generally "critical GIS" scholarship seems to fall into these camps:
- what is a point, really
- military industrial complex exist
- respect newbies, open source good
all perfectly interesting and valid observations, but also you're telling me nobody has tried to write a history of EPSG codes
in my experience when people who don't do map stuff learn that the industry standard source for coordinate reference systems still used today was made by a professional association of oil geologists they think it's weird. (the Esri monopoly is less weird; Adobe or Maya tend to be the analogies that come up which makes sense I guess)