The logic of mapping the world is structurally inexhaustible expansion

Evidence

As one project leader put it, “The challenge of deciding you’re going to map the world is that you can’t ever stop.” So it was that by 2016, Google’s Street View website celebrated its successful evolution by stating, “We’ve come a long way since our initial U.S. launch in 2007; today we’ve expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to include locations on all seven continents.” Street View’s fleet of surveillance-gathering tools had been augmented to include a wearable backpack, a three-wheeled pedicab, a snowmobile, and a trolley, all of which were designed to capture places that Street View cars could not traverse. Tourist boards and nonprofits were offered the use of the company’s Trekker equipment (the backpack camera) to “collect views of remote and unique places” that were, literally and figuratively, “off the grid.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 475

Categorization

• CANDY: The fleet of backpack, three-wheeled pedicab, snowmobile, and trolley designed to capture hard-to-reach places is a memorable, tweetable detail.
• XREF: connects to: The concrete enables one reality to be translated into multiple codes and dimensions — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 698; Class consciousness operates as an internal map locating each individual relative to other classes — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 760; Colonial extraction logics are structurally recapitulated in contemporary data platforms — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 346 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Maps can construct territory rather than merely represent it #qualifies (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 661
• Reality’s coherence depends on a reserve of un-mapped imaginary territory #contradicts (0.75) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 403