A new book, “Little Blue Dot,” by Katherine Dunn, raises questions about the unintended consequences of knowing where we are.
August 6, 2026
Illustration by Jackson Gibbs
Around two years ago, Shachar Maidenbaum, a neuroscientist who studies spatial navigation at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel, drove north with his children to visit a friend. He was following his location on G.P.S., using the Waze app for directions, when an automated voice suddenly told him to turn left and drive roughly two hundred miles south. “I thought, What? I’m driving north. What’s going on?,” he told me. “Then I realized: my phone thinks I’m in Beirut.” Israel often jams G.P.S. signals as a military strategy, and in recent years it has employed “spoofing,” a technique that sends fake location data to G.P.S.-enabled devices. Some pilots and ship captains in the region have had to disable automated safety systems as a result.
Maidenbaum, who frequently asks research participants to find their way in virtual-reality experiments, was now facing his own navigational challenge. His friend had told him about a move from one address, near some train tracks, to a new one, so he decided to drive to the center of the correct town and find the tracks. After following them to his friend’s old street, he tried navigating based on his friend’s description of the move. He eventually made it to his destination, but the experience heightened his awareness of our new relationship to physical places. “For the first time, we have a society which is heavily reliant on G.P.S.,” Maidenbaum told me. “What happens when it goes away?”
The Global Positioning System was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the nineteen-seventies, and the first known G.P.S.-equipped bombs were dropped during the Persian Gulf War, in 1991. When civilians were first given access to the technology, it was only to lesser versions, but in 2000 the U.S. decided to make the same G.P.S. signals available to everyone. Within a decade or so, there were a billion G.P.S. receivers in use around the world. Most had nothing to do with the military, according to Katherine Dunn, the author of the new book “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.” A military technology had become an invisible guiding hand in our lives. “It’s like we’re all using bazookas to order delivery,” Dunn told me.
Satellite navigation depends on a process called trilateration. A receiver—whether in a cell phone, a smart watch, or a vehicle’s navigation system—generally fields signals from at least four satellites. It can calculate distance from the satellites by measuring the time it takes for each signal to arrive. With this information, the receiver can locate itself. The American navigation system has been joined by similar networks from the European Union, Russia, and China, and together they provide a reliable answer to the question Where am I?
For centuries, getting lost was a major preoccupation—something that could prove life-changing, even life-ending. We wouldn’t have the Odyssey if the ancient Greeks had had G.P.S.; fairy tales might never have warned readers to stay on the path when walking through the forest. In a nineteenth-century study of people’s fears, conducted by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, an entire section is dedicated to “losing orientation.” Hall notes that a twelve-year-old suffers from “the constant fear of losing the points of compass in city or country,” while a twenty-year-old “awakes in anguish till she knows which way is north.”
Lately, I’ve been unnerved to notice how differently I move through the world on account of technology. In a foreign city, instead of situating myself by reading signs or scanning for landmarks, I’ll open Google Maps and wait for my blue dot to settle—as though the dot, instead of me, is finding its bearings. Last month, on my way to a doctor’s appointment in Manhattan, I saw that my dot was a few blocks south of me; even though I was in the right place, I slowed down until it caught up, and when it did I felt inexplicably comforted. During hikes, I’ve grown accustomed to keeping track of my exact location on the AllTrails app, which is probably not the best way of escaping into nature. I can’t remember the last time I travelled somewhere using just a map and my own sense of direction. It’s only logical that humans would embrace a tool that makes navigation easier, but G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?
It wasn’t so long ago that we all got around without G.P.S., and yet stories of old-fashioned navigation have started to sound increasingly retro, like tales of gathering around the radio or ordering five-cent lunches at the Automat. Todd Spencer, a seventy-six-year-old who started working as a truck driver in the mid-seventies, said that he once relied on a trucker’s atlas from Rand McNally. “That was, in essence, your Bible,” he told me. He would also ask on his CB radio if other truckers were familiar with his destination, and if they had any helpful directions to offer. On the way into a town, he often found city maps pasted on the walls of truck stops. Piper Purcell, a fifty-nine-year-old in Texas, delivered Domino’s pizza in her early twenties. The delivery zone was only a mile in each direction, and she was expected to know it in detail. “You had to have a lot more granular knowledge of the city,” she told me. A home might be described as “near the new grocery store” or “by the old mall,” she said. When she delivered in a larger city, she depended on multiple maps—one for the broader area, and others for particular neighborhoods where apartments were densely clustered.
Not surprisingly, Spencer and Purcell both use G.P.S. now. So does Rick Mossman, a seventy-one-year-old retired National Park ranger who spent most of his career navigating with green-and-white maps from the U.S. Geological Survey. “I used to pride myself that once I was at some place I could always find my way back,” he said. He doesn’t seem to remember routes nearly as well when he follows digital directions. In the worst case, our dependence on G.P.S. can render us vulnerable to glitches. Spencer told me about trucks getting stuck on narrow roads after their drivers followed faulty directions; in June, a woman wedged her car onto light-rail tracks in Seattle. People have driven to the edges of cliffs and even into lakes.
Mary Hegarty, a psychologist who leads the Spatial Thinking Lab, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that by relying on G.P.S. we neglect an intrinsic navigation strategy: cognitive mapping, which depends on a spatial conception of the environment that is populated with landmarks such as trees or buildings. This approach is supported by “place cells,” specific neurons in the hippocampus, each of which represents a precise physical location. (One could think of them as the brain’s internal blue dots.) G.P.S. is more in line with a very different navigation strategy, stimulus response, which treats navigation as a series of motor responses: turn left, go five hundred feet, then turn right. This utilizes a different area of the brain, one that supports habitual learning. “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.
In 2008, a study found that people who walked a route with G.P.S. assistance were less able to draw the path they had taken, or to guess what direction they were facing, than those who walked the same route without G.P.S. In 2020, researchers at McGill University asked subjects to navigate two virtual mazes—one that was easily traversed with cognitive-mapping strategies and one that could be better navigated using stimulus response. The more that people used G.P.S., the worse their spatial memory seemed to be, and the worse they did on the cognitive-mapping maze. The participants who relied more on G.P.S. also noticed fewer landmarks dotted around the maze, such as pyramids and trees, than those who used it less.
Maidenbaum, the neuroscientist, came to see Israel’s G.P.S.-spoofing tactics as a natural experiment in how people navigate. Many people who were accustomed to G.P.S. could no longer rely on it. He wound up surveying nearly six hundred people in affected areas. (He has published his study as a preprint, while it is undergoing peer review.) Some of them complained about grocery deliveries that were directed out of the country, or of matching with users of dating apps across borders. About eighty per cent of respondents still reached their destinations when G.P.S. was disrupted. The rest, however, reported that they ultimately went home. “We’re seeing this group of twenty to twenty-five per cent who are taking this really hard,” he said.
The rise of G.P.S. navigation may fundamentally alter our perspective, according to William Rankin, a historian at Yale and the author of “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century.” When he was in college, he hung a campus map in his dorm room, and by studying it he found new places to explore, and routes to jog. “Beyond that, I had no idea what was going on, and I needed a different map, or couldn’t get there at all,” he said. But digital maps are essentially infinite; you can keep zooming out until the entire planet is in view. They also place a user’s blue dot in the middle. “The world is always centered around you, and psychologically that seems pretty interesting,” Rankin said. “You don’t necessarily have a sense of how you are in relationship to some larger whole.”
In late July, my husband and I decided to challenge ourselves by navigating from North Brooklyn to Alley Pond Park, in Queens, without G.P.S. Then we would try working our way through an orienteering course—a sequence of place markers that participants must find without assistance, as a sport. On the drive over, I buried my face in a Rand McNally map of New York City and Long Island, examining the tiny street names. Instead of taking the highway, we picked the path that looked most direct. A drive that I expected to take twenty-five minutes stretched to forty. We weren’t lost, but we were stuck in traffic that our guidebook could not warn us about.
At the park, I picked the hardest path: Intermediate Course 3. Our mission was to find ten orange-and-white numbered placards using a map that I had printed out. We encountered our first obstacle right away: since we had driven there without G.P.S., I wasn’t sure exactly where we were starting. Some orienteers use compasses, but we hadn’t brought one. We had only the topographical lines and the shape of the paths to figure it out. Based on the curve of a trail, and the fact that we’d driven from the west, I guessed that we might be near marker No. 9. We decided, for expediency, to skip No. 10 and look for the markers in reverse order.
Marker No. 9 was supposed to be in a shallow ditch. After ten minutes of slipping on damp leaves and looking up at the treetops, I was frustrated. “Let’s move on to No. 8,” I said. I left the ditch and managed to match a fork in the road to one on the map; after about fifteen minutes of walking, we found No. 8 on what the map described as a “western boulder, northeast side.” It was thrilling to know where I was again; I could see No. 8 on the map, and here it was in front of me. I really was becoming more spatially activated. I moved through dense underbrush, looking around constantly for a hint of an orange sign amid trees and boulders. I lined up the general direction of the trail with its direction on my map.
Surprisingly, I still felt an urge to pull out my phone and look at my dot, to confirm what my surroundings were showing me. I started to feel that the true value of orienteering was more akin to that of reading a long book, or baking from scratch, or attending a long classical-music concert. I wasn’t necessarily tapping into my inner homing pigeon. I was practicing more general skills that get rusty when I over-rely on technology: paying attention, being patient, accepting uncertainty. We made our way to No. 7, on a “prominent tree, east side.” We didn’t find No. 6—a small blow to the ego—but my confidence soared when we found five, four, and three. The desire to check my dot faded to a low simmer.
No. 2 is where everything went wrong. It was supposed to be at the eastern tip of a marsh, so I trudged through muddy ground searching for it. Twenty fruitless minutes passed. No. 1 should have been nearby, and in the direction of the car, but our route no longer lined up with the trails I saw on my map. We finally came upon an exit to the street, and I saw signs for 233rd Street and Sixty-seventh Avenue—not helpful given that I wasn’t familiar with the neighborhood, and didn’t know our location relative to where we’d parked. We had been wandering for more than two hours. “I think we’re going to need to look at the G.P.S.,” I said sadly. I told myself that we could have figured it out with more time, but we both had other things to do that day.
In the end, I checked the AllTrails app, which had been running in the background so that I could reconstruct my route later. I’d assumed that we’d exited the park to the west, but we’d actually walked all the way to its northern tip. As a result, we had to retrace our steps for thirty sweaty minutes before we reached the car. As the discomfort of being lost faded, we both agreed that we’d come back and try another course someday. I was sure that, if I found myself back on these trails, I’d be more prepared to navigate them. For the moment, though, I was relieved to turn on the navigation and follow our blue dot all the way home. ♦
Shayla Love writes about science, health, and the mind. She has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2023.
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