I don’t understand why an artist used 99 phones to fake a Google Maps traffic jam

Most people hate traffic jams, but secretly, I love them.

Yes, it’s a mass of cars that lead to plenty of stress and anger. To me, however, it’s just another excuse to catch up on the hours of D&D podcasts I feel blessed to listen to on a weekly basis. 

But I digress. This is a rather tenuous link to what we’re talking about today.

To catch you up, Artist Simon Weckert had an idea after seeing Google register a large gathering of people at Berlin’s May Day demonstration as a traffic jam on maps (even though no cars were present). So he pulled a little red wagon full of 99 smartphones up and down mostly randomly chosen streets, to see if he could do the same.

And as predicted, an hour after starting to walk, he had successfully tricked Maps into thinking there was slow-crawling traffic. He even managed to do this outside Google’s Berlin HQ.

It’s a novel idea, and this piece - this headline - is in no way a bash of what he did here. Simon demonstrates how the tech around us that we trust greatly can be easily exploited by the simplest of things. The fragility of the apps we use so often can be quite comical at times.

Plus, modern art is subjective and I’ve seen far weirder stuff tell stories about the societal impact of technology at Frequency Festival.

...the actual reasoning he gave, however, is a bit odd. 

Simply put, he’s shining a spotlight on apps based entirely around geo-location and how they essentially rewrite the map of a city for us. Things like Google Maps, Tinder and even Facebook have become driving forces in virtually changing the physical world around us. 

The plainest example is that you don’t ask for directions anymore, you consult Google. Another one would be that chances are you’ve walked to places you’d never even imagine going to in the city because of the need to catch that gym in Pokemon GO. So far, so good - it’s an obvious discovery, but one that some may not have thought about.

Then he continues...

“What I’m really interested in generally is the connection between technology and society and the impact of technology, how it shapes us,” Weckert told Wired. “I have the feeling right now that technology is not adapting to us, it’s the other way around.”

This is the bit I don’t understand. 

Technology doesn’t adapt to us and we don’t adapt to technology. It’s all about what I’ll call co-adaptation. New technology is put before us as a result of predictive adaptation, and we as humans learn to adapt to it.

The modern smartphone was not born out of adapting to humans, and it took humans a fair while to adapt to them if you think back to 2007. A company saw a predicted trend of people wanting to consume content on the go, had this nifty new touchscreen tech and paired them both into what you know as the phone of today. We had to learn some of the new usage behaviours they were trying to teach us from the ground up, but this fitted in nicely with what the people wanted going forward. See? Co-adaptation.

Technology grows with us, and we grow with technology. It’s not as black and white as Simon says it is. Now whether you think this is a good thing or not is an entirely different conversation that I’d be happy to explore, but as of right now, you’re kind of stating the obvious and not really making an evocative point.