Borderless

In 2014, the catastrophe modeling company Risk Management Solutions launched RMS(one), a digital platform that collates numerous risk models into one overarching global dataset, allowing its users to see, in real time, the likelihood of a variety of different disasters occurring anywhere on the planet. In their brochure advertising the product, RMS produced a world map of startling novelty: other than a demarcation of broad regions via color, the map ignores boundaries completely and instead renders landmasses as constitutions of identically sized hexagons. In this vision, national borders do not matter; instead the earth’s surface is broken up into equal quadrants of data where what is of import is a geographic unit’s likelihood of suffering a given disaster ...