Geoscape

Bratton's addition to Appadurai's "-scapes": "a contested terrain of contested terrains," the territory of territories formed when incommensurable cosmograms (Google Earth, a caliphate-to-come, a state's map, an AR game's factions) co-occupy the same physical site without a shared master plane. Geoscapes are "entered into and so made real by their occupation," not arenas that precede politics. Because interfaces are image-instruments that effect what they depict, each regime's reductive world-picture becomes truer with use, and the grinding of incompatible pictures — "Google Earth fit inside the conceptual jihadi map" — is, for Bratton, the actual engine of geopolitical design and a bulwark against consensus sovereignty of last instance.