This afternoon Rob and I turned into our neighborhood and saw the above car leaving our neighborhood. Google Earth. Wow, I thought. That would be a weird job to write about. I felt like telling Rob to stop so I could run over to the car and pound on the windows and ask the driver how she’d gotten the job and where could I apply?
The Google Earth history is here. Basically, it amounts to Google mapping every shadowy corner and surface on the planet through 3-D images taken from a street view, satellites, and any other means that are available. The last time I looked up our address on Google Earth, it showed a van in our driveway that we hadn’t owned for about five years, a van that actually had blown its engine on a trip to Atlanta when we were traveling with our teenage daughter, a bird, and a dog. Our front lawn in that photo was parched from months without rain.
I have mixed feelings about all this readily available information. On the one hand, I love the idea that no place on the planet is hidden, inaccessible, so remote that it exists in a time warp. On the other hand, I am appalled at just how much information is out there and that it’s not necessarily accurate. Anyone with a website, anyone who blogs, anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account or any kind of social media interaction is online, there, clickable.
And yet, don’t we all live a good portion of our lives in our own heads? Don’t we construct elaborate worlds inside our skulls, our consciousness? Aren’t we continually weaving the threads of our personal stories that even Google can’t fathom or document?
So, carry on car from Google Earth. Keep that camera humming. I’ll know the right version of my house when I see it. Our SUV sits alone in the driveway, the grass to the right is green and flourishing now because we’ve had rain and Rob has cut back on the bamboo and other trees and plants that blocked the sunlight. The Google camera may capture the tall avocado tree in our backyard – the one that produced so many avocados last year that we had to give them away. It might even capture one of our three mango trees, the branches blooming and promising a bumper crop this summer.
Ah, Google. In just 16 years, you have entered our lexicon in a way that few other words/concepts have. When someone asks me a question to which I don’t have an answer, my response is always the same: Google it. When I’m lost, creeped out, need a menu, a nearby restaurant, store, a particular book, product, the place with the cheapest gas, when I need anything at all, I Google it.
And I find something. It isn’t always the very thing I’m searching for, but if I click enough links, I eventually get to what I need.
So seeing that odd Google car leaving our neighborhood of perhaps thirty homes drove home the weird and sometimes uncomfortable reality of what we have become as a society, a planet, a collective people. Privacy is who you are inside your own head. Everything else is open to scrutiny, observation, judgment.
But in five years or ten, will Google or some other technology have found its way into your head? Your soul? Your essence? Is that technology already in development?
As a sidenote, look at all the orbs in the photo!
Uh-oh, I may have missed this!
There’s the really clear one on the right side, but the best one is right on top in the middle of the car. I see 5 in total. Pretty cool!
I see the one you mean!
That was a photo I took from the Internet of the car. I thought those specks were dust- but I thin you’re right! Orbs. How cool.
Great blog post Trish.
I think I’ve seen this car in my street too,come to think of it,but no matter how many photos it takes it is only capturing the past,not the present…like rings in a cut tree trunk.
To be truly up to date Google would need a satellite over your house 24/7 broadcasting live.
Being of Jewish heritage I can’t wonder but think what a person like Hitler could do with this kind of data.
Like Mike said,”like everything there’s good and bad, but our privacy is disappearing.”
and that is a worry to me.
I shudder to think about what Hitler may have done with this data!
it certainly seems sometimes that people are tremendously worried about what you ask at the end of this post………….i think of “the Matrix” and “Surrogates” for example. I certainly know that people seem often to be addicted or hypnotized by those little boxes (I guess they’re called smartphones) that they walk around with peering into an endless mesh of moving images and information overload while, well, the world moves all around them. Ive noticed lately that people with smartphones keep walking in front of my car, failing to notice it. I read somewhere also that they are developing “internet implants” (https://www.infowars.com/a-chip-in-the-head-brain-implants-will-be-connecting-people-to-the-internet-by-the-year-2020/)……….
now that seriously gives me the willies. Where is the guarantee that all that technology, downloaded into an implant, will always be benevolent? For all of our amazing technology, we still haven’t managed to end wars, hatread, greed, or the destruction of the environment………………
Amen, Lauren.
I agree with Mike…..sooner or later a newborn won’t be given a social security number. Instead, before leaving the hospital nursery, the infant will be implanted with a chip. Probably the same kind of chip we put into our pets. The first thing I did when I brought Storm home was to have a chip put into her, so that if ever she becomes lost, there is a much better chance of getting her back. But putting chips in humans…..just thinking about that gives me the shivers, yet I believe it will eventually happen. Pacemakers, artificial limbs, artficial hearts…..chips. Ouch.
This accidentally ended up in spam. Just found it.
A couple of years back we saw the Google car in our road. Like everything there’s good and bad, but our privacy is disappearing – though we help this along by divulging info here, there and everywhere. But eventually we’ll no doubt all be chipped – and they’ll tell us it’s all for our own benefit. Interesting days to come.
Our privacy is certainly vanishing. I think it’s time to re-watch Blade Runner!