The digital world of 2025 is an increasingly dark place—promises of an end-of-history, neoliberal technotopia have foundered on the rocks of monopoly, nativism, and a fractured epistemological understanding of the world. I’ve personally seen the retreat from the “digital public square” to semi-private spaces: group chats, invite-only servers, forums. Some of them are “group chats that rule the world.” Indeed, we seem to be, collectively, past “Peak Social Media.” This week, Julia Kieserman investigates the rise of a different sort of digital private space: social location sharing.
—Hal Triedman, Reboot Editorial Board
“Lighthouses in the Sky”
By Julia B. Kieserman
My brother is a notoriously awful texter. Texts go unacknowledged for days and then weeks, sheepishly answered only when he has stumbled upon a meme, an article, or a funny anecdote he wants to share. While frustrating, there is an honesty to the implicit demand that we make no expectations on his unreliable and often unreachable virtual self. It holds the faintest echo of a time when a landline’s sharp ring cut through the silence of an empty house or a hastily signed postcard arrived mildly battered three months after the fact. It is a declaration of liberation from a shiny piece of alloy, bits of Earth extracted and reconstituted to weigh down our pockets and wear down our fingers. He is not his phone and his phone is not him.
Or at least, it wasn’t him.
A few months ago, he started sharing his location with us, the friends and family who love him. With the flick of a wrist, he absolved himself of the stress of answering the question that location sharing is best suited to answer: where are you right now?
My brother isn’t alone. A 2022 Harris poll found that four in five U.S. adults use location sharing tools like Apple’s FindMy and Google Maps to share their real-time location data with whomever they choose. While we have long known that we are being watched by the advertising industry, the bread and butter business that keeps our tech behemoths afloat, location sharing now puts us in the power seat, allowing us to become the watchers (or the watched) as we silently observe the movements of our friends and family.
To me this immediately raised alarm bells. Having a friend’s location on demand appears to strip them of the very same autonomy that nearly every teenager fights so hard for against their parents. Why is this something we find attractive and how might it be impacting our ability to maintain relationships with one another? In an attempt to answer these questions, I talked to 15 location sharers and polled an additional 67 to discuss how location sharing is part of their lives and understand why they share, who they share with, and what it really means to them to do so.
Like other infrastructure, the Global Positioning System’s (GPS) seeming dullness disguises a mild technological miracle. Accurately rendering each GPS dot on a map requires a roundtrip journey to space, atomic clocks, and communication with no less than three satellites in medium Earth orbit or, as inventor Dr. Ivan Getting put it, “lighthouses in the sky.” To consider it this way is to see it as a bit magical, perhaps the way weary sea travelers see lighthouses on land, or the way the Polaris (also known as the North Star, the spiritual ancestor of GPS) appears to those who turn to it for guidance.
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