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These sailors’ coordinates may have been merely conventional signs, but today, in quantified modernity, such signs have attained a universality that grounds them in new ways. Here is the backstory.

Much to the shock of the Americans, who did not see it coming, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957. This was the earth’s first artificial satellite, a mere 58 centimeters in diameter with two pairs of antennae communicating radio signals back to earth. In the three months before it crashed out of orbit, Sputnik traversed the entire inhabited earth.¹⁷⁹

Sputnik was launched on a Friday, and when William Guier and George Weiffenbach came to work at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University on Monday, they were surprised to find that nobody had yet attempted to track its signal. Guier had created computer simulations of hydrogen bomb explosions, and Weiffenbach was at the time finishing his Ph.D. in microwave spectroscopy.

Soon they detected the signal and calculated the satellite’s trajectory. By dint of Cold War necessity, they were mere eavesdroppers. On the prompting of Frank McClure, the Laboratory’s director, they realized that not only could they determine the location of the radio transmitter, but the location of the receiver when tracked against the trajectory of the satellite. Geographical position could be determined in a passive communication system – just by receiving a signal, without having to send one.¹⁸⁰ It was this insight that was became the basis for the subsequent development of the Global Positioning System (GPS).

For forty-two years, Gladys B. West worked for the US Naval Surface Warfare Center where she was one of the key creators of GPS. “The primary mission,” she wrote in a now-declassified document, “meets the geodesy requirement to provide the Department of the Navy with a global data base of 10 cm precision radar altimeter measurements. This data will allow for improvements in the gravitational models required by advanced Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile systems.”¹⁸¹

At the US Air Force Base, GPS project leader Brad Parkinson had posted on the wall of his office this guiding slogan: “The mission of this Program Office is to drop 5 bombs into the same hole.” Parkinson’s word was turned into practice for the first time in the 1991 Gulf War.

Billions of dollars later, by 1995 the US had a complete satellite system in place, with thirty-eight satellites circling the globe at a distance of approximately 20,000 kilometers. The GPS signal was opened to full civilian use in 2000. The Soviets started launching their own system in 1982, followed by partial and still incomplete European, Chinese, and Indian systems.¹⁸² It’s irrelevant how many systems there are, because the numbers driving them all are the same – the three-dimensional geocoordinate system of latitude, longitude, and elevation that was established at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington DC.

Today, there are billions of GPS receivers, mostly mobile phones, and an unthinkable number of daily calculations of place. To work, a receiver needs a line of sight to at least four satellites. Every satellite has an accurately synchronized atomic clock, and the time it takes for the signal to reach your device tells how far the receiver is from each satellite. In a calculation transposing these times into space, the machine can determine where you are with a margin of error of 30 centimeters. Combining the Russian signals with the US signals, a beet farmer can achieve accuracy of less than an inch, at which point the position of every seed is recorded and then each beet dug up without damage.¹⁸³

Here we encounter another significant difference between speech and text. Speech can only refer to place awkwardly or ambiguously – “near/far,” “before/after,” “in front of/behind.” The numbered coordinates that are named in text and drive geolocation are for practical purposes unspeakable.

An incidental effect of the time-space basis of GPS technology is that, as well as determining locations, GPS satellites today also drive most of the world’s clocks. GPS time commenced at midnight on 5 January, 1980.¹⁸⁴

Returning to Einstein^§AS1.3.1a for a moment, in material and experiential terms, time and space are profoundly not the same. To make time a fourth dimension in a continuum is to ignore an irreducible difference between the three dimensions of space on the one hand, and the trajectory of time on the other. Time and space do not need to be jammed into the same frame of dimensionality for their meanings to be transposable. The power of GPS is not its conflation of space-time into a unified continuum, but in the mechanics of its transposition, its cross-calibrations between meanings that are fundamentally different, and whose efficacy is in the difference.

Then, another transposition is required, from numbered geocoordinates that are unspeakable when it gets down to meters and centimeters, to the instantiation of place represented by speakable names – though these too are so many that they can’t be remembered for spontaneous speech. We need to read them off our devices for the purposes of navigating directions.

The transposition from numbered to named place is achieved by Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a phrase used for the first time in a 1965 report by Michael Dacey and Duane Marble for the US Office of Naval Research.¹⁸⁵ GeoNames contains an all-but definitive list of more than 25 million place names on earth, with 645 feature codes, including “anchorage,” “automatic teller machine,” “asylum,” “arch,” and “abandoned police post.”¹⁸⁶ Since its launch in 2005, Google Maps has become the most definitive GIS software, layered into Google Street View and Google Earth – covering just about every street in the world. OpenStreetMap is an open data, collaborative mapping project hosted by the not-for-profit OpenStreet Map Foundation.¹⁸⁷

Connecting GPS to GIS, Yelp will find you almost any restaurant. In the United States, Zillow will show you current and historical prices of almost every house, along with pictures inside its bedrooms and bathrooms that may have been posted by realtors at an earlier sale. On Facebook and Instagram, users create place names, and when other users search for nearby places, they find geotags where they can “check in.” Cameras with GPS include incidentally recorded geographical metadata in Exchangeable image file format (Exif),^§AS1.4.6c and locations are automatically marked in albums that bring GIS to bear on GPS.

Based as they are in a now-singular and universal grammar of place, a hugely detailed, semantically regimented representation of empirical locations has been created by giant companies and millions of information-contributing users. This representation of place is arguable in its minutiae, but definitive in its generality. Its validity can be tested and refined against a myriad of moments of experiences of place, and internal place–place calculations when people and machines corroborate data with data.¹⁸⁸

In the unspeakable numbers that power these transpositions from place to number to text, and back again, we encounter what Félix Guattari calls, in a nice turn of phrase, “asignifying semiotics.” He explains: “the systems of logical, topological, algebraic algorithm, the processes of recording, memory storage, and data processing used by mathematicians, sciences, technology, harmonic and polyphonic music, etc., do not have an aim to denote or fill in the morphemes of a fully constituted referent, but to produce them through their own machinics.” He calls this a “machinic unconscious,” in order “to stress that it is populated not only with images and words, but also with all kinds of machinisms that lead it to produce and reproduce these images and words.”¹⁸⁹

Or in our terms, the transposition from place (context) to its naming (text), picturing (image), and embodied presence (space) is by means of “machinic” mediation where the intermediate texts are unspeakable and unreadable. In the now-universal grammar of digital place, calculable position is always waiting to be turned into meanings-for-us.

Along the way, we’ve lost track of the fact that place may be relative to historical contingency. Our ontology of place has become now so universal and so definitive in its details that we can lose track of its historicity, its strangeness in the span of human species-life. Notwithstanding its peculiarities, except in the most minor of ways, it has become practically non-negotiable.

Since May 20, 2019, we have grounded universal calculation of place, time, and other measures in the most stable natural phenomena scientists have found, and their cross-calculable transpositions. From that date, Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in France deemed that the kilogram will be measured by the amount of energy it takes to balance its weight using electromagnetic forces.¹⁹⁰ Now, all seven base units of measure (meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela) are to be calculated against physical constants, and in calculations against each other. These transpositions, so it seems, are now definitive.

A meter had already been determined in 1983 to be the distance covered by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, and in 1967 a second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.¹⁹¹ So, it would seem, we have naturalized place in relation to other measures, and fixed these measures to non-negotiable materiality for all time.

Not that this now-universal grammar of place is, by virtue of its ubiquity, in the slightest neutral. Far from it: the conventions of calculable place reflect the conquest of certain patterns of place-sense over others.

The new cognitive prostheses of place and wayfinding begin their calculations on a universe of fixed coordinates and cardinal directions. This is an objective world, grounded in the historicity of its measures. At the same time, subjectively they position the self at the world’s center. “Turn left,” says the GPS. “Recenter,” you say, and the map puts the little arrowed directional dot of the ego back in the center of the world. Along the road, the map is oriented to the direction of travel, not the north of past mapping convention. The objectified spatiality of the world is recalculated and transposed onto the subjectively self-centered world of the GPS-dependent wayfinder.

There is, for the moment at least, only one other thing of final relevance in the map of the world, the destination icon. In between, there is a line, so the two-dimensionality of printed maps has effectively been reduced to one, a direction. The GPS barks your marching orders, and barely conceals its irritation at your mistakes.

The software does the transposition for you, from two-dimensional place to one-dimensional direction, from context to self, from objective place to subjective wayfinding. This process entails loss as much as gain. The most obvious loss is agency, the relative control of place and path afforded by two-dimensional mental maps. By relieving the wayfinder’s burdens, the cognitive prosthesis displaces a wider, contextualizing cognition. The world is narrowed, and maps of self become “maps of ignorance.”¹⁹²

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¹⁷⁸ Lewis Carroll, 1876 [1981], The Hunting of the Snark, Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, pp. 15–16.

¹⁷⁹ Yanek Mieczkowski, 2013, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

¹⁸⁰ George Weiffenbach and William Guier, 1998, “Genesis of Satellite Navigation,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19(1):14–17, p. 16.

¹⁸¹ Gladys B. West, 1986, Data Processing System Specifications for the Geosat Satellite Radar Altimeter, Report NSWC TR 86-149, Dahlgren, VA: Naval Surface Weapons Center, p. 1.

¹⁸² Greg Milner, 2016, Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds, New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 56–58, 88, 100, 144.

¹⁸³ Ibid., pp. 101–05.

¹⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 154.

¹⁸⁵ Michael F. Dacey and Duane F. Marble, 1965, “Some Comments on Certain Technical Aspects of Geographic Information Systems,” Office of Naval Research.

¹⁸⁶ www.geonames.org/export/codes.html

¹⁸⁷ www.openstreetmap.org/about

¹⁸⁸ Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, Amin Mobasheri, Luisa Griesbaum, Melanie Eckle, Clemens Jacobs, and Carolin Klonner, 2018, “A Grounding-Based Ontology of Data Quality Measures,” Journal of Spatial Information Science (16):1–25; Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, 2018, “The Polynomial Volume Law of Complex Networks in the Context of Local and Global Optimization,” Scientific Reports 8(11274):1–10.

¹⁸⁹ Félix Guattari, 1979 [2001], The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, translated by T. Adkins, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 20, 216, 10; Gary Genosko, 2008, “A-Signifying Semiotics,” Public Journal of Semiotics 11(1):11–21.

¹⁹⁰ www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/17/the-kilogram-and-three-other-metric-units-are-about-to-be-revamped

¹⁹¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit

¹⁹² Marco D’Eramo, 2017, “Geographies of Ignorance,” New Left Review (108):43–45.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 81–85. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Gladys B. West’s Global Positioning System §AS1.3.2b