Lagscape

An ongoing project by David K. Ross

As this map shows, there are countless examples of self-storage facilities in and around Las Vegas that do not exist as far as Google Maps is concerned. These places are absent from Google’s Street View and Satellite images, not because they have mysteriously vanished, but because they were not there when Google’s imaging vehicle passed by to photograph these sites. The lag between the image presented by Google of these sites, and the actual conditions that exist (these storage places are, in fact, there) leads to a strange visual untruth—an image of a piece of geography that is chronologically and architecturally erroneous.

The incongruity of this data is related to both the speed at which self-storage buildings can be constructed, and the rate of updates done by Google’s imaging teams, but the net result is the same: the self-storage business seems to be moving faster than the internet.