This chap called Jon Rafman has been painfully scouring Google Street View for the last couple of years, collecting some very cool and sometimes very odd images inadvertently snapped up by the electric cars of Google.
Here are some of my favourite ones:
Check out the full collection here: http://9-eyes.com/
From this premise, you would expect it to be a collection of photos of people being sick or getting photographed burgling and other acts of indiscretion. But in fact lots of the pictures are quite artistic images of oddness.
Google Street View is such a bizarre thing. Mankind has never built anything like it before. It’s scary as an illustration of Google’s immense power and scale, but it also provides us with an unrivalled documentation of human civilization at this point in history. Imagine if someone had been able to photograph on this scale in the nineteenth century. We’d have the most amazing resource for historians.
That’s a really good point actually Rich, i’d never thought about how it gives and insane cross-section of our current world, and the curiosity future generations will have pouring over the images. That’s to assume an EMP doesn’t wipe it all out. Civilisations seem to have a curious ability to leave very little behind when they fade away. Perhaps it’s all a grand plan to keep historians in work.