interpretation in real time, providing the power to in-
vestigate any place as it is right now. In effect, anyone
could find a live view of whatever spot on the planet
they wanted to see. “The world basically becomes
transparent,” says Koller, a systems director at the
Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research
and development center in Southern California.
Koller has been monitoring the space industry
since around 2015, taking note as satellites became
easier and cheaper to build and launch. Today, more
than 700 orbiting objects watch Earth all the time,
up from 192 in 2014. That growth means that some
continuously produce images, showing your house
not as it looked in 2016 but as it looks while you
read this. He has also seen artificial intelligence get-
ting smarter. It can, using finely tuned algorithms,
count cars and identify cats or your cousin. Finally,
he’s seen that with phones and fast networks, peo-
ple can stream such analyses. Take that to its logical
endpoint, and—voilà!—a Geoint Singularity.
We’re not there yet, but we’re well on our way:
Satellites capture images of a given sea or sky-
scraper daily. AI is good at narrow, specific tasks,
like recognizing trees or gauging traffic, but inte-
grating different streams—aerial pictures, CCTV
feeds, Twitter threads, addresses, current trash-
truck locations—remains a wicked problem. Given
all that, no one can say if this singularity will come,
or how, exactly, regular earthlings’ experiences
would change if it did. Maybe people will watch the
ice caps melt minute by minute. Maybe they will fact-
check municipal claims about building new housing,
or whether foreign ships are docking nearby. Maybe
they will know, at all times, the best open parking
space in the whole city. Or maybe they won’t care
very much at all, and mapping skills will remain im-
portant but niche, deployed mostly by intelligence
agencies, humanitarian groups, and corporations.
At Backcountry, the OpenStreetMap volunteers
represent a future in which people do care. They
want to know all about their place on the globe.
McAndrew pulls up a video on his computer and puts
it on loop to set the mood. A dark globe appears on
the screen. Bright dots and lines flash across its sur-
face in a DayGlo seizure, tracing countries and cities
and the spaces between. It’s an atlas of Earth, drawn
chronologically as people add roads, houses, and
schools. Other crowdsourced projects serve specific
niches; StoryMap lets users highlight the locations
in a series of events; Ushahidi helps people share
information about things like police encounters.
But OpenStreetMap has the broadest ambitions:
to capture the entire, always changing planet, and
whatever people in each place care about.
McAndrew says, “Every line you see is an edit”—a
place now on the map, now truer to the real world.the fastest growing in the nation) is changing. About
40 people have volunteered so far.
Fritz flips open her laptop to find the how-to pre-
sentation she’ll give to any newcomers who venture
in. For now, though, her only audience hangs above
her: beer signs scattered around the room.
As her computer powers up, the other MeetUp
leader, data scientist Margaret Spyker, arrives with
member Jim McAndrew, who moved to Pennsylvania
and is back for a visit. “If you order quick, you’ll make
happy hour,” Fritz urges them.
Spyker grabs a menu from the table, the pair
orders with just two minutes to spare, and the triad
begins chatting. “Jimmy’s already checked in here
on Foursquare,” Spyker says.
McAndrew smiles and shrugs: guilty. Speaking of,
Fritz remembers, she’s been meaning to compliment
him on a recent sprint on the fitness app Strava,
where he tracks his impressively fast runs.
They pause and laugh at their predictability. Even
their small talk is geospatial—all about things re-
lated to place and time—exactly as you’d expect
from people who build maps in their spare hours.
Tonight, they hope to make progress on the
so-called Denver Building Import. They’ll overlay
shapes, sizes, and addresses from a government
database onto a crowdsourced, free map of the world,
and merge the two so that the structures become a
permanent feature of the digital geography.
The project is part of an international effort called
OpenStreetMap, founded in 2004. A cartographic
Wikipedia, OSM relies on volunteers—a million
since its start, making it the largest such endeavor—
to create an ever-evolving representation of the
planet. You can view it in a browser or within a plat-
form like Facebook, which relies on it for location
information. And although individuals work on it
just for fun, it underpins services at huge companies
like Amazon and Microsoft. OSM is important and
different from maps like Google’s because it’s made
by and for the people. It contains information its
participants want—not, as McAndrew puts it, “what
will make Google Maps money.”
All over, nerdy normals are using mappy data for
specific pursuits: Archaeologists have uncovered hid-
den tombs; police have found missing people; relief
organizations have dispatched aid to flood victims;
retired spies have located weapons caches; conser-
vationists have detected deforestation; artists have
pinpointed secret military installations; and retailers
have gauged vacancies in competitors’ parking lots.
A policy adviser and analyst named Josef Koller
believes this plethora of frequently updated informa-
tion might lead to a tipping point he dubs the Geoint
Singularity: a time when people with no particular ex-
pertise or wealth have access to geospatial data and its
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