Borges describes an empire whose cartographers built a map at a scale of one mile to the mile. Succeeding generations found it useless and let it rot. Tattered fragments survive in the western deserts, sheltering animals and beggars.

The story is told as a fable about excess. It is read wrongly. Read it again with the sequence reversed and it stops being a fable at all.

The satellite pass over your street is refreshed on a schedule. The street is not. The kerb has been broken since March. In the imagery it is whole, because the imagery is composited from the best available day, and the best available day was in February.

Somebody will repair that kerb. When they do, they will be closing a discrepancy, not fixing a kerb. The map is the document of record. The territory is a rendering error that has persisted into production.

It is the map that precedes the territory. It is the map that engenders the territory.