Back in 2021, a 22-year-old from Arkansas named Trevor Rainbolt shuttered himself in his Los Angeles apartment to memorize the world. For months, he spent his time studying Google Street View from his desk chair. Delivery drivers handed over his meals; a barber came to style his hair. After a while, his memory grew planetary. When you see cabbage-like plants thriving along the sides of a Russian country road, he learned, you’re most likely looking at Sakhalin Island. On a bridge lined with pea-green pavement? You’re above a river in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province. If your vista, but for the sweep of golden grasslands, screams South Africa, you’ll be in Eswatini.
Rainbolt’s growing topographical erudition was in the service of winning at an online game called GeoGuessr. The game presents the player with a randomly selected image of a stretch of road on Google Street View; at the top of the screen is a timer, and at the bottom is a world map. The aim is to use signs, infrastructure, vegetation and any other distinctive elements to locate the images as swiftly as possible on the map. Rainbolt is the game’s most famous player and a legend in the community. His millions of online followers scroll through videos in which he sits at his desk, pallid and poker-faced, intuiting the location of some remote lane in a blink.
He recognizes the precise rusty hue of Beninese soil. He can sense when grass is Mongolian. His astonishing skill extends beyond the game, too. He geolocates old family photos sent in by his fans, and when a TikTok influencer tried to gatekeep the source of New York’s “best” bagels (“you’ll never taste this goodness”), Rainbolt used subtle visual details to identify the restaurant. (It was Bagel Market.) His ability is uncanny, even unsettling, and he performs it with the shtick of an evil genius. “Nice,” goes his deadpan catchphrase, mumbled when he lands on or near his target. “We’ll take that.”
Rainbolt knows nearly nothing about lands beyond Street View’s reach. Up until a year and a half ago, he owned no functional passport and had never left North America. Late in 2022, though — after an evening spent, as usual, on GeoGuessr — he felt an unfamiliar pull. He imagined himself strolling the exotic roads he had memorized on his screen. He thought about glimpsing distinctive bollards I.R.L., seeing the world’s telltale street lamps in 3-D fullness. He had a yearning to view streets.
So Rainbolt sold his possessions, gave up his apartment and decided to live off earnings from his GeoGuessr content. He applied for an expedited passport; the day after it arrived, he purchased a flight to Germany. Back then, the country’s most recent Street View images were from 2009, and he was curious how the streetscapes might have changed. “Germany got an update,” he thought, after he landed. When we spoke over a video call last month, I asked what it felt like to “discover” a place he had already taxonomized in his head: Did memorizing Street View spoil travel? It was true, he told me, that walking around reminded him of playing the game. “You feel oddly familiar with a lot of the world,” he said — “like you’ve been there before.”
After a month in Germany, Rainbolt headed for sunnier climes. Open to him were around 100 nations with coverage; he prefers to go to places that are on Street View, he said. For a year, he spent each month in a different country. In Laos, he paid a driver to ferry him to his favorite road: a rural track, skirted by limestone hills, that chases the twisting Nam Lik River southwest of Vang Vieng. He arrived during the dry season. The view was greener and more vivid in the images he had seen — but it was still beautiful, and his tears were of delight.
On his travels, Rainbolt continued his daily GeoGuessr videos. But he also began posting more videos in which he wandered around the material world. “Wow,” he said in one video, hiking along the coast of the Portuguese island Madeira — “this is, like, real.” Afterward, he went to a bar and filmed himself playing GeoGuessr on his phone. The swing between these types of content was surreal enough to confuse some viewers. “What’s going on?” an X user asked in response to a video about the trip to the Laotian road. “You look like you’re lost in the middle of a desert, bro.”
It turns out that touching Thai grass for the first time is infinitely more thrilling if you’ve obsessed over its texture and hue on your computer.
When I first encountered Rainbolt’s GeoGuessr videos, it was his erudition that intrigued me. He is conversant with the regional bus-stop signs of Sweden. He knows that the only place in Finland where the outer road lines are dashed is an archipelago called the Aland Islands. He knows that wooden houses on stilts suggest Acre, Brazil, and that an image-processing glitch has, on Street View, opened a rift in the skies above northern Montenegro. Rainbolt knows the world in a strange new way, like a Marco Polo who has seen only what you can spy from the roadside.
Then I started watching his more recent content. His real-world vlogs can be clumsy, but they are every bit as engrossing as his virtuosic geolocations. Maybe it’s just the faint dystopia of it all: Rainbolt is a man whose experience of moving about the world is destined to be that it reminds him of Google Street View. There is a very short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” about a life-size, one-to-one scale map, laid out over the territory it represents — an absurdist response to the fantasy of exhaustive knowledge. But that is precisely the kind of cartographic perfection to which Google aspires and which Rainbolt has devoted himself to internalizing: a map so big it can crowd out the world it models.
This could have made Rainbolt a guy who lives inside an everything map, doomed to discern reality through a vapor of data. But as I watched him flinging a basketball toward a hoop on a Portuguese court he first got to know on Street View, I realized there was another reason I didn’t want to stop watching: The map seemed to have heightened Rainbolt’s attention to reality, nurturing his love of the world.
Rainbolt’s most banal moments are now served with little tinctures of epiphany and recognition. It turns out that touching Thai grass for the first time is infinitely more thrilling if you’ve obsessed over its texture and hue on your computer: It’s the excitement of a face-to-face meeting with a longtime correspondent, a first date with an old crush. Rainbolt has used the internet’s cartography to turn up the world’s intensity, fusing the virtual with the real to make both more pleasurable. “Depression can’t be real if there’s mountains,” he said last July, in a video announcing that he would soon be summiting Mount Kilimanjaro. His route: a trail that a Google Street View camera ascended 10 years earlier.
On Rainbolt’s first full day outside North America, a blue car with a camera on its roof drove past him as he stepped outside to pick up lunch in Germany. The vehicle was crawling through town, gathering new data for Street View.
Open, if you’d like, Google Maps, and find Hochstrasse, a street in Ratingen. Activate Street View outside the Hotel Bergischer Hof. You can see Rainbolt on the sidewalk in a green hoodie, swinging a plastic bag of doner kebab. Click up the street. He is sprinting after the car now, hurling himself across an unmistakably German pedestrian crossing, sliding into the frame’s edge. Miraculously, unlike the faces of everybody else in the image, Rainbolt’s is not blurred out. His eyes are fixed on the camera. It was, he told me, an intense moment. What, he wondered, could possibly be a better experience?
Tomas Weber is a writer who lives in London. He has written for publications including Wired, FT Magazine, Scientific American and The Economist’s 1843 magazine.
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