SPEAKER_08: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The only truly accurate map of the world would be a map the size of the world. So if you want to make a map useful, something that you can hold in your hands, you have to start making choices. You have to choose what information you're interested in and what you're throwing out. These choices influence how the person reading the map views the world. But a map's influence doesn't end there. Maps can actually shape the place they're trying to represent. And that's when things get weird. I love a good map. And today we have three short stories about how maps have changed the real world in big and small ways. OK, so Kurt Kohlstedt is in the studio with me and he also loves maps. And you've written a ton of articles about maps and map projections and even you did an article about the design of pins on maps. Oh, yes. So the love is deep. It's real. So we're going to talk about actually one of your favorite geographical oddities, and that's exclaves and enclaves. And these are bits of land cut off from their home countries in various cool ways.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and they take a lot of forms and it gets complicated pretty fast. So I just wanted to start with something simple that listeners out there might recognize. When you look at a map of the United States, there's this little bump up in the middle and it's called the Northwest Angle and it sticks up from Minnesota into Canada. Right.
SPEAKER_08: OK, I know that one. It's basically how like non-Minnesotans know where Minnesota is. It tells it from the other states up there, it just kind of breaks up this like clean straight Canadian border running along the western U.S. and then when it hits the Great Lakes you get this bump. Exactly.
SPEAKER_05: So like on the left it's all kind of a straight line and on the right it starts getting zigzaggy. And it has a really kind of neat origin story, but I'm not going to go there today. Suffice it to say cartographical errors were made. And for me growing up in Minnesota, I actually always tended to picture this notch as a piece of land, like a solid, because you know it's like part of the shape of the map. But it's actually not, or at least not entirely. So the southern portion of the Angle is water and above that there is a patch of land and that's what's known as a practical exclave.
SPEAKER_08: A practical exclave. So under the basics of exclaves and enclaves, these are areas of land that are isolated or separated in some way from the rest of the country, but what does a practical exclave mean, like in this case?
SPEAKER_05: Basically the land in the Angle is surrounded by Canadian land on most sides, but below it has this area of American territorial water, which is basically a really big lake. So practically speaking, someone who wants to go directly there without leaving the US, they could do it by boat. But on land they'd actually have to drive through Canada to get back into this slice of America, which isn't impossible, it's just impractical. Right, okay.
SPEAKER_08: That makes sense. This actually reminds me of Point Roberts, which we actually sent Sharif to, to do a little story a while ago, where he went to the post office that people go to on Point Roberts. That's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and it's totally in that same category of exclave as Point Roberts, though in the details they're really different. The Angle is huge, it's much bigger, it's relatively remote, and it's really sparsely populated by comparison. So it only has around 100 permanent residents or so, and the crossing stations are correspondingly pretty minimalist.
SPEAKER_08: So what does it take to cross the border at the northwest Angle?
SPEAKER_05: For a long time you had these little shack-like buildings called Outlying Area Reporting Stations, or ORS, and you had to do like a video call with a border agent. Skype. Right, you basically Skype into the border patrol, they kind of, you know, look who wants over, you show them your passport, and you're on your way. I mean, it just wouldn't be practical to staff these things, right? That's ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. And then I've been reading about this because I haven't been up there in a while, and apparently over the last few years they've been working on streamlining things with a mobile app called ROAM, spelled R-O-A-M. So like a way that you can kind of check in without really going through all these hoops.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, that's so cool. So yeah, Point Roberts, yeah, northwest Angle. You know, these are fairly regional examples, like people that live there interact with them, but most people don't interact with them. Are there ones that have like bigger impacts on the world in general?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean there's ones that people never really think about, and a really good example is the whole state of Alaska. Right, okay, of course. So Alaska is considered to be what's called a semi-exclave, and it's actually the largest of its kind in the world. And it's got this semi-modifier because even though it doesn't border the lower 48, it does have like this really long stretch of international coastline, so it really has direct access to international waters. Right, right.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so those are exclaves. I think those are pretty easy to understand. So describe what enclaves are, because those can be pretty strange. They really can.
SPEAKER_05: And I should note here that there are some nuances to all this and a lot of complexity, like some enclaves are also exclaves. But like in the simplest and most general terms, enclaves are countries or parts of countries that are entirely contained within another country's territory. So they're totally surrounded.
SPEAKER_08: So the Northwest Angle and Point Roberts in Alaska, they don't count because they aren't cut off completely from the US. You can still get to these places by boat, for example. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_05: Whereas enclaves are fully enclosed. So San Marino in Europe is a classic example. It's this relatively small country, and it's completely enclaved on all sides by Italy.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, maybe it's because the US is so isolated and on its own and surrounded by water that that feels weird to me, to be enclosed in another country. I mean, maybe if you're like the Czech Republic, you're surrounded by other countries too. Yeah, or like Luxembourg or something. It's like, you know, it might not be one country, but you're still pretty small. But there's still something kind of special about being a country completely inside one other country. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05: You're kind of dependent on them in certain curious ways. Exactly. And that's sort of just the first level of this too. These things get even more complex and even more small in a lot of cases. For example, with counter enclaves, which are an enclave inside of another enclave, or more specifically, like a piece of the Netherlands inside a piece of Belgium that is itself in the Netherlands.
SPEAKER_08: So they're like second order enclaves or like enclaves in enclaves. Yes. Enclaves all the way down. All the way down.
SPEAKER_05: And as crazy as those are, it doesn't stop there. Consider counter, counter enclaves like a piece of India inside a piece of Bangladesh inside a piece of India inside of Bangladesh. And in fact, that triple enclave example is the only known third order enclave in world history. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: Well, that makes sense that it would be the only one. It's so absurd. It's pretty. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty hard to picture. How does that even work in the real world?
SPEAKER_05: So basically for a long time, there were villages within villages. And at the middle of it all was this two acre parcel that was owned by a Bangladeshi farmer who lived in the surrounding enclave. And he would just wake up in the morning and cross into India to farm his tiny patch of land in the middle of this zone. And then he would cross back into Bangladesh each night. In 2015, India and Bangladesh finally agreed to this really big cross border land swap to essentially tidy up all these enclaves within enclaves. And essentially they ended up handing over dozens of enclaves to each other totaling thousands of acres.
SPEAKER_08: Did that mean that there were like Indians now living in Bangladesh and vice versa? I mean, yes, in some cases.
SPEAKER_05: And I actually thought they handled it pretty well and pragmatically. They basically offered residents of these former enclaves a choice. They could either stay where they were and basically be in a different country than they had been before, or they could move quote unquote back across the border to their official country of citizenship. And it all kind of reminds me like this isn't quite technically an enclave or an exclave thing, but once you start thinking in these terms, there are some other interesting geographical mind benders out there. So I've got one more for you. And as far as I know, this place has no official name. So I've just been calling it Inception Island. And it's a pretty normal island located in Canada. But apparently, as far as I can tell, it's also the world's largest known island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.
SPEAKER_08: It's like Inception. Like there's a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. So that's why you're calling it Inception Island. I get it.
SPEAKER_05: And it kind of blows my mind in the same way too, right? Like I have to do some like mental, you know, accounting to keep track of the what's within what as you go along.
SPEAKER_01: Now in a dream, our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our world simultaneously. And our mind does this so well that we don't even know what's happening.
SPEAKER_08: Does the top keep spinning? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? And so of course, we have pictures of these all on the website? Oh, yeah, of course. Cool. That's awesome. That's at 99pi.org. Thank you, Kurt.
SPEAKER_05: Thanks, Roman.
SPEAKER_08: Up next is Joe Rosenberg. Okay, so Roman, the best way to get into this story, I think is with kind of like a mental
SPEAKER_02: exercise. Are you game?
SPEAKER_08: I'm definitely game.
SPEAKER_02: All right. So what I want you to do is imagine that you are taking a stroll through the British countryside. Okay, does it matter where in the British countryside?
SPEAKER_02: Actually, no, it actually doesn't matter. That's kind of the point. It could be anywhere on the island of Great Britain.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so let's ramble through the Lake District. I like a good fell. I could ramble on a fell.
SPEAKER_02: Excellent choice. Excellent word use. Okay.
SPEAKER_08: Will there be hedges around there? Definitely. Okay, good hedges.
SPEAKER_02: I could throw in some sheep. Okay, I'm there in my mind.
SPEAKER_08: I'm rambling. It's a beautiful place.
SPEAKER_02: I'm glad you're enjoying yourself. But here's the thing. On this hypothetical ramble of yours, no matter where you chose to go, so long as you are somewhere on the island of Great Britain, after a while, I can almost guarantee you, you will come across an object that looks like this. Here let me show you a photo.
SPEAKER_08: It's like an obelisk. It looks a little bit like a fatter squatter Washington monument without a pyramid on top, which is like kind of a tapered concrete pillar. I can't tell from the perspective of how tall it is, though. It's maybe like four feet high. Okay, yeah. So in the middle of the countryside, it's very austere. It looks like a ruin, kind of. It has a little vibe of something that has been left behind, but it's cool looking. It's evocative. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: For me, it's almost like a gray concrete version of like the monolith from 2001. It's just kind of there. And the thing is, is that these pillars are actually all over the place. No matter where you are, if you head out a few miles in any direction, you will keep stumbling upon these things.
SPEAKER_08: And they all basically look like this?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're all identical, exact same shape, exact same measurements. It almost never varies. This one you're looking at is in Wales. Let me show you a few more. This is one that's actually in an island called St. Kilda. It's like in the outer Hebrides, like super remote. There's like abandoned settlements there. There's all there is is a military base out there. But still, they have these pillars. They really are everywhere.
SPEAKER_02: And like, for example, not just in these like remote craggy places. This one's just in a field, in a farm field. We got one here that's just like in a kind of suburban backyard.
SPEAKER_08: So what are they and why are they everywhere?
SPEAKER_02: So the actual technical term for these things are triangulation stations. But in Britain, everyone just calls them trig points or trig pillars. And these trig pillars are the remnants of a centuries long effort to do something that we today kind of take for granted, which was to make a topographical survey of an entire country.
SPEAKER_08: And so a topographical survey of the entire country. I kind of know what you mean, but what do you mean? Right.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. You're like, Oh, yeah, sure. The survey is doing the thing. They have those things. And then there's topo maps and it's all taken care of. The kind of broader contextual answer is that at least in Europe, as you get into the age of exploration and colonization, but also the age of nation states with standing armies, there is an increased need for really spatially accurate maps.
SPEAKER_08: And this is because navigation and military actions and this sort of thing, like you need to be more precise than you did before. Is that the deal?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you're going to aim an artillery piece, you really need to know what you're going to hit, the curvature of the earth, things like this. Right. But the first topographically accurate survey maps were only of certain small areas, like maybe a coastline or a town. And it turned out that most of these maps weren't even like that accurate because anytime they tried to line them up side by side, they were never in agreement. Like their longitude and latitudes would never sync up. And it was hard to say which map was right or whether perhaps even like all the maps were just filled with errors. There were no national maps, no national grid systems, which is to say there's like no set of fixed reference points for all lower order maps to use. And this was really frustrating. Just like imagine for a moment not having a consistent map of the country where you lived.
SPEAKER_08: Right. Like every time you saw a big map in a classroom, the coast would be all different and Florida would look crazy every time and that sort of thing. Like everything would be different. Yeah, because nobody really knew.
SPEAKER_02: Right. Right. And I don't know about you, but if that were ever taken away, I would feel its absence. And so in Europe increasingly, as you get into the 18th century especially, there is a desire for precisely that. A true God's eye view of the land that would feel like you're just kind of floating many miles above the earth and looking down at what is actually.
SPEAKER_08: And this was kind of a new idea to be really accurate in this way.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because in Europe in the Middle Ages, you didn't need to know exactly how far away Bruges was. It was like three days right away to the left. Right. And your field, it wasn't that it was 255 yards long versus 257 yards long. It just ended where the cops of trees was. Right. Still the way we use subway maps today, right, which is something that helps you in practice. But now we're getting into this era where there is a kind of practical need. But also you had this Enlightenment idea that there is some kind of fixed objective reality out there that we have been denied access to up until now. And we need to find out everything we can about it and master it somehow as part of our grand Enlightenment project.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_02: And so in the 1700s, you begin to see more and more countries start to do national surveys and make the first spatially accurate national maps whose kind of official coordinates keep all the other maps in agreement. And so by fits and starts in the 1780s, and then officially in 1791, Britain is finally like, hmm, we should also probably know where everything is. And they said, you know, we want a national map too. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_08: Great. Okay, so how do you go about making a national map?
SPEAKER_02: Where do you even start, right? Like when you don't know where anything is, and you're not sure about anything's location or the distance between things? What's your first reference point? Like how do you decide where like, yeah, yeah. And the answer is trig pillars. And this is what they did. They built two triangulation stations about 12 miles apart, kind of what Heathrow Airport is now.
SPEAKER_02: And then they used just so they think got the measurement exactly right. They used a series of glass tubes, like I think each glass tube was like 12 feet long, and they just kept placing them end on end over the course of like many, many months until they finally could add them all up and say, okay, this is the distance between these two first triangulation stations. Those two triangulation stations were within sight of the Greenwich Observatory. And the Greenwich Observatory, they were like pretty sure they knew where the Greenwich Observatory was because it had all these telescopes with which to make celestial measurements. And so like the Greenwich Observatory's longitude and latitude was the longitude and latitude they were like the most confident in. All we need to do now is measure the angle between these two stations and the Greenwich Observatory. And now we have the location and distance between all three of these objects. And once they had that, then they were off to the races because now you don't need to physically measure layout like, you know, rulers or glass rods or anything anymore. All you need to do is place a new triangulation, a third triangulation station within sight of the first two, measure the angles again, and then you can just do all the math from the angles and you get to know the exact location of the third triangulation station. And then you can place a fourth a little further away. And again, as long as it's within sight of two, get a fourth station, fifth, right? And then you just daisy chain your way across the entire landmass.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_08: Wow, and in this case, you mean Great Britain and that's why those trig points are everywhere.
SPEAKER_02: For the entire island of Great Britain, yes, with triangulation stations at every point. Wow, how long did this take?
SPEAKER_02: The primary triangulation was finally completed in 1853. So it took 62 years. And in fact, like in 1935, they did a retriangulation. And this time it was much faster. It only took 30 years. And so all the trig pillars you see dotted throughout the countryside, I have to fess up are actually from the retriangulation.
SPEAKER_08: These are the second ones from 1935. Yeah, and then the reason they installed these new ones is like the original ones were just
SPEAKER_02: kind of like holes in the ground. And there's actually hilarious descriptions of where you could find them. Because they'd be like, oh, ask the farmer who lives at the end of the lane and he'll tell you, you know what I mean? And those were like any official descriptions of where the trig points were. And they're like, this isn't good enough. We need to make better trig points, more trig points. And the reason they are all the exact same shape is because they are literally mounts for the surveying equipment.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, okay. That makes sense. So in the end, for the full survey, how many trig points do they have to build?
SPEAKER_02: They built about 6,500. And today there are still about 6,200. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's pretty good. So believe it or not, there is one guy who has visited every single one of them. Of course.
SPEAKER_04: It happened bit by bit, really.
SPEAKER_02: So this is the guy. His name is Rob Woodall. He is 59. He works for a Water and Waste Authority in East Anglia. And he honestly cannot tell you what compelled him to do this.
SPEAKER_04: You never set out to bag 6,000 trig pillars. But yeah, just gradually you get kind of sucked in.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Rob likes the outdoors and he likes a good challenge, clearly. But when I asked him if there was some kind of philosophical reward in it for him, something to do with perhaps seeing all of Britain, he was like, no.
SPEAKER_04: But yeah, in terms of discovering stuff, I don't know. I'm not that kind of guy, really. I don't have much poetry in my soul, I'm afraid.
SPEAKER_08: Rob has no poetry in his soul. Poor guy. I think he's being a little self-deprecating.
SPEAKER_02: I think for sure.
SPEAKER_08: Clearly, if he did this, he does, even though he can't articulate it in that sense. That's a remarkable human. I really like him. Right.
SPEAKER_02: And in that sense, he's not alone. He is part of a small but flourishing community of people called trig baggers who like to visit and catalog trig points. But so far, Rob is the only one to visit every single one. He says one guy was neck and neck with him for a while, but retired at 5000. Came across somebody else that had done 4000 and then unfortunately, I think he had a road
SPEAKER_04: accident. So he gave up a bit after 4000. There's a lady called Carol Engel that has done, I think something like 5300. I mean, she's about 10 years behind me, but she's very, very keen.
SPEAKER_02: You know, I think for most of the trig baggers, the core poetic motivation is the same poetic motivation as anyone who decides they want to climb a mountain. Just because it's there. Precisely. Because it's there. Although, you know, in this case, you might say like, there is a lot of there there. Rob says it took him close to 12 years to visit them all.
SPEAKER_04: I got there and kind of 5000 of them relatively quickly, really, but the last 1000 I'd say were really hard.
SPEAKER_08: It's what makes the last 1000 so hard.
SPEAKER_02: Well, part of it is that some of them are just in really remote places. You know, there are some that are just like on these sea cliff islands with no real place to land. So it's almost like a mini expedition just to get to them. But a lot of them are also just like in these overgrown areas or places left to the elements in one way or another. And Rob says like a lot of trig pillars have started to kind of crumble away. Like there was one that was on the edge of a sea cliff apparently that a few years back was about to tumble into the sea.
SPEAKER_04: And yeah, so somebody noticed it fallen over and then the next people went to explain find it down the bottom of the cliff and the farmer had actually managed to rescue it and pulled it back, you know, winced it back from the cliff and re-erected it a little way back and that was really nice.
SPEAKER_08: But if the farmer put it back up, did he put it on the exact same point? I mean, does it still serve as a trig point if you move it to another place? No, he had to move obviously like the point where it was was now just in midair.
SPEAKER_02: Right, right. And so he had to move it and so no longer is a functioning trig point. And there is a further irony, which is that all of this wear and tear can also make certain trig points somewhat paradoxically hard to find.
SPEAKER_04: Sometimes they just disappear completely and sometimes they actually reappear somewhere completely unexpected. There's one actually turned up in Scotland, not seen yet. Yeah, they do come back sometimes. I don't even know what that means.
SPEAKER_02: It just means that like they will disappear from their known location and then reappear in a new location and exactly what hands they pass through in between is no one knows. Rob actually says that at one point another trig pillar showed up on eBay and one of the UK trig baggers had to intervene to make sure it wasn't sold overseas. Although most trig points, if they are interfered with, are interacted with in kind of more innocent ways. So as more and more people have learned about them in recent years, more and more getting like painted. Let me show you a few.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_02: This is an English rose. It's kind of been stenciled on, a red English rose. This is a Welsh dragon. Welsh dragon. Very good. So obviously in Wales, but my favorite has to be the minions. It's a straight up minion.
SPEAKER_02: It's a straight up minion, but the proportions are very good. Like someone realizes these things are minions. They nailed it. They nailed it. So it really is, I find it really quite charming. But the thing that Rob told me that really got me thinking is that the trig pillars are only the tip of a much larger surveying infrastructure that is actually all around us. And because those just provide the starting points for any given map, for all the lower order measurements, like the streets and the hills and the rivers and the slopes, surveyors used much, much smaller markings, really just these little notches made in the landscape. Sometimes it was a small plaque called a benchmark, but sometimes it was like a notch just called a cut mark.
SPEAKER_04: If you keep your eyes out, you tend to see in the UK anyway, you tend to see them. There's huge numbers of them. There's probably about a million of them put in, I would think.
SPEAKER_08: There's a million of these benchmarks just around the landscape.
SPEAKER_02: Wow. That was my reaction as well.
SPEAKER_04: I've got one about 200 meters away from my house actually just chiseled into, I think it's number 40, our estate.
SPEAKER_02: That's incredible. And so like someone like your neighbor down the street, do you know whether they know that that mark is on their house?
SPEAKER_04: I've never thought of mentioning it actually. They probably don't. It might be fun to mention sometimes, but a bit of a strange thing to ask really.
SPEAKER_02: I guess the point is that these thousands of trig pillars and however many benchmarks and millions of cut marks are just kind of secretly all around us. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. And they're not just in Britain. Lots of countries have some form of physical surveying infrastructure in place. So India has its own kind of triangulation stations, so does Japan and the US. And the only reason we're not as familiar with them as they're not as dramatic looking. They're more like cut marks. They're just like little cairns or poles or plaques in the ground. They are everywhere. And it's strange to think that there is this kind of invisible network of objects all around us that actually is responsible for giving us a way to look at ourselves from outside ourselves.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_08: That's kind of amazing that it gives us so much, these little things. That's awesome. Well, thanks, Joe.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_08: What happens when the map says there are monsters everywhere and people flock there to catch them all after this? The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Sign up today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand.
SPEAKER_08: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking, your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com slash invisible. Here is Vivian Le.
SPEAKER_03: Roman, have you ever heard of a town called Occoquan? Say it again. Have you ever heard of a town called Occoquan? No, just say it. Just say it. Just say it. Okay. Occoquan. Nope. Never heard of it. Okay. So Occoquan is this beautiful little town in Virginia and it's very old and it's right on the water and it looks like pretty much the perfect setting for a CW drama about a prestigious East Coast boarding school. Perfect.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_07: So it's quaint and vintage and kind of playing up on the history and the country style, but also very upscale.
SPEAKER_08: So who is that?
SPEAKER_03: So that is Lauren Jacobs. She's an artist and a teacher based in Northern Virginia. So in 2015, Lauren won a juried prize, meaning she'd get to exhibit and sell her work at a gallery in Occoquan called the Artist's Undertaking.
SPEAKER_07: The Artist's Undertaking Gallery is called that because it used to be the undertaker's house.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, nice. Sounds like haunted. It's like goth. Isn't that cool? I love it. The town is like 300 years old, so you can find like a ton of these really cool historic
SPEAKER_03: sites like that around Occoquan. I mean, it's completely full of really interesting history.
SPEAKER_07: Like they have this famous ghost tour and Occoquan has all of these kind of quote unquote certified ghost sites and ghost sightings.
SPEAKER_08: What does she mean when she says a certified ghost? Like how do you get a ghost certified in this world? There's an organization.
SPEAKER_03: They'll come by and then like confirm the validity of your haunting. Of course. And I think I unintentionally made Occoquan sound like the town from Hocus Pocus. But it's actually this really nice area to go shopping. There's lots of one of a kind mom and pop shops that tended to cater to definitely a wealthier demographic who wanted to spend the day strolling along the river and maybe buying a $400 pair of sunglasses and then go antiquing. And this was more or less the type of clientele that Lauren's Gallery depended on for sales too.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_07: At the time, we were working a lot off of walk-in traffic clients who were coming in and they were looking for a really special gift and coming in to spend several hundred dollars. I know this sounds like kind of a lot, but it's not like the artists at our gallery were
SPEAKER_03: getting rich off of these sales. From what Lauren tells me, it was really mostly just people who wanted to have a presence in the local arts community, make their rent at the gallery, and then maybe earn just a little something extra on the side. And for a while, everything was going great.
SPEAKER_08: The direction this is going indicates to me that things are not going to be going great soon.
SPEAKER_03: And then... And then... Okay. So in 2016, Pokemon Go comes out.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, okay. Well that's not what I was expecting. So Pokemon Go comes out. How does that change everything?
SPEAKER_03: So have you ever actually played Pokemon Go?
SPEAKER_08: I have not played it. I feel like I'm familiar with it a little bit. It's kind of like an augmented reality game where you go find these creatures in the built environment.
SPEAKER_03: Pokemon.
SPEAKER_08: Pokemon, right. Right. Okay. And then you find... It's like a scavenger hunt on your phone.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to clarify it just a little bit. Okay, good. So you're right. It's an augmented reality game. And it's based on your real world location. So you will find things in the game by physically going to those places on the Pokemon Go map. So to capture a Pokemon or there's these things called PokeStops where if you go there, you'll get prizes within the game like Pokeballs and potions and stuff. But you physically have to be at those locations in order to access things within the game.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_08: Okay. That's a good sense. So it is a way to explore the environment. But that's what I remember people walking around parks. Yes, yes. Staring at their phone.
SPEAKER_03: I remember the exact day that Pokemon Go came out. And I remember exactly where I was because this was podcast movement 2016 in Chicago. And because the gameplay is based around real world map data, usually the best places to play it are populated cities like Chicago or like New York. But sometimes these little random places just become hotspots for Pokemon activity, which is exactly what happened in Occoquan. Occoquan had always been this kind of sleepy town and you would go and it was very comfortable
SPEAKER_07: walking around on these picturesque historic streets. And it was kind of this very relaxed kind of outing. And all of a sudden, it was like a river that was was far too full to teaming with fish. You know, you just couldn't walk down the streets. They were so crowded.
SPEAKER_08: Wow. And so I can get why New York and Chicago and San Francisco would be hotspots. But how did Occoquan become Pokemon Central?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So Pokemon Go was created by this company called Niantic. And years earlier, Niantic had come out with this other location based AR game called Ingress. And I've never played it before.
SPEAKER_03: But Ingress is this game where like this mysterious trans dimensional force appears and you as a player have to interact with like these portals based on your actual GPS location. So it's kind of a similar concept of using your real world location to access things within the game. But you know, these portals within Ingress are all based around real world landmarks. And the cool thing about, you know, Ingress in particular was that, you know, game users could add landmarks to the map within the game. So you know, if you reach a certain level, you can add a historical site or a mural or, you know, whatever to the map. So years later, when Niantic teamed up with the Pokemon company to release Pokemon Go, they reused the same like map information. And all of those portals within Ingress became Pokemon Go PokeStops.
SPEAKER_08: So all those historical sites and even like the certified ghosts, haunting sites, all became like PokeStops along the way. She told me that from like while she was working in the gallery from her seat, she could access
SPEAKER_03: two PokeStops without ever leaving her chair. Thank goodness for the ghosts. But like, you know, as you can imagine, this kind of sent the town into a tizzy because it's such a small town. And they weren't equipped to handle the sudden influx of people like walking all over the streets. In the beginning, enormous pushback that summer, nothing but pushback, but mostly because the
SPEAKER_07: residents were like, well, this has got to be we can't can we just make it illegal? And the town kept on being like, no, no. What? What? Illegal for what? What exactly you mean that people should not be allowed to walk on our streets anymore? What exactly are you proposing? And the businesses are like, well, can we like hang signs or something?
SPEAKER_06: I was like, you can't what? When has a business ever hung a sign saying that a certain contingency of people isn't welcome like where you thought that possibly history would think that that's okay.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, historically. She's right. Historically, that is not a good look. It's immoral. Okay, so I do remember when Pokemon Go came out that there were these, these stories of places being inundated with Pokemon Go players, especially trespassing on private property and all that sort of stuff. And what was one I feel like there was other sort of sacred places or something like that.
SPEAKER_03: The Holocaust Museum had to be they had to say, please, don't play Pokemon Go at the Holocaust Museum. But I, if this place is, you know, kind of meant for a little bit of tourist action.
SPEAKER_08: Is there some way that they could have just capitalized on it and just sold more things or something like that?
SPEAKER_03: Yes. And you know, this did happen. Lauren told me that there were businesses that kind of adapted and popped up to like this influx of people, you know, like, snack shops would appear and you know, tourist traps, souvenir type Pokemon Go themed businesses. And she even said that there was a Pokemon Go cruise that opened up that would take you across the Occoquan River at just the right speed so you could hit all the Poke stops. But if you remember, Occoquan was this place that was known for this kind of upscale shopping. And the people who were going to Occoquan to play a video game aren't going to like drop in and buy an antique clock. Okay.
SPEAKER_08: So they didn't have the ability to kind of like, you know, take advantage of a bunch of bougie rich people, but they didn't have the ability to take advantage of 10 year olds with iPhones glued to their face. We don't know what to do with these children. They're not buying antique clocks, these kids today. Yeah, but like, not only were the children not buying antique clocks, because of all
SPEAKER_03: this foot traffic, it was the Pokemon Go players were pretty much driving away the regular clientele who helped pay the bills because you know, you go to a place like Occoquan for the quiet vibe and you know, the historic feel and all of a sudden, it's just teeming with a bunch of people on their iPhones.
SPEAKER_07: So yeah, it became kind of a big issue for the residents. Not only were we not seeing people in the gallery, the wealthy residents weren't shopping in their neighborhood anymore, period. And we had this huge influx of people. And instead of revitalizing the town, it completely destroyed commerce.
SPEAKER_03: And this shift in business eventually trickled down into Lauren's artwork, because you know, people were coming in wanting to spend around 20 to 40 bucks. So some of the artists at the gallery started making things that were you know, smaller and cheaper and just generally more palatable to more people. And Lauren found herself doing the same thing.
SPEAKER_07: My artwork has always been weird and contemporary and often creepy. And I was bringing in stuff that was more kind of homogeneously whimsical and relatable to more people. And I think just, you know, more boring. It wasn't serving my art at all. I announced that I was going to leave a couple months ago, and January was my last month that I was at the gallery.
SPEAKER_08: Huh. Did things go back to the way they were? I mean, like, so in Pokemon Go, you know, like it was a big deal a few years ago. It definitely feels like it's, you know, dwindled. Are people still flooding the streets like it was in 2016 when this all started? Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people in town thought that this was just going to be
SPEAKER_03: like a little blip on the radar too. But those core clients disappeared. And because of that, the stores that catered to those core clients disappeared too. And I'm not going to say that Occoquan is like any worse or better than before. But you know, this one game really disrupted the town enough that it changed it on a permanent scale.
SPEAKER_08: Right. And since Niantic reused the Ingress maps for Pokemon Go, if there's a new game using that same engine, it's going to happen again, right? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And you know, they actually have reused the same maps for different apps that weren't as popular as Pokemon Go. But theoretically, they could make something as popular if not more popular than Pokemon Go, and then they're going to be in another cycle again. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's sort of an amazing phenomenon that you could sort of create a digital map that has so much effect on the real world. It's kind of a strange amount of power we're giving augmented reality that I've never really thought of before. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: How do you really regulate something like that? I mean, I don't, I mean, probably the answer is you can't and you probably shouldn't, but
SPEAKER_08: a map can really change the meaning of a place. And also, it just like makes you realize that, you know, like, a map for one thing isn't a map for everything. So like reusing these historic sites as, you know, popular destinations for cartoon characters. She has her head in her hands.
SPEAKER_09: But like we're using like, you know, these historic markers for things that they're a
SPEAKER_08: game is like, you know, obviously the Holocaust Museum isn't the place for Pokemon Go, you know, but both things should exist in the world. Yeah. Pokemon Go should exist in the world. It should.
SPEAKER_03: It's done a lot of great things. So I just wanted to give a special thanks to Lauren Jacobs, who I spoke with for the piece, and also to Alastair Sticco, who was actually the one who wrote to us and made sure that we knew about this story. So thank you, Alastair.
SPEAKER_08: Nice. Cool. And if people want to see Lauren Jacobs self-described creepy art, where can they go? We'll have a link to it on our website. That's awesome. Thanks Vivian.
SPEAKER_03: Thank you. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, Kurt Kohlstedt, Joe Rosenberg, and
SPEAKER_08: Vivian Leigh. Sean Rial wrote all the music including this Pokemon song. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Drompemore, Sharife Yusef, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to the Radiotopia donors who make everything we do possible, including Alexander Kondiba, Curtis Galloway, Peter Lyons Photography, Paul Kane, Steph Weaver, and Anil Kondikath. We are Project 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. You cannot find it on a map, but you can find beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radiotopia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Fund them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org, or on Instagram and Reddit too. But if you want to suggest a story about maps, even if you want to leave a link to the Peters projection scene from the West Wing, I know you've been dying to do it. You can leave a comment at 99pi.org. Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally
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