
The random boys flipping off the camera, the villagers in England who formed a human chain to block the entry of the camera car, the ongoing debates in some countries over whether to ban Street View for perceived privacy violations—and even the street art project in Pittsburgh—all get at the problematic core of using the country as its own map. Lewis Carroll imagined the problem comically, as an objection put forth by farmers (it will block the sun!). In "On Exactitude in Science," Borges offers a dark gloss to Carroll's map. "The Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it," writes Borges, will become "useless and permitted to decay and fray under the Sun and winters." The 1:1 map, Carroll's exuberant Grand Idea, is, to Borges, the work of an empire on the verge of decline, with nothing left to do, nowhere left to go. "In the Deserts of the West, still today," he reports, "there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars." If Borges is right, the unwillingness of Street View's skeptics to be captured in the grand map may be the refusal of people to be a part of just such an empire.






