The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

Of course, if this book has taught me anything, people don’t always unite around street names. Digital addresses bypass arguments over the meaning of street names. But I like the arguments. Arguments are what divide communities, but they are also what constitutes them as communities. And digital addresses don’t make communities. In a way, they can divide them. Your neighbor’s what3words address is completely unrelated to yours. You can’t learn her address from looking at her house—you have to ask an app, a third party. You can’t ask anyone on the street for directions. And, as Graham Rhind, an addressing expert, told me, digital addresses like what3words “don’t provide any link between our mental maps and addressing, and removing that link stops addressing being effective. There is no relationship between horse.town.faster and what I experience when I traverse through my world.” Digital addresses create a world in which we all exist as dots on a map, each our own island, named by a corporation. And they can also create a world where, as open data expert Terence Eden points out, the address for an Auschwitz camp is grouchy.hormone.elevating.