It was a black plastic bucket, placed in the woods outside Portland, Oregon. Inside were a logbook, a pencil, a slingshot, videos, software, and a five-dollar bill. The man who left it there, Dave Ulmer, called it the "Great American GPS Stash Hunt." He posted the coordinates, 45°17.460′N 122°24.800′W, to a Usenet group. The only rule was to take something and leave something.
This was not a grand invention. It was a test, a playful experiment made possible by a recent and deliberate technological shift. Just one day prior, the U.S. government had turned off Selective Availability, the intentional degradation of public GPS signals. Overnight, civilian GPS accuracy improved from a margin of error of a hundred meters to about ten. The world, digitally, snapped into sharper focus.
Ulmer’s act was a question posed to this new precision. What do you do with a map that can point to a single tree? The answer was not military or logistical. It was whimsical. Within three days, two different people had found the bucket using their GPS receivers. They logged their visits. The idea, which would soon be named geocaching, propagated not through corporate launch but through distributed curiosity. It created a parallel, hidden layer atop the physical world, a game of latitude and longitude where the prize was simply the act of finding. It turned wayfinding into a form of global, communal hide-and-seek.