Today, that same apparently same self-evident image of totality also serves as a graphical user interface to personal mapping applications that are based on satellite observations of all locations within the image-territory. Google Earth, for example, is a meta-interface into an archaeological view of the virtual frozen present of a planet comprehensively available to vision, but also largely devoid of animal bodies. It frames an Earth mostly deserted by humans who have left behind empty cities. For Google Earth, both the image and the interface promise an absolute frame; a metaframe of frames and their collaborative geopolitical ambition is derived from that promise. By zooming in and out across relative scales, the global image becomes a total site condition, one for which infrastructure-as-monument is apparently the most appropriate measure of intervention at any given resolution. <sup>39</sup> However, the territorial politics of Google, as discussed in the Cloud chapter, resides less in what is seen than what is not seen, and in how the not-seen allows the seen to override other jurisdictional inscriptions and partitions.
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Earth Layer