Janelle published his first paper on space-time compression in 1965 in the pages of the reference journal of mapmakers, The Professional Geographer. But he was, of course, blowing up nearly everything professional geography thought it was about. “Geographers, as physicists, have traditionally been concerned with the positions of points (places) in space,” he wrote. “However, geographers have not employed the concept of ‘velocity’ in studying spatial relationships. Yet it might be of value and not too far-fetched for the geographer to ask ‘at what ‘velocities’ are settlements approaching one another?” We should ask ourselves the same question. At what velocity are you and | getting closer to other points on the planet? Janelle was writing in 1965. He was concerned then about the sound barrier as the practical limit to speed. But imagine his insights applied to an age where networks are switched always on, constantly packing the world ever tighter? Where a mistake or an innovation or an attack in one place can happen instantly and everywhere, because the speed limit is the speed of light? 4. At first glance, of course, geography seems the least dynamic of sciences. It is rooted in the glacial-paced realities of geology, a discipline where speed is usually measured in the creaking, inches-a-century advance of tectonic plates. The faster links of transportation, whether they are trains or planes or data connections, lay blanket-like atop that slower-moving geological layer. These high-velocity networks are, in a way, a new geography. Mathematicians and data architects call the landscape they represent a “topology”. The word refers to maps that can be re- arranged as a result of connection, the way in which speed and distance between two points does affect how “far apart” they are. You can think of it this way: Geographies are pretty much constant; topologies can change in an instant. In geographic terms, Moscow and St. Petersburg are always 450 miles apart. When you he