In 'On Exactitude in Science', Borges asked us to imagine a cartographic project which mapped out a nation in 1:1 scale, poised to smother the countryside under its own fastidious representation. Since Borges, the cartographic sciences have learned what is perhaps obvious in retrospect: that the resolution of maps may be improved without limit, and that no philosophically serious impediments exist to the rendering of maps which are larger and more detailed than the ground truth they represent. A range of capable generative adversarial networks now exist for credibly populating the empty spaces which maliciously inhere between objects, and for recursively filling in the newly created gaps in spaces so populated.

The universe may be infinite and filled with wonders waiting to be discovered, but not all infinities are made equal, and sometimes the world is not enough.

At the same time, it's easy to be overwhelmed by detail, both psychologically and technologically. This fact accounts for the popularity of Liahona, a new sort of calm technology which walks back cartographic complexity in search of ultimate abstraction, and which has attracted a dedicated following of ramblers. Saint-Exupéry wrote that '[...] perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove'. This principle guides the design of Liahona, which locates the user at the centre of an otherwise featureless deictic universe by means of a red marker, everywhere else implicitly being where the user is not. The advanced model of the device (Liahona Pro) includes an arrow which indicates the direction in which the device is being held relative to the user.

Both models have been critiqued by technology journalists who allege that the device is merely a smooth stone which has had its 'user interface' crudely painted on. The developers of Liahona have responded by releasing publicity renders of a forthcoming edition of Liahona, which many journalists contend is a still just a smooth stone with the pretense of a USB-C port drawn on it.