Apologies for the late send this week! Sprout came down with a fever over the weekend. I spent my usual writing time plying her with Tylenol and watching “Wild Babies” on Netflix. She has recovered, thankfully, and we’re back to business as usual. Next weekend’s edition should, knock on wood!!, come out on schedule.
There’s a tree outside my front window: an old silver maple, 100 years old.
I arrived at that number with the help of a string and some black-magic math that I found on Google. I’m not confident it’s right, but the tree is pretty big — and this suggests that it was planted around the time my house was built. They both started out on a street paved with bricks, in an era lit by gas mantle lamps. Now they’re both, as part of a major update, rendered in 3-D on Google Maps.
The new update hit my phone last week — and at first, I paid little attention. But then I started to notice the trees, which were wrong in ways I couldn’t reverse-engineer to my satisfaction.
My silver maple is on Maps, for instance, but not the large cherry tree two doors down. Two other maples further up the block are similarly missing in action. When I’m driving, the trees on Google Maps distract me; I’m constantly comparing their green lollipop forms to the real-world trees I’m speeding past. If there’s a pattern to which ones get mapped and which don’t, I personally can’t distinguish it.
Google almost certainly knows where these trees are, which is what makes the whole thing so strange. Like many US cities, Buffalo maintains an inventory of more than 70,000 street trees, complete with species and exact location. Google itself has, since 2020, offered municipal governments access to a free, high-resolution tree canopy tool, which uses AI to identify trees in satellite images. When I pull up my block in each of these tools, they show every tree I expect.
Why, then, are the trees in Google Maps so inaccurate? It’s possible, I guess, that Google did not mean these forms as literal trees — more pixelated gestures at the idea of foliage. But Google has trumpeted the realism of this new, “immersive,” AI-powered update, and decorative or symbolic trees would seem to undermine that. “Gemini models … analyze fresh, real world imagery from Street View and aerial photos to give you an accurate view of things along your route,” a Google blog post promises. (My italics.)
Maybe it’s just difficult, even now, to reconstitute a place from dehydrated data. This was a problem for cartographers long before AI, but AI makes technological abstractions of all kinds more absurd and more egregious.
Google’s systems undoubtedly possess more information than anyone on my street could ever hope to know. And yet, by virtue of living here, in a physical body that feels shade and sees buds and hears the crunch of fall leaves underfoot … every person on my street could draw a better tree map than the one that Google’s AI produced.
And the AI will improve, to be clear. The trees on Google Maps will get more accurate. But even then, as tech companies hoover up reams of data heretofore uncomprehended in the history of man … I like to think they’ll still miss out on certain types of knowledge.
The roughness, for instance, of a maple tree’s bark, ashy and dry against your palm.
The wonder (and terror) of knowing this tree will probably stand here after you’re gone.
The awkwardness of waving to a neighbor who’s watching you measure a tree in the dark. Did you know this is on Google Maps now? You’ll say. But yeah, no, not the one in your yard!
➤ I, for one, am ready to welcome a post-influencer internet. (I just can’t imagine what they’ll throw at us next.) Many people are clearly souring on “content creators,” and the economics of online influence have grown more complex. Maybe that yields a kinder, gentler, more diversified and smaller-scale online culture … or maybe it just incentivizes ever-more-cynical attention hacks. [Vulture, The Atlantic, Rachel Karten]
➤ Steven Pruitt is a 42-year-old federal contractor who lives with his mother in the DC suburbs. He is also the single most prolific Wikipedia editor ever. [New Yorker]
➤ A beloved movie database, first launched on Geocities in 1997, was forced offline by a flood of bots — some of which might have been probing for information they could use to get an edge on prediction markets. [Stephen Follows]
➤ The Social Connectedness Index uses anonymized Facebook data to map friendship networks across locations. Click your county or country on the map, and you’ll see the corresponding counties or countries where people in your area have the most Facebook friends. [Social-Connectedness.org]
➤ I long for the days when little boys wanted to grow up to be streamers. Now, according to this multifacetedly disturbing article, boys as young as 16 pimp out other kids online as so-called “OnlyFans managers.” [The Cut]
➤ Fascinated by this California pastor who created an AI replica of himself, the better to serve his parishioners off-hours and fuel my late-night ruminations about the purpose of human presence. [NYT]
➤ “I guess I’ll end this by saying that if you have no free time, not using your phone won’t give you more of the time you don’t have — you’re just filling the same small container with a different substance, one that’s most likely better than Instagram. Similarly, if the world is insane-making, logging off won’t change that world. It does, however, make you more aware of your place in it, even if your place is on the bus writing some bullshit.” [kate wagner]
➤ The “new Luddite” movement is, as far as I can tell, an Occupy Wall Street for theater kids. They’ve got the slogans and they’ve got the camp. (As in aesthetics, not habitation.) [404 Media]
➤ The actual most interesting thing I read this week, which relates in no way to internet culture: Right-handedness might be dominant in humans because it gives you an advantage in hand-to-hand combat (!!). [Quanta]
The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the restaurants staging an aestheticized, anti-AI resistance.
Many thanks to the other grown-ass adults who wrote in to share that they’re also on their parents’ cellphone plans. There are more of us out here than you’d think. And certainly, more of us out than will admit it …
Below the jump, ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vox and The Verge.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin
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