Ninety-nine second-hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate a virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red, which has an impact in the physical world as cars are navigated on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.

With its Geo Tools, Google has created a platform that allows users and businesses to interact with maps in a novel way. This means that questions relating to power in the discourse of cartography have to be reformulated. But what is the relationship between the art of enabling and the techniques of supervision, control, and regulation in Google’s maps? Do these maps function as dispositive nets that determine the behavior, opinions, and images of living beings, exercising power and controlling knowledge? Maps, which themselves are the product of a combination of states of knowledge and states of power, have an inscribed power dispositive. Google’s simulation-based map and world models determine the actuality and perception of physical spaces and the development of action models.