Pay to put your town on the map!

I had a dream last night in which I was watching a TV interview with an entrepreneur who had started a map-making company and had become famous for his unique business model. His company wasn't going to do any surveying or geographical research at all. Instead, you could literally pay to have your town put on the map. If a company received one dollar from a particular town, it would be mapped as having a population of one. If they received 10 million dollars, it would be mapped as a metropolis of 10 million. That was it.

But wouldn't such maps be useless, the interviewer wanted to know, since all the population figures would be fake? Not at all, the entrepreneur insisted. While the figures would be incorrect in the absolute sense, they would give a very good measure of the relative prominence of each town -- better even that accurate population figures! Of course the bigger and more important a town, the more its residents and local government would be likely to contribute to the mapping company. Raw population figures would give the impression that cities like Washington and Las Vegas were less important than Oklahoma City, but this new method would portray their prominence accurately.

And what if some troll with money to burn decides to spend a few million inventing a non-existent city with a stupid name like East Fumbuck and putting it on the map? That would be a problem, the entrepreneur conceded, but only for a short time, since all such joke-cities would inevitably become self-fulfilling prophecies. "It all boils down to this," he said. "If it looks good on a map, people will want to go live there."

This is an actual dream I had, not an allegory I invented, but I do think it makes for a pretty good allegory of how the media work!