A spy satellite simulator in your browser, except the data is real. Live open source spatial intelligence on a photorealistic 3D globe.
God's-Eye-View blew up and hit #1 repo on Github in the last week of August. It is an open-source, browser-based "spy satellite simulator" built on real public data feeds. It integrates flight tracking (commercial and military), vessel and ship tracking, CCTV camera feeds from cities, traffic density data, wildfire detection, earthquakes, data center and submarine cable infrastructure, and more. You can also point an AI coding agent at the repo and layer in your own data — license plate readers, SDR radio feeds, whatever data you have access to. In short, it is a Palantir-styled global surveillance tool now accessible to all, including rogue AI. Looking at the comments, it's predominantly men and boys who are very excited to get to "play" with this surveillance tool. I won't link to the actual video or the Github repo (you can find it if you want to), but here are some of the comments on that Youtube video:
@Fonsoknows33: "10/10 access to all public surveillance cameras would be even crazier" (862 likes)
@erikig: "I installed this on Pinokio, I feel like I'm one of the analysts in a 90's action movie. I can pull up random data for my bosses that's trying to save the world from varous villainous syndicates." (328 likes)
@onsh: "Ofc it blew up, it's fucking awesome! I shared the video with my friends and it's on my list of things to mess with when I get time. Great work!" (66 likes)
@Psychopatz: "I never though to relive this childhood imagination of me being on a classified 007 like mission during my lifetime, Thanks kind sir!" (46 likes)
Men, why is this such an exciting thing for yous? The fantasy of seeing everything from nowhere in particular, and of seeing without being seen, is an old fantasy indeed. Feminists like Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding have called it the "god trick" of objectivity, and we saw last month how it animates the search for certainty and objective knowledge in Descartes. It also underwrites surveillance capitalism and war. This tool didn't just stumble into that framing by naming itself "God's Eye View." The name perfectly captures a military, colonial, masculinist fantasy embodied by tech as we know it.
I keep coming back to the excitement in the comments. I really don't really get it. It's weird. It's pervy. What is it that they are doing with this tool? What is it that you are playing at when you play with God's Eye View?
@kevito666: "Can't wait until the Flock plugin ;)" (423 likes)
The creator, Bilawal Sidhu, is no random vibe-coder. He's a former Google spatial-computing Project Manager turned full-time creator who also acts as a talent scout for Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the tech venture capitalist outfit that funds tech projects. According to Claude and his Youtube channel, Sidhu is also a technology curator & host for TED conferences (TED2025, TED2026, TEDNext), and runs a newsletter at spatialintelligence.ai. He is an industry insider who has been a consultant for large industry players like Netflix, YouTube, and Vimeo.
Given this info, the question becomes: What do you think industry players might gain from open-sourcing a basic global spy surveillance tool for the public to "play" with?
Remember when ChatGPT took the world by storm, coming seemingly out of nowhere? Remember when OpenAI promised people building ChatGPT plug-ins would be able to sell them on a marketplace, and it was being billed like the early days of the Apple App Store? I built a dozen such agents; we were never able to sell them in a marketplace. Now I can see it was free market research.
(When you see something coming out of seemingly nowhere, and the story told is oops-I-made-the-next-big-thing, be very, very suspicious. The chat interface for ChatGPT was no mistake; we already knew with Eliza (circa 1966), the first-ever chatbot, what putting a chat interface on an LLM and calling it AI would do for people.) The Eliza effect had already been coined, and people had already written books on human-machine interfaces (see Lucy Suchman's work).
I think, if it's free, you're likely the marketing/R&D/pipeline. Industry insiders likely want to know what this population of mostly men would do with this surveillance tech, surface talent, and normalize and make surveillance capitalism cool. If consumer-grade, global OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) becomes unremarkable, it lowers resistance to the commercial and defense-adjacent versions of the same capability. Free public toys make the professional or paid tier feel like less of a leap.
You are playing "war" like you might in a video game, except now it's the "real" world. Where video games were simulations of a world in which you could shoot to kill, the world is now being handed back to (mostly young) men as a video game… where you can play war. I think this is an example of how men are incentivized to align their interests with the forces of chaos and destruction, so it will never occur to them that they are the ones whose lives will be on the line in real wars for the real resources of the world, to make not themselves but old men richer and more powerful.
What do you think?
I'm working on some other posts for the Feminist Romp Through the History of Philosophy series, but I saw this and wanted to put out a quick post about it, rather than a long-ish note. I solicit your comments, opinions, and ideas.