[tazjin]

Reminds me of the problems with contested borders, which e.g. Yandex runs into because they operate in Western and non-Western jurisdictions. They ended up just removing all national borders from the maps for this reason, which has made the UX worse, especially for international trip planning.

Google (used to?) opts for a different approach where some borders are drawn based on where they geolocated you to.

[nix-zarathustra]

I'm pretty sure Yandex removed all borders was because the Russian government annexed territory but they hadn't clarified the territory borders that were annexed, so Yandex decided to be on the safe side and remove all borders to avoid this issue.

[persnickety]

We'll all be better off by shifting to a borderless paradigm. Yandex is just a canary in the coal mine.

[NikolaNovak]

I mean, depends on use case right? Certainly for travel and navigation purposes I very much want to know when I'm about to leave a country :-). For any economical or political review as well, country birders are extremely relevant data.

There certainly are geology and other scientific endeavours which perhaps don't care too much for countries, but even they probably need them when they interface with regular humans (I.e. This lake is in such and such country, this volcano is about to explode over there, etc)

[persnickety]

Tourist endeavors really care about borders for 2 aspects: as barriers, and as places where legal or social rules change. If administrative borders had their powers limited to, say, statistical purposes, and not social obstacles, a tourist would stop caring about them.

Interfacing with humans does not necessarily have to be done along social borders. I'm sure it wasn't that way before the rise of the nation-state. Everyone knows where the Alps are, or where the Great Lakes are. Pretty much every place on Earth is covered by some geographical-not-political area name. Why shouldn't places be referred to in that way? It's harder to politically push for a change in the definition of the Gobi Desert than of an arbitrary administrative unit.

[mihaic]

I am pretty sure that you needed to know who controlled what territory all across human history.

The planet is populated everywhere, and you need to know who's in power pretty much everywhere you're going, or else you might have a bad time.

[NikolaNovak]

If I'm reading it correctly then, you're aftually advocating for a massive paradigm change in our social and political life, and not for a small UI change in mapping software.

Which I did not pick up from your initial post within this context, but fair enough!:)

[persnickety]

I'm actually curious about the UI change in mapping software as well. The current cartography is focused on human-scale things, rather than geological-scale things. It's hard to find a map that gives topography as much space as it gives to roads, even when visiting some mountain ranges. In the lowlands, tourist maps still focus on roads and town names disproportionately more than on the type of environment and natural landmarks.

On a global scale, when the country borders are removed, we find ourselves lost, despite the huge ecological and geological diversity of the place, which makes our - or at least mine - experience as a inhabitant of this amazing place so much poorer. Compare the difficulty of finding the Atacama desert versus Luxembourg. How often do you see a whole-Earth map with the desert marked but not the state?

[viraptor]

When you're near a border you typically don't want to get your car ride routed over 2 border crossings just because it's the shortest path. Skipping the borders is definitely not a "better off" situation.

[persnickety]

When we're borderless, there's no border for your car to cross.

[viraptor]

Yandex removing displayed borders doesn't move us in any way closer to borderless world in reality. No country is seriously considering it. It's not a canary for anything - they stopped displaying borders exactly because countries/people care about those a lot.

[persnickety]

We stopped requiring photos on CVs because some employers cared about them a lot (in order to discriminate).

[Chris2048]

"we" is not all countries of the world.

[sofixa]

> No country is seriously considering it

Schengen says hi.

[samus]

These border checks are waived, not abolished. In times of crisis, they can (and were, during the Pandemic for example) reinstated. Countries can impose movement restriction for internal regions as well, but these carry a much higher legal overhead.

Also, Schengen borders are transparent only for full EU residents. If your visa and right of abode is restricted to a particular country, the borders are still very relevant.

Even for EU residents, the borders are still relevant as they demarcate places with quite different civil and penal law codes.

[mchaver]

That's a big hypothetical. Mapping companies are not the arbiters of where borders exist. Knowledge of where de facto borders are is pretty useful for directions.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

A nice fantasy, but something tells me a borderless reality is not in our near term or distant future. Maybe by the time Star Trek is more fact than fiction

[agent327]

How will you know which laws apply?

[manuelmoreale]

I guess the next logical step after the borderless society is a lawless one /s

More seriously, as much as I’d love to live in a different world, borders are not going anywhere.

[slowhand09]

You should run for congress... wait, no borders means no countries so no congress. Just a bunch of really powerful people making rules over fiefdoms...

[infecto]

This to me is like saying your a sovereign citizen. The world would be better off if we all shared resources and everyone enjoyed some minimum of quality of life while there still be strong desires from individuals to create. Its a nice idea but not a reality that is possible.