““This, we speculated, is due to the way in which these apps are recording the GPS inaccuracies and counting these as actual, physical movements,” they continued. “In reality, these odd asymmetrical star-shaped tracks offer a map of the shifts of the phone attempting to locate itself.” It is not you, then, but a mathematical error, a phantom version of yourself wandering in the blind spots of military satellites.”
“If even something as stationary as an art gallery in Manhattan can appear to slide back and around again through the surrounding neighborhood, then, in a very real sense, the entire world is also always night-running, departing from its apparent fixedness without ever appearing to move. Your smartphone was in a different neighborhood last night, perhaps even stumbling through someone’s home or slipping across state borders.”
“This geographic existentialism, wherein even our instruments are lost, is just one intriguing side effect of relying on contemporary satellite technology for a sense of real-time location. Although ever-more intense levels of precision are on their way—particularly with the launch of what Lockheed Martin calls GPS III—even these future machines will reveal shortcomings and blind spots. Stationary points will still wander, in other words, and that’s before we look at the possibility of outright system failure.”
“Here is a place that moves just as we attempt to step on it, fleeing from precision as if unwilling—or unable—to be mapped.”
“Just as it has now become possible to know exactly where we stand in the world, with more definition than ever before, these new forms of error make that place much stranger than we could perhaps once have believed.”