 To this episode of RC3 Talks here on ChaosZoneTV, ChaosZone is the collection or collective of all the hacker communities here in Eastern Germany and we are presenting you today hacking Google Maps by Simon Weckert and Moritz Allert. This talk will be in English, so I will quickly jump to German to announce the translation. Now back to English and back to the talk hacking Google Maps by Simon Weckert and Moritz Allert. Have a lot of fun. This is our RC3 submission called Hacking Google Maps by Simon Weckert and Moritz Allert. Simon Weckert is an artist with his home base in Berlin. He likes to share knowledge on a wide range of fields from generative design to physical computing. His focus is the digital world, including everything related to code and electronics under the reflection on current social aspects, ranging from technology oriented examinations to the discussion of current social issues. In his work, he seeks to assess the value of technology, not in terms of actual utility, but from the perspective of future generations. He wants to raise awareness of the privileged state in which people live within Western civilization and remind them of the obligations attached to this privilege. Hidden layers like producing and transporting the raw minerals required to create the core infrastructure of technology and human fold automation labor of micro workers who perform the repetitive digital tasks that underline new technology are just some of the topics in his projects. Moritz Allert is researcher and artist based in Berlin. He studied architecture in Hanover and the Berlin University of the Arts. In his work he explores the interface between actor based urban design, mapping and digitalization of cities. He is the author of several publications and he exhibited internationally. From 2015 to 2017 he was part of a three-year graduate program to research the aesthetics of the virtual at HFBK Hamburg and was working towards a PhD in art. He defended his dissertation last year. Since 2017 he is a researcher and lecturer at the Habitat Unit, Chair of International Urbanism and Design at Tuba and Inn. Recent teaching activities include the Atlas of Digital Fragments analyzing the global appropriation of digital tools by civil society actors in an international context. The format of our RC3 submission is a video essay based on an essay by Moritz Allert with two interventions by Simon Weckert. The essay by Moritz Allert discusses the technical development of maps and their function within society. It links the genesis of early maps with the current development of urban apps and the success of Pokemon Go. Thus it questions the practice of mapping and gives an overview over the critical perspectives of today's mapping. The two interventions by Simon Weckert are Google Maps Borders a research. Focusing on the virtual border regime of Google Maps and second the Google Maps hack and performance and intervention which went viral in the beginning of this year. Maps have always been instrument of power. They have always been a significant instrument of government and domination. In antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in the modern age alike, rulers have used maps to further their political agenda and to enforce their sovereign power. Maps are proven instruments for reflecting statistical data, and the history of the map is therefore also closely associated with the founding of nation states. In the mid 18th century, the nation state took a growing interest in measuring its own territories and in surveying its population. With its topographical divisions into states, these became the main protagonists in cartography. By providing iconographic national outlines, maps increased identification with the nation state, thus allowing geopolitical borders to become fixed in people's minds. Maps served as instruments of military defense, in military campaigns and in propagandizing national identities. Until only a few decades ago, maps were exclusively produced by nation states, frequently in a military context. The map he's in was an instrument of disciplinary and sovereign power, as Foucault would have defined it. From the late 1980 onwards authors like John B. Harley, Dennis Wood, and Jeremy Crampton have taken a critical look at the ways in which maps function, and have explored the current perception of maps. They have come to the conclusion that maps are not objective, neutral graphic representations that endeavor to reflect the real world as accurately as possible. Instead, cartography is governed by rules that are scarcely questioned. Formalisms such as simplifying, distorting, secrecy, centralizing and hierarchizing have always been determining factors in cartographic praxis. A particularly interesting and tension-filled relationship between power and counter power can be noted in the maps produced by the Transnational Corporation Google. This pose is a question, how are power relationships expressed in the cartographic praxis and representation of Google Maps specifically, in terms of the previously mentioned strategies of simplifying, centralizing and hierarchizing. The advent of Google's Geotools began in 2005 with Maps and Earth, followed by Street View in 2007. They have since become enormously more technologically advanced. Google's virtual maps have little in common with classical analog maps. The most significant difference is that Google's maps are interactive, scrollable, searchable and zoomable. Google's map service has fundamentally changed our understanding of what a map is, how we interact with maps, their technological limitations, and how they look aesthetically. Thanks to Google, maps are more ubiquitous today than ever before, and, with the widespread use of smartphones, are influencing users' patterns of behavior. By using maps as a form of synaptic real-time networking, smart digital devices are creating a novel form of hyperlocality, a situation in which things and users are interconnected and can be localized, and in which the physical world fuses with the virtual world. Google's Geotools have become the nerve center and logbook of this world order. Think about maps, then we always have to think about how maps have been used, especially back in the days, as an instrument of power and as an instrument of control and instrumental argue to shape and to define areas to basically take a liner and a pen and then, like we see it here on this map, to say, okay, this is my part, this is your part, or also talking about conversation, how people have been divided by those maps and have been used as an argument to split them. And so it means that maps are such a power for such a strong, let's say, tool and instrument to represent a specific world view and, of course, also to make political hurt. And so, as we know, maps can draw borders, for example, but they can also use another specific, let's say, graphic, let's say, tool of graphic symbols like a circle for a city or, let's say, like a, I don't know, let's say, black line for a street or something like representation for a river, and these kind of graphical sets, they're also representing some kind of generalization. So when we see a map, then we always have to think about this is really just a generalized point of view. This is not the real world, it's really just representation, but there can be so many other different point of views about this area, what we're seeing there. So that's always, I think, I think what we should not forget. And when we see a map, that's really, it can be never seen as the real world, it's really just representation of the real world. And, well, you know, think about like, I guess, MacArthur projection, where we always give them some kind of, it's like a super central Europe central map. I think most people in Germany learned in school that they see this kind of projection and therefore they can also give them like Europe a much more, let's say, importantness in this map because Europe is in that sense much more a place in the center, but there are so many different, let's say, versions and variations how we can present the world map. So I think that we should always have this in mind and how, well, how maps can be used for some kind of political statements or some kind of political, well, let's say, motivations can be seen here in this project, which I did last year, that's so-called Google Maps borders. So I was writing a kind of algorithm to scan Google Maps on their, let's say, borders of their countries. And you have to know that there are different Google Maps, let's say, versions. So basically, it's like a Google Maps Ukraine, there's a Google Maps France, there's a Google Maps Russia, there's a Google Maps India and US and so on. And I was interested in if Google is showing us the same informations when we're going to use the different Google Maps versions. And what I found was that it's not like this. So what you can see, for example, on the top is on the left side, you see Google Maps India and on the right side, you see Google Maps China and especially for the Kashmir region, you can definitely see that the borders are different. So of course, we know that it's like an old conflict between the two countries and it's still, in a way, not somehow, let's say, 100% clear how they're going to deal with it. And it's always like this kind of forward background process. But I think what's important here is to see that Google is kind of, you know, standing behind the local opinion of this country and I think I would say that they are also, in a way, trying to not lose the local market of online map services in this country when they are not in the sense representing the local opinion. And here, I would say they are definitely making politics and they are not dealing in a neutral way with their maps, the way how it should be. So same thing, for example, is here on the bottom, like when you see Google Maps Russia and Google Maps Ukraine. And we all remember the an ancient of the Kremlin Island or the Kremlin between Russia and Ukraine. And on the left side, you see that the border between Ukraine and the Kremlin Island is basically like a line and it's definitely saying, okay, this island belongs to Russia. But when you see it on the green side, then suddenly it's like a stroke line and the state is somehow unclear. So this definitely for me represents some point of some worldviews and it creates actually some kind of imbalance between what kind of information we are getting with regards where we're coming from. And then it's quite hard for us, I would say, to come to a common sense when we're getting different arguments, we're getting different informations by those tools. At an early stage, Google put in place specialized programming interfaces called APIs which allowed the programmers of other web tools to combine their data with Google Maps and to geo reference it, known as map mashups. It was the opportunity offered by the mashups that first made possible the emergence of new economic models, such as large parts of the digital shared or gig economies. In this fashion, Google Maps makes virtual changes to the real city. Applications such as Airbnb and car sharing have an immense impact on cities, on their housing market and mobility culture, for instance. There is also a major impact on how we find a romantic partner, thanks to dating platforms such as Tinder and on our self quantifying behavior, thanks to the Nike Jogging app or map based food delivery app like Deliveroo or Foodora. All of these apps function via interfaces with Google Maps and create new forms of digital capitalism and commodification. Without these maps, car sharing systems, new taxi apps, bike rental systems and online transport agency services such as Uber would be unthinkable. An additional mapping market is provided by self driving cars. Again, Google has already established a position for itself. As mentioned Google Maps has led to novel displacements and overlapping of physical and virtual spaces. In this context, simulation techniques are used not only to generate virtual worlds, but to form realities and to intervene in physical spaces. We can safely say that digitalization has opened up the mapping sector, which was once dominated by the state. Instead of leading to increased democratization, this has resulted in fragmentations. Economic interests appear to have replaced state and military interests. Google uses its maps to open up new markets, to collect more data and to profit from the online platforms which use Google Maps as their basis. With its geo tools, Google has created a platform that allows users and businesses to interact with maps in another way. This means that questions relating to power in the discourse of cartography have to be reformulated. But what is the relationship between the art of enabling and techniques of supervision, control and regulation in Google's maps? Do these maps function as dispositive nets that determine the behavior, opinions and images of living beings, exercising power and controlling knowledge? Maps, which themselves are the product of a combination of states of knowledge and states of power, have an inscribed power dispositive. Google's simulation-based map and world models determine the actuality and perception of physical spaces and the development of action models. To echo the words of Agamben, today, it seems that there is not a single instant in the life of an individual that cannot be formed, contaminated, ordered or controlled by dispositives, in the form of maps. Deleuze writes, in the societies of control, it is no longer right there a signature or a number that is important, but a code, the code is a password. Individuals have become individuals, masses, samples, data, markets, or banks. He cites Guattari's vision in which a divisual map becomes the control material. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's divisual electronic map that raises a given barrier, but the map could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours. What counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position, licit or illicit, and affects a universal modulation. The digital map of today is an instrument of the surveillance and control dispositive described by Deleuze and Guattari. Every click on the net, every step in space is recorded and registered. Everything that moves around, goods, information, communication, capital, and consumers, is tracked. According to Zigmund Baumann, every human being is a wandering hyperlink. The digital map co-writes, tabulates, and increasingly removes the blank spaces of our private life. The everyday negotiations of our lives are cartographed by a succession of new digital techniques and applications. With the smartphone, if not before, communication coincides with control. Zigmund Baumann describes how once solid and fixed surveillance relationships would become increasingly more flexible and the mobile, and would expand into areas of life in which they previously played only a marginal role or no role at all. Baumann adopts Deleuze's rhizomatics to show that surveillance in control societies does not grow in a tree-like and ordered way, but spreads rhizome fashion. The new forms of surveillance would depend on data processing and would have long since left the framework of the disciplining discourses described by Foucault. They affected a new transparency, in which not only state citizens as such, but every human being in all areas of everyday life, could be continuously monitored, observed, tested, evaluated, judged, and sorted into categories. In a fully one-sided way, while every detail of our everyday life is becoming ever more transparent to the organizations that observe us, their activities are increasingly opaque to us. The power relationships of today, on the other hand, are, according to Baumann, post-panoptic, electronic technologies which are, made use of, by power in the rapidly changing and mobile organizations of our present day, make solid walls and windows largely superfluous, apart from windows and firewalls, of course, their virtual phantoms. Additionally, they enable very different forms of domination, not only do these no longer have any clear connection to prisons, they are also frequently characterized by being exceptionally flexible and, in the media and shopping, actually frequently go hand in hand with fun and entertainment. So, there we're gonna come to, let's say, the topic I was, basically, where everything started and I was really interested in is how these digital tools, how Google Maps and, yeah, how this new way to see maps have shaped the way how we work in the city, how we, yeah, basically how we use this tool to interact with other actors in the city, or how we also, how it's also basically shaping the way we're gonna travel, for example. So, Google Maps started in, I think, 2005 followed by Street View, and these maps have, I would say, fundamentally changed our understanding how we read maps, right? I guess, when you ask somebody, think about a map, I would say that for most of the people, what power in their mind is more like a virtual map, like the ones which is defined by Google, so we could say that. Aesthetically wise, they're also defining, in a way, like how maps look like these days. And, of course, they have little in common with analog printed maps, so they are scruple, scrollable, zoomable, and also searchable. And so I would say that since 2005, through the advance of it, a lot of, let's say, things change, how we understand maps and how we read them. I mean, of course, it's quite obvious that one of the benefits of digital maps is that they can implement data there, which means that they can somehow act as a real-time map, right? And that's probably also one of the negative sides of printed maps, because you have to imagine, let's say, you have, like, whatever, like a big map, like a huge map printed of Berlin. In the moment when you print it, it's actually already outdated, right? Because the landscape, the area around us is changing, it's dynamic like a river. And in that moment, when you print, or when you create something like this, then you cannot, you can actually never say that this map is the current state. So it means that maps can be helpful for us, but for a short period of time, but can also limit the use of these maps, especially when they are printed. And I think that the main goal of Google Maps is to overcome the state and to say, like, okay, here, right now we are creating a tool that doesn't come with this kind of outdated situation anymore. It's kind of a representing of the world around us, a real-time representing of the world around us. So unfortunately, as technology likes us, sometimes it doesn't like us, the codec didn't work for the presentation, so here I would like to show you the Google Maps hacks, maybe also for the one who doesn't know it. So yes, in the beginning of this year, in February, there was the 15th birthday of Google Maps. And one week before the birthday, I published this project on Twitter, and what the project is about. So what you see is there's a guy walking the street of Berlin with a red wagon, and in this wagon there are 99 smartphones. On those smartphones, actually all of them are Android smartphones. And what's happening is that when you're working alongside the street forward, backward, and sometimes also a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower, then it generates some virtual traffic on Google Maps, and this had the effect in the moment that people which are using Google Maps navigation system are being linked around me or about this guy. And after a while, you could literally see that the street was getting empty and empty of cars. And this was quite interesting to see how such a huge impact these navigation systems spend, especially the maps as on our, let's say, way how we use them, but also in a way like how people are, let's say, traveling and navigating in the city. And this kind of slow, faster movement, as I mentioned, was also some kind of a trick to think about how could the algorithm read, let's say, 99 cars in a way as a traffic jam. So with this action, we were trying to also generate some kind of stop and go traffic. And yeah, I would say the hack or let's say the performance itself, I got the idea at the first of my main demonstration in Berlin, where I saw a lot of people working alongside the street, especially in Kreuzberg. And in that time, I had to look at my smartphone and I realized that Google was showing a lot of like a huge virtual traffic around Kreuzberg. But in fact, there was no car driving at all in the city or in this place there. So it was quite clear to me that they are tracking those smartphones of the people and then they are creating the virtual traffic out of it. And I was asking myself, okay, how can I create something similar to this? And then of course, I mean, it was clear that I just need smartphones and not the people to do a similar effect. And yeah, I mean, then the journey began like how to get the smartphones and so on. But this was quite hard in a way at the beginning because I thought, okay, like is there, you know, there must be some kind of secondhand smartphones and let's say companies at airports and so on, because all the employees, they're getting smartphones like every three years, four years. But unfortunately, I didn't get any, let's say, response from them to say, like, yeah, of course, you can use it here for something like this. And then I came up with the idea, okay, maybe out of, let's say, if I want to generate something like this, I could also make another performance out of this, out of it to ask, let's say, friends, if they are willing to give me their smartphone for one day, and if they basically can live without their smartphone for one day, and I'm going to use their smartphones for this heck. And this was actually interesting to me that most people were, first of all, like, yeah, okay, I can, let's see how it works. And but then after a while, they said, okay, okay, that's going to give you, I'm going to give you the smartphone and then we can let's do it. And then I will see if I can survive the smartphone for one day. And of course, I don't have 99 friends. So I also got smartphones from some official smartphone suppliers. And yeah, and then basically, I had all the smartphones for one day, the performance and after after one hour working inside the squeeze bus, in a way, quite obvious that this kind of performance or this kind of heck will work. Let me jump out of the presentation because I would like to give you also another thank you very much. It was super interesting. I think actually there could be a future similar workshop to how we're working today on seeing how YouTube shows different things in the future how YouTube or how Google Maps shows you different routes. That's quite scary development. Yeah, I would like to just ask you one question before we open up to the audience. And I'm sure you get this question quite a lot. But do you know if anything was changed by Google in their algorithm or their software after you did this performance or was there any change or are we still able to do this hack? I mean, it's definitely possible. There are already some, let's say copycats out there. So there are YouTube videos where people generating a similar virtual traffic. I mean, the thing is that Google spokesperson said like, yeah, they are, you know, no matter what's in the city, if it's like a whatever car, camel, or the person on the camel or something else, they are trying to track everything. And there was another sentence that they are also happy about it, you know, people making aware of that kind of bugs and they're trying to filter these kinds of events out. So for sure, I will do a, basically, I will test the system. I don't know, maybe a half year or yeah, and then figure it out if it still works or not. But I have the feeling it's going to be quite hard for them to filter something like this. Yeah, I guess something will always be possible to hack it. Yeah. Great. So are there any questions from our audience? We still have a bit of time before we start with the works? Just a technical question about the act you have done on Google Maps. The 99 cellphone should be on Google, like, or just with GPS activated or Exactly. So yeah, you have to activate, I mean, of course, right there, there are three, three different ways how smartphones can be tracked. So I would say the most accurate is GPS, then you have, let's say the network location system, which works over antennas in the city. It's like a triangulation calculation. And then you have Wi-Fi. And I enabled all three of them. And then the thing is also important to mention is that it didn't, I didn't have to open Google Maps on the smartphone, but that you really just Android. I mean, probably it works better when you have Google Maps running as an application smartphone. But for sure, they are also tracking you when you don't have it running Google Maps. There was another question here in the front. Thanks for the talk. That was really interesting. And I've got a question. You were mentioning copycats or copykids. Anything interesting you've seen there coming up on YouTube, people, you know, elaborating on your idea and maybe, you know, giving you a new angle on what you started there? I mean, of course, there had been some people mentioned like, I mean, I got a lot of, let me think, I got some kind of ideas where people thought, okay, that could be interesting to use it also in another way. I mean, not from the guys on YouTube. They literally were trying to, well, you know, to simulate that. But of course, they are also learning, let's say, that when there is a traffic going on every week on the same time, then after a while it will also predict that in a way. And then I think people came up with the idea, okay, you know, when I'm going to do that, let's say three or four times, then will it be possible for the next time the street will be empty. And then I have basically, you know, when I cycle from A to B, then the street will be to my, when I go to work, for example, in the street will be empty. This kind of ideas came up during the conversation, or let's say in the comments might be interesting to see. I mean, also, by the way, that's a thing also important to mention. I mean, as an artist, I always try to, that's my understanding, I really try to come up with some easy, let's say narratives for by the audience to understand like how this technology works, right. And this was for me to use the smartphones a pretty, let's say understandable, easy to read way. But I also have to mention that there are multiple ways to simulate something like this. I mean, buzzwords are, you know, GPS spooing, as we know it from Pokemon Go as well, like how they are using it. But of course, you can also use, let's say, trick the Google API. There are really some papers out there where people did it like five years ago. But I would say for for an audience which is not so familiar with technology, let's say hard to read that or to understand that. And then I think that's probably also the reason why the 99 smartphones got a lot of attention because it was easy, easier to read. The 2016 summer's fashionable phenomenon was the location based app Pokemon Go, a project by the Nintendo video games company and former internal Google startup Niantic, headed by the Google Earth inventor John Hanka. This summer, this augmented reality app led to hysterical mass movements, caused lethal accidents, but first and foremost, had users hooked catching monsters, like here in the video in Taiwan. Pokemon Go gamifies the real urban space, making it a virtual arena. It is based on a modified Google map. Pokemon Go brought users into places of the disciplinary society declared by authorities to be unsuitable places to play, such as prisons, schools, hospitals, barracks and military training areas, or former concentration camps. Owners of matured Pokemon's virtually occupied contested territories and defended them against other players, obliging them to move and cover ground. Pokemon Go has entered tech history as the most profitable smartphone game of all time, with a daily take of over US$2 million from so-called in-app purchases. More profitable, although it cannot be recorded in numbers, is the switching on of location sharing, the tracking of the mass body, the inscribing of its serpentine movements on Google Maps. Movement data allows the coordinates of the base map to be improved. Google analyzes the individual surroundings of users based on GPS and geodata. Additionally, the map steers users in a targeted way. In Japan, it steered them to fast food restaurants, where a so-called BokeStop was inscribed into the map in front of every McDonald's branch. With Pokemon Go, Google dramatically shows that it is able to steer large currents of customers, and how it can function as an instrument of social control through virtual techniques of marketing. With this game, Google is testing something that will probably be common place for all sorts of maps soon. The recipe for Pokemon Go's success lies with the individual play and user experience. It will be interesting to see how the knowledge gained from this will translate into the everyday functions of the normal individual Google map, with the goal of working towards a still more efficient control situation. Pokemon Go can be described as a map monster with a liberal appearance. Inscribed into Pokemon Go are the codes of a divisual control material. Deloose writes in the post-script that the serpent is the animal of the societies of control. The serpent is conquering space through movement. The coils of a serpent, of a snake are even more complex. In the context of Pokemon Go, Deloose's serpent looks like Pikachu.