Click here for details on a free trip across America!

If you’ve never used it, Street View is a wonder of the modern age – a vast database of panoramic images captured by vehicle-mounted cameras moving along millions of miles of road. Arrows within each image let you click forwards and backwards to the next or the previous image (or left and/or right at road junctions). You can carry on clicking ad infinitum, ‘travelling’ any distance you choose.

Most users just want to check out a short stretch of road or a single building, but Muspratt had a more ambitious itinerary:

“I started at the easternmost point on the US mainland – West Quoddy Head, Maine – and clicked westward once, and then again and again. Petabytes of Google imagery later, I found myself halfway across the country with a journal full of small-town historical anecdotes and screenshots of the open road. It is the Great American Road Trip, done virtually.”

This certainly requires patience, but compared to a highly edited travelogue or news report, Street View gives you an unposed, unspun view of the places you’re seeing:

“I’d been streaming America in the uncompromising volumes and divisive tones of 24-hour news cycles and now-now-now social media. I needed doses of the America I hoped still existed, of less angst, more commonality.”

So, travelling click-by-click, what does the great American road trip reveal?

“America is deeper than Twitter and Facebook feeds would suggest; America is, yes, great.

“Still, it is impossible to miss something else in Street View America: vacant and derelict buildings are endemic; inequality runs visibly rampant. From rural Maine to the Rust Belt’s heartland and west, I cannot click but minutes without encountering an abandoned home or gutted Main Street. An hour in West Virginia and central Ohio downloads enough barren steel industry apparatus and one-bar, one-post-office town centers that the disconnect from wealth – and Washington – is palpable.”

The cultural elites tend to live in global cities where the world is laid out before them; different languages, cultures, cuisines can be sampled – or not – without effort or commitment. When the elites do leave their cities it is to rural or suburban retreats where only some of the people and places they have to share a country with are on view – i.e. their sort of people; their sort of places.

Tools like Google Street View give us all a chance to break out of our bubbles. To see the nations we belong to as they really are. The view is a distant one, but unlike almost any other medium it is unfiltered and undiluted:

“Street View travel is my awakening. It is one thing to read narratives and case studies of our national fracture. It is another to actually see it, face-to-screen, by scrolling slowly through one disenfranchised town after another in a sequence so sure that the breadth and depth of the Trump-American landscape feels as infinite as Google itself.”

Book your trip now.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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