Speaking of artworks exploiting Google Maps, here is a piece that would no doubt have been included in this month’s exhibition had it only existed a little earlier: Google Shoot View, which uses Google Street View as the backdrop for a (plotless and not particularly fun, my favorite kind) first-person shooter game. (The website is currently down, whether due to Kottke-driven traffic, a complaint from Google, or in acknowledgement of the abhorrent nature of the idea, I don’t know.) So now you can stalk your home town with an automatic weapon, as you have no doubt always dreamed in some part of your meager little human heart. What makes this game abhorrent, of course, is not the fact that it exists but the inevitability of its existence. In fact it’s such an obvious idea that it surprises you to learn it didn’t exist already, which is where I would encourage the 0% of my readers who are outrage-prone to direct their outrage.

But to the subject at hand, I’ve often wondered about a kind of predatory flaneurie, a Psychogeography of rage, let’s say, that underlies the appeal of the first-person shooter–the uncanny underside of the desire to map space, no doubt deeply buried in our horrible genes.

At any rate, in this bleak and complicated future in which we keep finding ourselves, I’m not sure which is more outrageous: that a privately-owned driverless car with nine eyes is even now stalking quietly through your neighborhood, capturing images of your street, your house, your car (perhaps you, standing awkwardly with a coffee cup (while military or police drones circle overhead, mapping, surveilling, compiling data for the global War on Everything))–or the fact that there is a video game that (finally) uses that technology to let you wave a virtual gun at your neighbor’s living room.