the Denver area is changing so rapidly, the map-
pers hope to keep updating the buildings, creating
a historical record—a sort of pencil-mark-on-the-
doorjamb growth chart—of how the city becomes
what it will be. In the OSM, you can check out the
archive of edits just like you can on Wikipedia.
Denver, of course, isn’t the only city lacking
user- friendly data, and the problem is even more
acute in rural and developing areas. Across the
world, more than 150 OpenStreetMap chapters are
helping to make their regions visible, tracking an
ever-shifting landscape of roads and borders.
Coloring in the map can also just be fun. Spyker
and Fritz are creating a city art directory, and soon
they’ll be able to peg graffi ti and murals to the walls
of specifi c structures. Green thumbs could one
day calculate how many hours of sunshine their
building- shadowed urban gardens will get. A book-
store owner could estimate how many people will
walk by their window display.
Under Fritz’s helpful tutelage, Burt fi nally gets
to the point of actually working. He stares mirror-
eyed at the map, all of its layers shining from his
screen, waiting for him to paint on another. “Ah,”
he says, “this looks beautiful.”
“Did you hear that?” Fritz asks Spyker, who’s
pulling up a site she made to help people plan pub
crawls on bikes. “He said it was beautiful.”
THE MEETUP GROUP AT BACKCOUNTRY
Pizza tonight represents the vanguard of the Geoint
Singularity. But it’s also fair to ask if a tipping point is
something the average person wants, needs, or will
ever care about. Consider, for instance, that most
folks are content with spinning through Google
Earth, where the images are usually a couple
of years old. “That satisfi es most people’s basic
curiosity,” says Geospatial Amateurs’ Timoney.
The phenomenon’s godfather, Koller, notes that
the singularity really requires a useful idea, one
that cheaply and easily integrates real-time data
and analysis, probably through a smartphone or
browser interface. The glut of information is too
much for our puny brains to parse quickly, which
means we’ll also need AI to get smarter than it is
now, and have the particular kind of savvy to serve
up what people actually want. “The key point will
be to fi nd that killer application,” he says, a rea-
son that an all-seeing eye on Earth would make
the everyday easier or more effi cient. “I don’t think
anybody has really identifi ed that yet.”
This wouldn’t be the fi rst time we couldn’t
clearly see the future. “If someone had asked me
some question in 1980 about GPS, I’d be like, ‘I don’t
know if it’s useful to see where you are,’” says Geor-
gia Tech’s Mariel Borowitz, author of Open Space:
The Global Eff ort for Open Access to Environmental
Satellite Data. But here we are, with Tinder and
Yelp and our general inability to navigate without
a robot voice in our ear, because of GPS and our
smartphones’ ability to put them in our palms.
Borowitz has questions, though, about how pri-
vacy protections will evolve. “I can imagine when
you have ubiquitous data, your ability to track
individuals or specifi c individual movements in-
creases,” she says. The rub for watching the whole
world change is that you are part of that world.
And not every “you” will get access to that
change. “What I think stands in the way of closing
the digital divide is the growing trend of the rich
versus the poor,” Koller says. When only the
wealthy can reach the bounty, they also control how
information gets collected, used, and interpreted.
That’s why self-rolled initiatives aim to put power
in more hands. Like, for example, the hands of peo-
ple currently Pay Paling their share of the pizza bill
to Fritz. Only one of them—Burt—has mapped any-
thing tonight. But that’s fi ne. As much as this group
is about geospatial data, it’s also about connecting a
community, and forging bright lines between them.
McAndrew tilts his eyes toward the window.
The storm has fully arrived. He stares for a sec-
ond before pulling out his phone and punching up
a real-time traffi c display. “You can tell where the
snow’s the worst,” he says, fl ashing his screen to-
ward us. Green segments, where cars are fl owing,
slam into red ones, where drivers have slowed,
fl akes undoubtedly hypnotic in their headlights.
When we step outside, our eyes confi rm the
situation: The snow has begun to stick. It piles up
on cars and blades of grass. It reveals the outlines of
everything, showing our footprints as we walk away
from each other, past buildings yet to be imported.POPSCI.COM/ SPRING 2020 67