Google Earth is a terrifying invention with some truly disturbing implications. Today I watched--live from my own chair at my own desk in Cheyenne, Wyoming--Osama Bin Laden crawl out of a small hole in a mountain somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakastan, build a fire, and cook himself up a can of pork and beans! Pork and Beans! Madness! He's Islamic!

I tell you here and now, this Twenty-First Century piece of Antichrist technology is nothing less than the absolute and final word on the literal manifestations of the panopticon!

Just kidding, sort of. But only because it's not in real-time--yet. Eventually, though, I'd imagine it will become that way, or that there will be something like it introduced which provide us all the ability to monitor each others' each and every every out-of-doors move as we make it.

Imagine it--Google Earth Live. We could watch wars with this thing. Monitor human rights violations in real-time. Witness first-hand the procession of Western militaries marching just ahead of the multitudes of construction workers laying foundation for miles and miles of oil pipeline around the globe. Attend live and unedited breaking news feeds virtually and on location. Get into major open-air sporting events for free. Follow the plight of a baby lioness in Africa as she travels with her pride throughout the Sahara. Become peeping toms and watch some farmers' daughter's silhouette undress itself behind a window curtain in Iowa. Anything.

It could be the ultimate in reality television programming; a psuedo 'virtual-reality' simulacrum and role playing game all rolled into one; a new millennial identity crisis for the information age in which one is always half subject-on-display, half autonomous and anonymous observer. It's hyperreal, baby. It's real hyperreal.

And furthermore, I wouldn't be at be at all surprised to learn that the more secretive of our government agencies has already had in place for years a version of this same prototypical program, except with incredibly unholy capacities for detailed resolution, exploratory three dimensional imaging, even infrared and other structure-penetrating observational capabilities, etc., and that theirs actually does work in real-time. I mean, we have half a million satellites in that sky of ours--have you ever seen a representation of it? It looks like theres a gigantic colony of tsetse flies swarming around the world in all directions and at all elevations, at all times of the day and night. Look it up. I'm amazed that anything approaching escape velocity could ever blast itself out of this atmosphere without pummeling straight through one of those little mothers at some point along the line of its trajectory. Seriously. It's incredible.

What's more than that though, is that we have a thousand times that many cameras here on the ground, and we have people here at home buried deep in the hearts of our own mountains--mountains, mind you, with giant fields of antennae sticking up out the top of them--'our own people,' eating government-issue pork and beans and watching giant video screens for lord only knows what purposes. God help us. God help us all!

Anyway, I geeked out on the program all day long, flying around the world at dangerously low levels, creeping along at gangsta-slow speeds while listening to City of Daughters by Destroyer, sightseeing in the historical cities of the world on a 'Da Vinci Code tour,' and scouring the open terrain of New Mexico and the American Southwest for alien launch pads, crop circles, and chupacabra. It was both awesome, evil, evil, awesome, and weird. Both.

"One could say we lost the space race, one could say we lost the space race, one could say we lost the space race. Another one could say we won."