The same impulse that drives people in real life to visit the Branch Davidian compound, or Kurt Cobain's house, or the place where Flight 93 went down, exists online as well. People use Google Earth to experience death sites, and those places give off the same creep factor. Here is Dealey Plaza from a vantage point just above the Texas Schoolbook Depository building. (The placemarks suggesting that JFK was killed by triangulated crossfire far outnumber those that maintain Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.) As a simulacrum of the Earth, Google Earth provides a safe space for unlimited voyeurism. You have instant access to forbidden or dangerous places—North Korea, Mecca, the Kremlin, the favelas of Rio, the top of Everest. But mostly it's fun to hop around. Freed from physical constraints, the Google Earther perceives the planet as small, manageable, knowable, and interconnected. This bonhomie can be exhilarating.