![]() ![]() Two years ago, I co-hosted an episode of a podcast with my friend Ashley Carman (whose location I can see at all times), in which we asked our co-workers why they’d made the choice to use location-sharing apps. Even Cult of Mac, a near-fetishistic daily news blog about Apple products (tagline: “Tech and culture through an Apple lens”), called the app both “useful” and “evil” upon its release. Not everyone feels so swoony about Find My Friends. A rhetorical question, because of course we all knew exactly where she was. “Where the fuck am I?” my friend Katie texted the group chat one day at 3 a.m., alongside a photo of dozens of pairs of high-end sneakers, arranged in neat rows on the floor of a strange apartment. Bored or lonely or sad or anxious, I could open the app and click down the list- she’s at work she’s at the movies she’s at the worst bar in Brooklyn, why is she there? All my people, scattered around the city, doing their things, living their lives, then returning to places where I knew they were okay. It created friendship seamless, like in the movies: We could meet up easily and at any time, and our story lines were all spliced together into one coherent drama. Sitting on my stoop, waiting for one of them to bring over a bottle of wine, I could track her little blue bubble as it lurched down my block. When we made dinner plans, I could catch them exactly as they rounded the corner to the restaurant. The idea was that I could wake up and watch them. ![]() What I wanted most was the sense of shared plot, by way of literal plotting. (We’ve all been to college, which is statistically more dangerous for a woman than anything we’re doing now.) That isn’t why I asked them to give me access to their location at all hours of the day and night, forever. It’s not that I fear for my friends’ safety in any real way. And a year ago, I persuaded my friends to share their locations with me “ indefinitely” in Apple’s Find My Friends app. I know this is not actually true, because generations of people did it, but it is true for me: I bought my first smartphone in 2014, my first summer in the city, solely for Google Maps. You simply can’t get around New York City without GPS. ![]()
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