An Angeleno knows the traffic patterns like a fisherman knows the tides. Back in 2014, driving from my home in Hollywood to Echo Park for a semiregular midday swim, I would often wait out the congestion in nearby Chinatown, parking with my tires turned toward the curb on Alpine Street and walking the neighborhood to enjoy the density and sidewalk life, which are relatively rare in the city. I would also work in the Chinatown Branch Library or at the well-lit and Wi-Fi-less Zen Mei BBQ Seafood Bistro. I was leaving the library, at the corner of Hill and Ord, somewhat hunched from a backpack full of books, when the Google-mobile passed me with about as much grace as a Mars rover. Because the Street View on this corner is a composite, like a David Hockney photo collage, I am only visible from one specific Dutch angle.
It wasn’t my first brush with the all-seeing eye (that happened in 2012, in Vilnius), nor would it be my last. Westside traffic and extortionary parking rates at UCLA, where I attended graduate school, prohibited driving to campus. Instead, I rode the Metro bus down Sunset from Hollywood to the northeastern corner of the university, then hoofed it to the library, classroom, or swimming pool or wherever it was I needed to go. As a hardened walker in LA, I was in the habit of defensively looking over my shoulder whenever I stepped into a crosswalk—even on the small street behind the School of Theater, Film, and Television, near my bus stop. It was there, in the spring of 2018, that I spied the approaching cam car in all its bug-headed ugliness. In turning to follow the vehicle, I produced a zoetrope of my movements on Street View that culminated in a friendly wave. But my cameo was short lived: The street scene was later reshot. And so, as often happens in Los Angeles, I had been replaced with another uncredited extra.