Re:Mapping Power:

Tools for Trust-Based Network Sovereignties

by Virginia Zangs and Judd Smith

Introduction

Problem Statement: The transition from traditional to digital cartography has perpetuated historical power imbalances in mapping practices. While tools have evolved from colonial surveyors' pens to corporate algorithms, maps continue to serve as instruments of control rather than tools of community empowerment. Platforms like Google Maps exercise unprecedented cartographic authority, transforming user movements into commercial assets while homogenizing diverse cultural understandings of space.

Research Question: How can mapping technologies and sharing protocols be reimagined to shift away from top-down algorithmically-led envisioning of place to tools of community empowerment while bridging the digital-physical divide in ways that strengthen organic trust in small peer-networks rather than erode local identity and trust?

Research Hypothesis: Peer2Peer (P2P) is a physical tool for future network sovereignties that integrates physical proximity with digital interactions. By enabling community-driven cartography and dynamic boundary definition, P2P prioritizes decentralization, local trust , and community agency over algorithmic-based trust, or corporate interests.

Research Relevance: This research contributes to broader discussions about technological sovereignty, digital democracy, and community empowerment in the digital age. By proposing concrete alternatives to platforms, this work seeks to foster trust, reinforce place-based identities, and redefine relationships between people and place in hybrid realities.

The Power of Maps: From State Control to Corporate Surveillance

From the earliest marks on cave walls to today’s satellite imagery, maps have always been more than passive reflections of our world — they are instruments of power. Historically, cartography has served as a means to control and govern. John Brian Harley, in Maps, Knowledge, and Power (1988), argued that maps are not neutral documents but instruments shaping how we understand space and territory. Through cartography, complex lived geographies were reduced to bordered territories, enabling domination and control.

What if the ‘North’ was the ‘South’? Who decides what goes where? (source)

Colonial Cartography and State Power The apex of this power was reached with the rise of nation-states, where maps defined rigid boundaries that marginalized interconnected human communities. Examples like the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 exemplify this practice, as colonial powers redrew boundaries without regard for ethnic, religious, or tribal realities. These arbitrary borders fractured communities, fostering decades of conflict and displacement.

The Digital Continuation of Cartographic Power

As Laura Kurgan highlights in Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (2013), digital spatial technologies, originally developed for military applications, have transitioned into tools for commercial mapping platforms. These technologies embed historical power structures into modern systems, reinforcing the centralization of control while presenting themselves as neutral or objective. Kurgan (2013) emphasizes that digital spatial technologies—originally designed for military surveillance—reflect specific ideological biases by prioritizing data legibility over the nuances of lived experience. This shifts the act of mapping from a participatory process to one dominated by technical systems, erasing alternative narratives and local knowledge in favor of standardized, globalized representations of space.

An example of the politics of mapping, is the continued use of cartographic “projections” to convert the globe into two-dimensional maps. One of the most popular projections is the Mercator projection, which distorts geographical sizes when viewed on a flat plane. A common criticism of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries near the poles (such as the U.S., Russia, and much of Europe) while understating the size of those closer to the equator (particularly the African continent). Tools like The True Sizer help illustrate these distortions more accurately.

Today’s platforms like Google Maps wield unparalleled cartographic power, shaping billions of users' perceptions of places through algorithmic decision-making. Every route suggested, every business highlighted, and every neighborhood boundary defined serves corporate interests, often at the expense of cultural diversity and local agency.

Movements and locations are harvested as data, transforming individuals' daily interactions with their environments into commercial assets. This aligns with observations by Velho Diogo (2016), who argues that platforms like Google Maps normalize surveillance by embedding location-based services into everyday interactions, turning personal information into valuable commodities for tech giants. The standardized blue dot that marks our location homogenizes diverse cultural understandings of space, erasing local knowledge, indigenous wayfinding, and community landmarks. What was once a tool of imperial ambition has evolved into a mechanism for commercial surveillance. Even the social dimension of our digital landscape further the tradition of a top-down approach to a communal vision of the commerce landscape through sponsored content and posts as wayfinding on networked platforms.

These dynamics perpetuate significant issues. Firstly, loss of community agency. Communities lack control over visibility on digital platforms and data, with governance structures imposed externally. Secondly, the erosion of place-based identity. Global digital platforms homogenize cultural differences, disconnecting individuals from their physical localities and creating a sense of placelessness. Thirdly, the digital-physical divide. Current technologies fail to bridge the gap between digital capabilities and physical community exchange, missing opportunities for local innovation. Finally, trust deficits. Reliance on external digital platforms erodes trust within communities and weakens social bonds.

This analog-to-digital progression necessitates new frameworks for mapping that reclaim power from centralized platforms.

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New Territories and Sovereignties: A Functionalist Turn

Digital technologies have triggered what we might call a ‘functionalist turn’—a profound shift where territory and sovereignty are increasingly defined not by where they are but what they do. This transformation reshapes our understanding of both space and power in the digital networked age.

No longer bound by the physical constraints of land and distance, territory now also flows through the digital realm as streams of information, connecting distant points into intimate networks of meaning and action. Manuel Castells (1996) captured this shift in his concept of ‘spaces of flows,’ where territory becomes less about fixed locations and more about vibrant channels of connection between them. Johan Michalove (2024) extends this understanding, describing how virtual territories become environments where meaning takes root, identities flourish, and communities imagine themselves into being. These ‘semioscapes’—landscapes of shared meaning woven through digital networks—emerge not just as new forms of territory but as vital spaces of human connection and cultural creation.

Sovereignty, like territory, has equally undergone a profound transformation. Building on Pasquale’s (2017) insights, Sofia Cossar and Felix Beer (2024) describe this as ‘functional sovereignty’—the capacity to establish governance rules and mechanisms without external interference. This reimagined conceptualization of sovereignty emphasizes practical self-governance and relative autonomy within one’s sphere of influence, whether digital or physical, rather than absolute control over fixed territory.

This transformation sets the stage for what Primavera de Filippi (2024) calls ‘New Network Sovereignties’—self-governing communities of interconnected actors leveraging decentralized technologies like blockchains and smart contracts for collective decision-making. As Cossar and Beer (2024) observe, these emerging forms of socio-political organization operate through consent rather than coercion, legitimacy rather than legality. Most significantly, they are ‘territorially unbundled,’ existing across multiple legal jurisdictions or connecting groups primarily in the digital sphere. These New Network Sovereignties raise a profound question: Are these better equipped to address the challenges of the current mapping paradigm?

“Furthermore, optimization systems apply a logic of operational control that focuses on outcomes rather than the process [19]. While this introduces efficiency and allows systems to scale, it also poses social risks and harms such as social sorting, mass manipulation, majority dominance, and minority erasure. In summary, these systems create substantial externalities — situations in which the actions of a group of agents, e.g., consumption, production, and investment decisions, have “significant repercussions on agents outside of the group” [20].”

[Vision] A Protopian Future: Affinity Territories and Trust-Based Sovereignties

While New Network Sovereignties offer promising paths toward decentralizing power, they alone cannot fully address the historical legacy of mapping as a tool of oppression.

As Richards and da Cruz Schafhauser (2024) suggest, a protopian vision reimagines both territory and sovereignty through the lens of human connection and collective trust. Additionally, a growing body of research around algorithm aversion suggests an innate disposition towards human inputs and human-based forecasts over algorithmic inputs and algorithmically-generated forecasts (Heinzl, Benbasat, Jussupow 2024)

Territory, in this vision, transcends the dichotomy of physical versus digital space. Drawing from Yi-Fu Tuan’s understanding of ‘place’ as a ‘center of felt value,’ territory emerges wherever meaning, memory, and community intertwine. These ‘affinity territories’ form through the magnetic pull of shared values, common purposes, and lived experiences. By integrating cultural and physical environments, communities can weave networks of trust and redefine sovereignty as collaborative stewardship. This framework aligns with Arturo Escobar’s (2018) principles of autonomous design, where communities co-create systems aligned with their values and contexts.

Sovereignty grows organically through face-to-face encounters, collaborative projects, and shared stewardship of both physical and digital spaces. Stephen Levinson’s (2006) outline of our underlying human “interaction engine” points out that the transmission of meaning does not rely on words alone, but on the face-to-face cooperative mapping of intentions, sequencing of actions, reciprocity of speaking roles and multimodal communication signals like visual, auditory and haptic cues to bind meaning. Trust is built from human-to-human connections — the closer the relational proximity, the more likely the information is accepted between parties. Unlike traditional sovereignty that rules from above, this form emphasizes trust-embedded collective co-creation with local relationally-connected networks. Communities claim sovereignty not by drawing borders or writing code, but by weaving networks of trust through daily interactions and shared stories.

Key Concepts and Terminology

Affinity Territories: Spaces of shared meaning, values, and experiences that transcend physical boundaries, existing in both digital and physical realms.

Algorithm aversion: people often prefer human-based forecasts to algorithms’ forecasts and more strongly weigh human input than algorithmic input.

Semioscapes: Landscapes of meaning formed within the network, representing collective experiences, stories, and values of a community. (Johan Michalove)

Place-based Identity: The connection between an individual or community and their physical environment, which can be eroded or strengthened by digital interactions.

Hybrid Mapping: The integration of physical locations with digital interfaces to create digital-physical representations of space, community, and interaction.

P2P + Network Sovereignty: The ability of individuals and communities to self-govern their digital spaces in alignment with their physical realities and local values.

Human Interaction Engine: A framework that states humans are natively endowed with a set of cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions that synergistically work together to endow human face-to-face interaction like intention attribution, mutual attentiveness, cooperation, and Gricean Intentions. (Stephen Levinson 2006)

[How] From Counter-Mapping to Remapping Power: P2P

The path to implementing our protopian vision builds upon a rich legacy of resistance through cartography. Counter-mapping movements have long recognized digital technologies not just as tools of oppression, but as potential instruments of liberation (Kitchin et al., 2011). From maps that show historical racism and segregation or indigenous historical land dispossession, counter-mapping has shown how alternative cartographic practices can challenge the hegemony of state and commercial mapping.

Yet P2P aims to move beyond mere resistance to active reconstruction. It does this not by simply creating alternative maps, but by reimagining the very practice of mapping through a trust-based, community-centered approach. P2P presents a vision for a future where digital platforms deepen our connection to the physical world rather than replacing it by establishing trust in human-inputs first through local sharing in the physical world which comply with our innate interaction engine’s attribution of trust and meaning. This model challenges the dominance of corporate platforms, ultimately reclaiming sovereignty and place-based identity in an increasingly placeless, digital world.

The P2P System combines digital and physical infrastructure that supports network activities: The network operates through a hybrid of physical companion devices (navigation, signaling, communication) and a digital platform (web-mapping and data collection). The network's architecture facilitates secure direct sharing of real-time travel, location-based recommendations, and resources between peers.

Trust is fundamental to building community-based networks. In our project, trust grows through IRL relationships and co-building of the network — whether exchanging stories about localities, contributing to participatory maps, or offering place-based recommendations that are digitally stored and embody the collective memory of the network.

This reimagining takes concrete form through four integrated features:

Hybrid Mapping: P2P integrates physical locations with digital interactions, creating a multi-dimensional map that reflects both geographical proximity and affinity-based connections. This feature allows users to see not just where places are physically located, but also how they're connected through shared experiences, values, and digital interactions.

Place-Sharing and Place-Making: Members share local experiences and build place-based online-offline identities through “exchanging place units.”
Physical Proximity Protocol: Utilizes near-field communication (NFC) technology to ground network participation in physical proximity and IRL interaction.

Speculative Example: Pop-up villages like Edge City Lanna and local communities could use P2P to map their programme of creative spaces, workshops, and collaborative projects. The map would show physical locations like relevant cultural sites, workshops and studios, but also reveals connections based on practices, shared resources, and ongoing collaborations. Members use NFC to check in at various locations, adding layers of information about events, activities, or gatherings, thus creating an adapting map of interactions.

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Places of Affinity: P2P incorporates indicators of shared values, interests, and experiences to measure and visualize proximity in affinity space, going beyond physical distance. This feature allows users to find and connect with others based on shared interests and values, regardless of physical location.

Semioscapes: P2P Facilitates the creation of landscapes of meaning that represent collective experiences, stories, and values through empowering the network through local trust found horizontally in a user’s existing network.
Exploration: The P2P interface encourages exploration of environments guided by “Semioscapes” and spatial features.

Community-Driven Cartography: Participatory mapping tools democratize cartography, enabling communities to collaboratively define their affinity territories. Drawing on Nancy Peluso’s (1995) principles of counter-mapping. P2P enables participants to collectively define and map their affinity territories through shared experiences, stories, and place-making activities. This feature democratizes the mapping process, allowing communities to represent their spaces in ways that are meaningful to them.

Participatory Mapping: Allows multiple users to contribute to the creation and editing of maps through the inclusion of their place and personal zones of interests.
Counter-Mapping: Incorporates principles of counter-mapping, allowing communities to create alternative, bottom-up representations of their spaces.

Speculative Example: A network of independent cultural centers could use P2P to create a European-wide map of event spaces. Each center contributes information about their activities, resources, and political stance. This collaborative map becomes a tool for coordinating transnational cultural events, sharing resources, and visualizing the reach and diversity of autonomous cultural production outside mainstream institutions.

Dynamic Boundaries: The territories mapped by P2P are fluid and evolving, reflecting the dynamic nature of cultural and political networks through their changing members and territories of affinities. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) concept of ‘smooth space,’ these maps adapt to shifting community interests and activities.

Temporal Mapping: Allows visualization of how cultural and political spaces and connections change over time.
Affinity Flux: Shows how community boundaries and connections shift based on changing interests and activities.

Speculative Example: Ars Electronica, a IRL festival and ongoing digital platform, could use P2P to map the evolving landscape of digital art and technology. The map dynamically updates to show how projects, collaborations, and themes evolve throughout the year, intensifying during the festival period. It visualizes how the boundaries between different projects, technologies, and global participants shift and overlap, providing a visualisation of the digital art world’s evolution.

Conclusion - Provocation: Reconnecting to Place Through a Trusted Network

Tuan's concept of place as a "center of felt value," can afford us to see with clarity that a network can reject purely algorithmic and digital representations of places and experiences that reduce human interaction and the environment to decontextualized data points. The network sees co-creation and collective action as the most effective means for cultural, social, and environmental change – participation and community-based, decentralized, peer-to-peer forms of governance, standing in opposition to top-down control for navigation, mapping, and place-based recommendations.

P2P aims to empower communities by enabling them to chart new territories and claim hybrid spaces through the reliance of meaning and order of importance found in small-network based trust . These maps not only bridge digital and physical realms but also establish governance mechanisms for collective decision-making and managing affinity territories.

P2P offers a radical new approach to mapping and navigating hybrid spaces, emphasizing trust, locality, and community agency. By empowering communities to reclaim control over mapping practices, P2P fosters a deeper connection to place and a more equitable digital future. In doing so, P2P challenges the dominance of corporate platforms, offering a protopian vision for networked sovereignties rooted in trust and shared meaning to create a more locally connected future.

Acknowledgments Special thanks to the SOAM Residence program (April-October 2024), curatorial team, and collaborators Felix Beer, Sofia Cossar, and Johan Michalove. Gratitude to Nadir Puccinelli for editing.

References

Harley, J.B. (1988). Maps, Knowledge, and Power.
Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society.
Pasquale, F. (2017). The Black Box Society.
Kitchin, R., Dodge, M., & Perkins, C. (2011). Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation.
Schingler, J.K. & Filippi, P. (2021). Extitutional Theory.
Richards, J. & da Cruz Schafhauser, M. (2024). Affinity Territories.
Michalove, J. (2024). Territories of meaning: Cultural sovereignty in a networked age.
Kurgan, L. (2013). Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics.
Tuan, Y.F. (1974). Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values.
Peluso, N.L. (1995). Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(4), 383-406.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.
Massey, D. (1993). Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Debord, G. (1956). Theory of the dérive. Les Lèvres Nues, 9.

Psychogeographic Exploration: Inspired by the Situationist concept of dérive (drifting), P2P encourages members to explore urban environments guided by atmosphere and spatial features. This practice helps create a collective identity and critiques how traditional urbanism can alienate people from their environments.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Dynamic Boundaries: This understanding of fluidity is inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of "smooth space" from "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980), which emphasizes nomadic, non-hierarchical spatial organizations.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.

Sovereignty Tools: This aspect of P2P draws inspiration from Arturo Escobar's work on "autonomous design" in "Designs for the Pluriverse" (2018), which emphasizes the importance of community self-determination in shaping social and technological systems.

Dietvorst, B. J., Simmons, J. P., & Massey, C. (2014). Algorithm aversion: People erroneously avoid algorithms after seeing them err. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000033

Jussupow, E., Benbasat, I., & Heinzl, A. (2024). An integrative perspective on algorithm aversion and appreciation in decision-making. MIS Quarterly, 48(4), 1575–1590. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2024/18512

Algorithm aversion: people often prefer human-based forecasts to algorithms’ forecasts and more strongly weigh human input than algorithmic input.

Kurgan, L. (2013). Close up at a distance: Mapping, technology, and politics. Zone Books.

Critical cartography. Kurgan argues that maps are not just representations of space but also tools for producing space: …in these days when virtual co-ordinates direct missiles to their targets and social networks have allowed phone companies and other collectors of our data trails to predict our next move in physical space . . . we can never be sure which co-ordinate systems take priority in terms of representing our identity or our spatial movements.”

Levinson, S. C. (2006). On the human "interaction engine." In N. J. Enfield & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 39–69). Berg Publishers.

Massey, D. (1993). Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place. In J. Bird, B.

Hybrid Mapping is inspired by Doreen Massey's concept of "a global sense of place" from her essay "Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place" (1993), which emphasizes the interconnectedness of local and global spaces.

Peluso, N. L. (1995). Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(4), 383-406.

Community-Driven Cartography: Participatory GIS and counter-mapping, as discussed by Nancy Peluso.

Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perceptions, attitudes, and values. Prentice-Hall.

Affinity Indicators: This draws on the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, his concept of "topophilia", which explores the emotional bonds between people and place.