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There is an infamous short story. It's only a paragraph long by Jorge Luis Borges that describes

the art and science of map making, becoming so precise that a map the exact size of an empire

could come to match it entirely point by point. This map, though, turns out to be useless in the story

and is abandoned to the forces of nature. Now, only tattered remains of this relic of cartography

can be found, says Borges, sheltering the occasional beast or beggar.

Some see this story as an elaboration on an idea from Lewis Carroll,

his story Sylvie and Bruno concluded in which a map of this clearly unwieldy size is described

that has never been fully laid out. Instead, inhabitants decided to use the country itself

as the map and they said it does nearly as well. The 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation by

Jean-Botrylard ad-mires the Borges story as what he calls the finest allegory for simulation,

describing how an aging double ends up being confused for the real thing, covering over the very

thing it was meant to represent, which leads us then to Bodryard's concept of hyper-reality

or the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality,

especially in technologically advanced post-modern societies. Hyper-reality is seen as a condition

in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is

no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Much has been made of how the

...