Chris Groves - What does the Google Car want?

We should perhaps assume (a la Robert Romanyshyn) that technologies are desires and social imaginaries that achieve expression through the use of techniques, and that as a result they’re heavy with futures.


With this in mind, there appears something almost archaic about Street View, particularly when compared with the immersive virtual environments that MMPORGs and other forms of networked gaming offer, including virtual presences which commit players to “taking responsibility for [their] own presence”, as Charlie put it.


Which is not to suggest that we should take a deflationary view of the Google Car – as per the oft-repeated Google line that Street View is primarily intended as a tool for people who want to buy a house.


On the contrary: I think we have to view the progress of the Car around (some parts of) the world as part of an assembly including GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth. This is why I found Charlie’s remark that the viewpoint adopted by the Car as that of “an almost angelic, dematerialised subject” very interesting. You could view the “imaginary” behind the whole mapping project which View, Maps and Earth constitute as converging towards a particular regulative ideal… How about this being (something like…) a GIS-based system that embodies a universal grammar of the human-inhabited earth, a structure in which myriad dimensions of official (and non-official, think of user layers in Earth) data concerning any given location can be accessed through an interface. And this would in principle give access too to all manner of ways of representing a location, or of relating it to other locations and their multilayered stories - what if you had a GPS-based system that “showed you where you were in all its literary and historical depth”?


So the fantasy, the driving, regulative ideal, would be a kind of philosophical language (a la Leibniz and the Encyclopedie), held together by the imagined viewpoint of a disembodied subject who is not part of Maps, View or Earth.


The huge gap between the map and the territory is of course immediately apparent; there is no real time mapping, there are private roads and government installations which are prevented from appearing on View, etc. etc.. Stitching it all together has a history, like edits on Wikipedia, a history of small acts by a team of embodied subjects. But this gap between fantasy and reality perhaps makes the desire more apparent – and sustains it...


UPDATE: There is, in fact, something of Zizek/Freud's Broken Kettle [PDF] about StreetView. All justifications for it are retroactive and unconvincing, partial ('it's for housebuyers', 'it's for nervous tourists' etc.). There's something exorbitant about it, something ridiculous. And the fact that it exists is perhaps best understood as a symptom of a complex fascination with and desire for disembodiment. Like wanting to be present at your own funeral; or to freeze time for everyone but yourself and run around doing all kinds of illict stuff... And so what draws people to it is its naughtiness, the pleasure of lurking?