There it was after all – suddenly this afternoon the Google Street View car crossed my way, thoughtlessly adding my image to the world inventory on the internet. I was very close to home in Voorburg, Netherlands, but I will be almost unrecognizable, since (untypically) I had no camera with me… It was a strange moment being registered for the world to see by a traveling set of cameras on top of a car, without the conscious intervention of a human. (I noticed myself mentally checking what I would look like.) In fact its haphazard machine-generated definiteness and the prospect of a long-time unwilled worldwide visibility is quite a different experience from gracefully moving through the field of a surveillance camera which is by its nature more ephemeral. I’m not so much thinking of the privacy implications; a lot is already being said about it, both false and true. What really interests me – apart from the personal experience – is the suggestion of absolute objectivity, which is nonsense, come to think of it: you will see no traffic jam, because the Google car can’t get through, busy streets may be empty at certain hours or during the holidays, there will be no parades or demonstrations, no dirt roads or tracks, no twilight, no nights, no bad weather even! And most unreal, all these blurred texts and faces; it must be said: fascinating, but so unsatisfactory an image of an incomplete world. Keep taking those photographs yourself, put your soul in your images, it does take you to do it.