Sovereigns, Spooks, and Hackers: An Early History of Google Geo Services and Map Mashups

This is a social history of the cartographic visions at work in Google geo services and related geoweb applications/map mashups, indicating how sovereign power and, later, capitalism had fundamental roles in forging ways of seeing with maps on the Web.

Abstract

Google geo services, such as Google Maps and Google Earth, offer popular and powerful geographic ways of seeing the world. This is a social history of the cartographic visions at work in Google geo services and related geoweb applications/map mashups. These geographic technologies are the result of shifting configurations of power that include state programs, private corporations, and small-scale tinkerer/hackers. Through these shifts, two particular geographic ways of seeing develop and come together: multi-scalar hyperlocal views and aerial imagery. These visual geographic knowledges were used together for military purposes during the Cold War and combined using 1990s video game software. Google popularized hyperlocal and aerial imagery ways of seeing by applying them in its targeted advertising-based business strategy. Hackers re-engineered Google Maps to create map mashups (geoweb applications), and Google executives chose to incorporate those applications into the company's strategy. Constructing this conditional history with its changing knowledges and variety of actors indicates how sovereign power and, later, capitalism had fundamental roles in forging ways of seeing with maps on the Web. Google's maps today have their own limits. They are highly individualized and often consumption-oriented but may prompt new kinds of mappings in the future.