Another one got ignored today, another road left unmapped, another place erased because it wasn’t profitable enough to exist on a corporate map. No one noticed, because no one was supposed to.

They don’t talk about the missing footpaths, the streets that don’t appear because they aren’t in a government database, the communities left invisible because they don’t generate ad revenue. They don’t talk about how your map—your view of the world—is decided not by truth, but by business interests.

They call us idealists, hobbyists, dreamers. They say the world has already been mapped. But they are wrong.

We are the ones who see the gaps. We are the ones who refuse to let our neighborhoods, our histories, our stories be erased. We are the ones who put the world on the map—not for profit, but for people.

Yes, I am a mapper. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is refusing to accept a world where only what is profitable is visible. My crime is knowing that no company, no government, no algorithm should have the power to decide what exists.

You may ignore us. You may try to replace us with AI, to wall off geography behind paywalls, to tell people that their contributions don’t matter. But you can’t stop us all. Because the world is ours to map.

After all, we are all alike. We are OpenStreetMap.

🤣 with apologies ++The Mentor++ (8 January 1986). “The Conscience of a Hacker”. Phrack, Inc. 1 (7): 3 of 10 - wikipedia