A Map Of The Internet, Part 1: The Lies Of The Land

A subscribers-only digital mapping nerdfest.

Hello! This is Everything is Amazing, a newsletter about curiosity.

And this is its first subscribers-only post, where I start repaying your kindness at supporting this newsletter with…whatever this is!

EiA is currently in an intermission between Seasons 2 and 3 (the latter is starting at the end of next week), and this is the first of a two-parter, so I’m sure there’s a clever name out there somewhere for such things. It’s one of those, anyway.

Before I get going with today’s stuff, a bizarre update on a previous newsletter. Remember the story of Metric vs Imperial? It’s become more timely than I could have ever expected, because the UK government announced 2 days ago that it’s going to allow British shopkeepers to trade using pounds and ounces, instead of insisting they always use Metric.

As far as I can tell, this isn’t going to change much on the ground (most of us already use a mix of both in our everyday lives, particularly a preference for miles rather than kilometres) - so it’s less a “post-Brexit bonfire of European Union red tape” *sigh* and more a confirmation that we’re even more eccentric than we first appear.

(And considering my country is one that still legislates that All beached whales and sturgeons must be offered to the Reigning Monarch, that’s saying a lot.)

Anyway. Today, a question that‘s been quietly bugging me for years - and one that might be a lot more important to our mental wellbeing than it seems at first glance:

What does the Internet actually look like?