard addresses, accurate maps and fixed names. Making places legible in this way brings real benefits, and it also simplifies them, overriding local knowledge and giving power to whoever holds the map.

The tradition

The political scientist James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State (1998), argued that modern states have repeatedly tried to make society legible: standardising measurements, creating permanent surnames, mapping land for taxation and laying out cities and forests in grids. Legibility enabled taxation, conscription and public services, but when imposed without regard to local practical knowledge, which Scott called mētis, it produced disasters, from scientific forestry to planned cities. The site’s idea Legibility and Mētis develops the argument.

The urban planner Kevin Lynch used the word differently in The Image of the City (1960). Interviewing residents of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles, he studied how people formed mental images of cities from paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, and argued that a good city is legible to its inhabitants: easy to picture and to find one’s way in. For Lynch legibility was a gift to citizens; for Scott it was an instrument of rule.

Where it shows up

The Cassini maps of France and the Ordnance Survey were legibility projects of states. Digital maps are legibility projects of companies. Google’s Ground Truth turned streets into a database of segments, turn restrictions and addresses; Street View photographed them; Waze turned traffic into a live feed. The result is that the world is now more legible to a few companies than to any government, and that companies such as delivery and ride-hailing firms can manage armies of workers through the map. In places without formal addresses, digital maps and coordinate systems have given people a way to receive deliveries and services for the first time. The same legibility helps police with geofence warrants and armies with targeting.

The strongest objection

The objection is that legibility mostly helps ordinary people. An address lets an ambulance find you, a map lets a newcomer find work, and a precise location lets aid reach a disaster zone. The losers from illegibility are usually the poor and marginal, who are invisible to services as well as to tax collectors. Scott himself acknowledged that many legibility projects were benign. The question is who holds the map and on what terms. A legible world mapped by a public agency or an open community is accountable in ways that one mapped by a private company is not.

What it means today

Organisations that make or rely on maps should ask who the map serves and what local knowledge it ignores. Governments might consider whether core geographic data, addresses, streets and boundaries, should be public infrastructure, as some countries have decided, rather than left to private companies. And designers can borrow Lynch’s version of the idea: a city, a product or an organisation is better when people can form their own picture of it, not only follow instructions through it.

7. Where you have been says who you are

The idea in plain terms

A single location reveals little. A record of locations over time reveals a life: home, work, friends, doctors, places of worship, political meetings, affairs. Location data is therefore among the most sensitive information there is, even though each point in it seems innocuous and was often given up for a trivial convenience. The question is what norms should govern a record that phones create automatically.

The tradition

The philosopher Helen Nissenbaum proposed in 2004, and developed in Privacy in Context (2010), a theory she called contextual integrity. Privacy, she argued, is not secrecy or control but the appropriate flow of information according to the norms of the context in which it was shared. A patient tells a doctor about their health; the same information flowing to an employer violates the context’s norms, even though it was disclosed voluntarily. On this view, the question about location data is not whether people revealed it but whether it is flowing where the norms of its original context allow.

American law developed a related idea, sometimes called the mosaic theory, which the legal scholar Orin Kerr analysed in the Michigan Law Review in 2012. Individual observations of a person in public may not be searches, but the aggregate, a mosaic built from many observations, can reveal what no single one does, and so can deserve protection. The concurring justices in Jones accepted this reasoning for long-term GPS tracking, and the Court relied on it in Carpenter and, in 2026, in Chatrie.

Where it shows up

The history after 2010 is a series of collisions between location records and the norms of the contexts in which they were created. Users shared location to get directions or weather, and it flowed to advertisers and brokers, as the New York Times showed in 2018. Soldiers shared runs with a fitness community, and the record outlined their bases. Google users turned on location history for a personal timeline, and police used it to find everyone near a crime. The FTC’s actions against Kochava, Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla targeted flows to sensitive places. Google’s decision to keep location history on users’ phones was, in Nissenbaum’s terms, a way of restoring a flow to its original context.

The strongest objection

The objection is that people consent, benefit and do not seem to mind. Location data improves traffic predictions, helps find lost children, aids epidemiology and solves crimes, including the bank robbery at the centre of Chatrie. Aggregated and anonymised, it serves the public good. And people repeatedly choose convenience over privacy when given the choice. The reply is that consent to an app’s permissions does not reflect understanding of where the data will go, that anonymised location traces are often easy to re-identify, and that what people accept when the cost is invisible is not good evidence of what they would accept if they saw it.

What it means today

For product builders, the principle is to collect location only for the purpose the user asked for, keep it on the device where possible, and treat its sharing as a decision with moral weight. For organisations buying data, the question is whether the people it describes would recognise the flow as appropriate. For individuals, the default settings of phones and apps deserve a few minutes’ attention, because the record they create is long and hard to recall.

8. Time made public, and the fragility of the invisible

The idea in plain terms

GPS is a navigation system built from clocks, and it has become the world’s clock. Phone networks, power grids, financial markets and data centres synchronise their equipment to GPS time. A technology people think of as maps and directions is also a hidden foundation of the economy, and like many hidden foundations it is fragile in ways most people never see.

The tradition

In Technics and Civilization (1934), the American historian Lewis Mumford argued that “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.” The mechanical clock, first in medieval monasteries, then in town towers, disciplined life into regular units, made the synchronisation of work possible and taught people to think of time as an abstract, measurable quantity separate from the events that fill it. Mumford’s history has been refined by later scholars, but his insight that timekeeping organises society has endured.

The sociologist Charles Perrow, in Normal Accidents (1984), studied why complex systems fail. Systems whose parts interact in unexpected ways, which he called interactive complexity, and whose processes follow each other quickly with little slack, which he called tight coupling, will have accidents that are not caused by any single error but are normal properties of the system. The more efficiently a system is coupled to a single source, the more a failure in that source spreads.

Where it shows up

The history of navigation is a history of time. Harrison’s chronometer solved longitude by carrying home time to sea. GPS satellites carry atomic clocks, and every receiver solves for time as well as position. Because the time is free, exact and everywhere, systems that need synchronisation have coupled themselves to it, often without anyone outside their engineering teams knowing. That is why the government’s study estimated that an outage could cost $1 billion a day, why jamming over the Baltic matters beyond aviation, and why the cancellation of OCX after sixteen years matters to more than the Space Force. The system’s invisibility is a measure of its success, and of its risk.

The strongest objection

The objection is that the risk is overstated. There are four global satellite systems, many critical users have backup clocks, and outages of GPS itself have been brief and rare in more than thirty years of operation. Jamming affects particular regions and can be detected. Engineers have proposed and in some countries are building alternatives, such as terrestrial radio timing and fibre-optic time distribution. The objection is partly right: the system has been remarkably reliable. But Perrow’s point is that reliability encourages coupling, and coupling turns rare failures into large ones. The question is not whether GPS has failed but whether those who depend on it know that they do.

What it means today

Organisations should find out where their operations depend on satellite time and position, often in equipment bought from vendors, and test what happens when the signal is lost or false. Governments should treat timing as critical infrastructure in its own right. And anyone thinking about technology can take Mumford’s lesson: the most consequential machines are often the ones that organise everything else and that nobody notices.

Bringing the threads together

The blue dot rests on a series of simplifications and gifts. A map leaves out most of the world, and when everyone uses the same map its omissions shape the world. A satellite tells the mind where it is, which spares it the work of building its own map, and of knowing places through that work. Navigation turns wayfaring into transport, and a reliable voice invites the trust that makes its rare errors dangerous. The signal itself is a public good given by one power, which others duplicated rather than depend on. Digital maps made the world legible to companies, for good and ill, and the phones that showed people where they were recorded where they had been. Beneath it all runs a clock that much of the economy now quietly shares.

The blue dot

When the White House promised GPS to civil aircraft after Flight 007, it was responding to a failure of navigation, a crew that did not know where it was. Four decades later, it is hard to be lost. The engineers who designed a system in which receivers only listen, the officials who opened and then unblurred its signal, and the companies that mapped the world’s streets gave billions of people a capability that navies once guarded. Few technologies have so quietly removed a whole category of human difficulty.

The history suggests some working principles. Use the map, and know what it leaves out. Keep some journeys for finding your own way, because that is how places become known. When the voice and the world disagree, believe the world. Collect a person’s location only for what they asked, because the record says who they are. Find out where your systems depend on a signal you cannot see, before someone else jams it. The blue dot answers the oldest question a traveller asks. It is worth asking, from time to time, what it is asking of us in return.

Selected bibliography

• Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1933.
• Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Harcourt, Brace, 1934.
• Borges, Jorge Luis. “Del rigor en la ciencia.” Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1946.
• Tolman, Edward C. “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men.” Psychological Review 55, no. 4 (1948): 189–208.
• Samuelson, Paul A. “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure.” Review of Economics and Statistics 36, no. 4 (1954): 387–389.
• Guier, William H., and George C. Weiffenbach. “The Early Days of Sputnik.” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 2, no. 1 (1981).
• Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT Press, 1960.
• O’Keefe, J., and J. Dostrovsky. “The Hippocampus as a Spatial Map.” Brain Research 34, no. 1 (1971): 171–175.
• Kindleberger, Charles P. The World in Depression, 1929–1939. University of California Press, 1973.
• Coase, R. H. “The Lighthouse in Economics.” Journal of Law and Economics 17, no. 2 (1974): 357–376.
• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984 (French original 1980).
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994 (French original 1981).
• Bainbridge, Lisanne. “Ironies of Automation.” Automatica 19, no. 6 (1983): 775–779.
• Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents. Basic Books, 1984.
• Parasuraman, Raja, and Victor Riley. “Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse.” Human Factors 39, no. 2 (1997): 230–253.
• Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, 1998.
• Maguire, Eleanor A., and others. “Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 8 (2000): 4398–4403.
• Nissenbaum, Helen. “Privacy as Contextual Integrity.” Washington Law Review 79, no. 1 (2004): 119–157.
• Aporta, Claudio, and Eric Higgs. “Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology.” Current Anthropology 46, no. 5 (2005): 729–753.
• Hafting, Torkel, Marianne Fyhn, Sturla Molden, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser. “Microstructure of a Spatial Map in the Entorhinal Cortex.” Nature 436 (2005): 801–806.
• Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. Routledge, 2007.
• Nissenbaum, Helen. Privacy in Context. Stanford University Press, 2010.
• Woollett, Katherine, and Eleanor A. Maguire. “Acquiring ‘the Knowledge’ of London’s Layout Drives Structural Brain Changes.” Current Biology 21, no. 24 (2011): 2109–2114.
• United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012).
• Kerr, Orin S. “The Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment.” Michigan Law Review 111, no. 3 (2012): 311–354.
• Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State. Anthem, 2013.
• Carr, Nicholas. The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. W. W. Norton, 2014.
• Javadi, Amir-Homayoun, and others. “Hippocampal and Prefrontal Processing of Network Topology to Simulate the Future.” Nature Communications 8 (2017): 14652.
• Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018).
• O’Connor, Alan C., and others. Economic Benefits of the Global Positioning System (GPS). RTI International for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2019.
• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.
• Dahmani, Louisa, and Véronique D. Bohbot. “Habitual Use of GPS Negatively Impacts Spatial Memory during Self-Guided Navigation.” Scientific Reports 10 (2020): 6310.
• Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112 (U.S. 29 June 2026).

Research limitations

The account of the 1973 Lonely Halls meeting rests largely on participants’ recollections, and historians dispute how much of GPS’s design originated there rather than in the Navy’s earlier Timation work; this essay notes both views. The 1983 announcement after Flight 007 is reported in secondary sources, and accounts differ on whether it promised free access or only access for aviation. Whether Selective Availability was switched off during the Gulf War is reported in several contemporary accounts but not confirmed by official records found for this essay. Figures for the fall in Garmin’s and TomTom’s shares on 28 October 2009 differ between reports. The date on which Google first began building its own US base map rests on a 2012 magazine account. The figures on GPS’s economic benefits come from a single government-commissioned study that relies on models and expert input. The neuroscience of navigation draws on small studies, particularly the longitudinal results, and causal claims about GPS use and spatial memory remain uncertain. Reports of GPS jamming in 2025 and 2026 come from governments, regulators and the press, and counts of incidents vary widely by source. The Supreme Court’s decision in Chatrie was handed down in June 2026 and is described from legal commentary; its application on remand was pending at the time of writing. The FTC’s actions against data brokers were settlements without findings of liability. The philosophical connections to Korzybski, Borges, Baudrillard, Tolman, O’Keefe, the Mosers, Maguire, Aporta, Ingold, de Certeau, Borgmann, Bainbridge, Parasuraman and Riley, Mosier and Skitka, Samuelson, Coase, Kindleberger, Mazzucato, Scott, Lynch, Nissenbaum, Kerr, Mumford and Perrow are the author’s interpretation; their works are paraphrased apart from short, attributed phrases. The decisions in the decisions box are judged by the author, separating what could be known at the time (process) from what happened (call).

Footnotes

1. Wikipedia, “Korean Air Lines Flight 007”, summarising the ICAO investigation of 1993. ↩

2. “How a 1983 Plane Crash Helped Speed Up Civilian Use of GPS,” Nextgov, November 2014; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Time and Navigation. ↩ ↩²

3. National Institute of Standards and Technology, “Economic Benefits of the Global Positioning System to the U.S. Private Sector Study,” October 2019; RTI International. ↩ ↩²

4. “Google brings more AI to navigation with ‘Ask Maps’ feature,” CNBC, 12 March 2026; on monthly users, Loopex Digital. ↩ ↩²

5. Wikipedia, “Longitude Act”. ↩

6. William H. Guier and George C. Weiffenbach, “The Early Days of Sputnik,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest. ↩

7. Wikipedia, “Transit (satellite)”; Johns Hopkins APL, Technical Digest history of Transit. ↩

8. IEEE Engineering and Technology History Wiki, oral history of Brad Parkinson; “The father of GPS,” Aerospace America. ↩

9. Review of The Lonely Halls Meeting, The Space Review. ↩

10. “Navstar 1, first operational GPS satellite, launches,” History.com; US Air Force Reserve, “GPS traces its history to Navy”. ↩

11. GPS.gov, “Selective Availability”. ↩

12. “GPS and the limits of control,” Lawfare; Science Museum Group, Magellan 1000M GPS receiver, 1990. ↩

13. GPS.gov, Selective Availability frequently asked questions; “The real reason Selective Availability was turned off,” Avionics/Aviation Today, July 2000. ↩

14. Wikipedia, “Automotive navigation system”; “PH Origins: navigation systems,” PistonHeads. ↩

15. “Nokia HERE said to be snatched up by Audi, BMW and Daimler,” PCWorld, on the price paid for Navteq. ↩

16. “Google Maps Begins,” History of Information; “From your desk to your pocket: 20 years of Google Maps,” blue News, 2025. ↩

17. Alexis Madrigal, “How Google builds its maps, and what it means for the future of everything,” The Atlantic, September 2012, republished by Nextgov. ↩

18. “Google Steps Into Another Market: GPS for Phones,” CNBC, October 2009; “Testing Google Versus Standalone Navigation Systems,” NPR, November 2009. ↩

19. “Nokia confirms €2.8B sale of HERE maps business to German car consortium,” Mobile World Live, August 2015. ↩

20. “Reports claim Forstall and Browett were asked to leave Apple,” TechCrunch, 29 October 2012; ABC News, October 2012. ↩

21. “Google’s Waze deal is a likely target in FTC antitrust sweep,” Bloomberg, February 2020; “Google to keep Waze as separate service,” Globes. ↩

22. “New Jersey town will close streets to fight navigation app traffic,” Engadget, 25 December 2017. ↩

23. Wikipedia, “Carpenter v. United States”; “SCOTUS issues landmark decision on cell phone location information,” Business Law Today. ↩

24. Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and others, “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” New York Times, 10 December 2018; “Fitness tracking app Strava reveals sensitive US military information,” iPhone in Canada, January 2018. ↩

25. US Federal Trade Commission, “FTC takes action against Gravy Analytics, Venntel for unlawfully selling location data,” December 2024; “FTC to ban data broker Kochava from selling Americans’ location data,” BleepingComputer. ↩

26. “Google is moving Location History to your device,” 9to5Google, 12 December 2023. ↩

27. Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, Legal Information Institute; “Decision alert: Supreme Court holds acquisition of Google location history through a geofence warrant constitutes a Fourth Amendment search,” Last Month at the Supreme Court, July 2026; on the Fifth Circuit, United States v. Smith, No. 23-60321, 9 August 2024. ↩

28. GlobalSecurity.org, on the commissioning of BDS-3, 31 July 2020; “BDS marches to new era of global services,” GPS World. ↩

29. “How to defeat harmful GPS/GNSS interference: a roadmap for action,” GPS World; “GPS jamming and spoofing disrupts two airline flights over Sweden,” Avi-Go, September 2026. ↩

30. Lockheed Martin, “Lockheed Martin launches GPS III satellite, paving the way for next-generation GPS IIIF spacecraft,” 21 April 2026; “Pentagon pulls the plug on GPS OCX,” KeepTrack, April 2026. ↩