ABSTRACT
Confident that nearly a half century of writing and thinking about maps would yield insights worth sharing, I had planned, early on, to title this essay ‘Forecasts’ and pepper it with bold predictions about how, say 30 years from now, maps that look markedly different will have radically altered the way we see the world. Insights, of course, are not forecasts, and bold predictions are often saturated with wishful thinking. What I can do is identify some emergent trends and plumb their plausible effects, beneficial or otherwise, on map use. Though the discussion occasionally verges on Orwellian science fiction, my hope is that an informed public, skeptical of geospatial technology, will both defend its privacy and preserve the cartographic record.
