The Cartographic Crimes Being Committed Online Are Genuinely Some of My Favorite Crimes

The bad-map genre is one of the more delightfully nerdy corners of internet humor, because the jokes require, at minimum, a working knowledge of where countries are and what they look like. That’s a higher barrier to entry than most meme categories, and the result is that the people producing this content tend to be genuinely well-informed about the geography they’re satirizing. The funny maps filling galleries like this are essentially geography lessons in disguise, where the joke is the payload and the geography is the carrier.

What makes the form particularly satisfying is how often the jokes reveal something true that you hadn’t noticed about a real shape on a real map. Iceland upside down does look like a pig. Florida does, in fact, look slightly different in different states of metaphorical climate stress. The geography memes in this gallery work because the visual pun is grounded in actual cartographic features, and the underlying features are, themselves, weirder than the average person noticed.

There’s also a strong recurring subgenre that uses maps as the vehicle for cultural commentary, often dressed up as fake data visualization. The east-versus-west tea-and-coffee divide. The European bowel-movement infographic. These cartographic humor pieces are not really maps in any functional sense. They’re opinions, presented in map form, because the map form lends a false authority to the opinion that makes the opinion funnier.

The other thing the genre does is play with the conventions of orientation itself. The upside-down world map. The four-California, four-Florida disasters. The map humor operating in this category is essentially gesturing at the arbitrariness of how we usually look at the planet, and the gestures are quietly philosophical underneath the cheap jokes.

CThe broader thing this whole genre captures, beyond the easy laughs, is the strange way maps have become emotional objects rather than purely functional ones. A map used to be a tool for getting from one place to another. The phone in your pocket has, for most users, completely replaced that function. What’s left, then, is maps as cultural artifacts, as visual jokes, as small statements about the world’s shape and our place in it.

The internet has, accordingly, repurposed the entire visual language of cartography for comedy. The mock data maps. The shape-recognition memes. The deliberate misrepresentation of borders for absurd effect. None of this would have worked in a world where maps were primarily navigational tools. We are in a world where maps are primarily decorative, and decoration is, by definition, available for play.

There’s also something quietly affectionate about the genre’s relationship with geography. The people making these maps are not, mostly, mocking the places themselves. They’re mocking the way maps are usually presented, the false certainty of borders, the suggestion that any one orientation is the correct one. Iceland is still Iceland. The pig is the bonus.