Ideas for Some Smartphone Apps That I Think Would be Popular
I presented this piece last Thursday, November 6th, at Seventh Heaven in Brooklyn, upon invitation from , for his Constantly Hating reading series. The other readers were Leah Abrams and Tony Tulathimutte, who were both excellent. This is the first public reading I’ve been invited to participate in (hopefully of many), so big thanks to Eli for the opportunity, and thank you to the audience for turning out and usually laughing at the appropriate moments. For whatever reason public speaking has never been something I get anxiety about, but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily particularly good at it either, so it was nice to know I didn’t bomb.
When he invited me, Eli told me to write something “piercing and critical,” where you could “feel the bite.” I think he was hoping for something like my Kirk essay, but unfortunately pretty much everything has been going fine in politics and culture since then, with nothing really to complain about happening anywhere in the world, so I decided to just share some app ideas I’ve had instead. Hopefully there was a developer in the audience that night who’s already hard at work turning these great concepts into cold, hard cash, but if not, perhaps this post will serve as the necessary catalyst. Also, if any startup incubators would like to hire me as a “thought leader” or similar, let it be known I’m very unemployed.
Ideas for Some Smartphone Apps That I Think Would be Popular
A dating app for murderers and people that haven’t killed anyone but are interested in dating a murderer, or multiple murderers.
An app that lets you activate a shock collar strapped around a celebrity’s neck. To prevent abuse, there will be no way of knowing exactly which celebrity you’re shocking, but the app’s developers will provide users, upon request, with a formal, legally-binding guarantee that someone famous is being shocked.
An app that makes up things about you completely at random based on a three-dimensional scan of your naked body and compiles them into a fun, stylish infographic that’s perfect for social media.
An app for sharing pictures of roadkill.
An app for people who hate roller coasters.
An app where you can take virtual tours of cemeteries around the world, rate them on a ten-point scale, add them to lists, share them with your friends, and receive algorithmically-generated suggestions for other cemeteries you might enjoy.
An app that shows you a criminal’s mugshot, and then you try to guess the crime they committed. The fewer guesses it takes, the more points you earn. There would be a casual, ad-supported Free Play mode, as well as subscription-based Head-to-Head and Battle Royale competitive modes where you could rank up and earn Judicial Tokens to spend on cosmetics in the in-app store.
An app that helps you develop heuristics for which of your possessions you should risk your life trying to save in the event of a property-destroying natural disaster, such as a flood or house fire, customized to account for the particularities of each type of disaster. The app would be backed by evidence-based research.
An app that can calculate the exact ethical cost, down to the third decimal place, of purchasing any given product with a barcode. By default, this figure would be derived from the rational, non-ideological formulas of utilitarianism and effective altruism, but alternative modes, calibrated to align with the world’s major religions, would also be accessible from the Settings menu. These modes could include special features such as penance suggestions for Christians, or a karmic debt estimator for Buddhists.
An app that’s passed the bar exam and is formally recognized as a lawyer in good standing in all US states and territories, and that becomes your lawyer when you purchase it, allowing it to give you actionable legal advice regarding everything from petty theft, to child custody, to military code of conduct violations.
An app that makes your phone completely invisible to everyone around you.
An app that’s just a picture of a stack of dollar bills, and you can’t do anything with it, you just look at it while the app serves you banner ads.
An app that monitors your driving and lets you know when you’re showing good or poor judgement on the road via a simple, intuitive alert system, to help you avoid tickets and save money. You would just set your phone in a holder on the dashboard of your car so the camera is facing out the windshield, so it could see everything you see. Then, for example, if you came to a complete stop at a stop sign, it would detect that and make a pleasant chiming sound. But, if you only came to a rolling stop, it would play an obnoxious chirping sound instead. Or, if you were coming home from work one day, you might see the cops have pulled someone over on the side of the road. There could be three or four cop cars all pulled up around this one minivan or SUV or large vehicle like that that will have all its doors hanging open, and with all sorts of clothes and other personal belongings hanging out of the open doors. There could be dress shirts and dress pants and raincoats and blouses, a purse, a pair of sneakers, nightgowns, bedsheets, a suit, a rack of ties, pillowcases, a bandana. And the cop cars might all have their lights on, but their sirens turned off, and it might seem eerie to you to see all those lights with no sirens, with hardly a sound to be heard anywhere around, no wind in the trees, no kids playing in the park that might be down the block. You might see a whole row of people lined up on their knees right there on the side of the road. They might be kneeling facing away from the road, and they might have their heads down, so they could only see the boots of the officers standing in front of them, and they might have their hands on the backs of their heads with their fingers laced together. Some of the cops might be walking around pointing flashlights at trees and patches of grass and other things around the scene, and some other cops might be writing in notepads, and still some others might just be standing around talking to each other, and you might see their lips moving, but you won’t be able to hear what they’re saying. You won’t even be sure if they’re saying anything at all. And one of the cops might be going down the line of kneeling people, and taking their hands off their heads, and putting them behind their backs, and putting them in handcuffs like that. One of the cops might be putting black bags over the heads of the people the other cop put in handcuffs, and another might be pulling the people in handcuffs with black bags over their heads to their feet, and leading them away. There might be so many cops there, it will seem impossible. “How did so many cops get here in so few cars?” you might wonder. It might be a quiet stretch of road, not too near any major thoroughfares, passing right by a few acres of woodland. And as you pass by, you might see that there’s actually an opening into the woods just here, that the trees and the underbrush have been cut and pushed back enough to create a weedy little footpath, and the cop that’s leading the people away might be leading them down that path, into the woods, one by one, single file, grabbing them and hauling them up if they stumble on a root or a half-buried stone, and if you look down the footpath you might see a tall chainlink fence, nine feet tall at least, you might think, and you might be able to see that this fence has coils of razor wire on top of it, and a sign with a high voltage warning on it, and that behind it there’s some sort of clearing where all these people are milling around, and these people are all wearing orange jumpsuits, and also have black bags over their heads, like the cops are putting on the people lined up by the road, and there are men in fatigues wearing sunglasses and holding big, black guns, and they’re standing in a loose circle around the people in the orange jumpsuits with the bags over their heads, and whenever the people in the orange jumpsuits with the bags over their heads wander too close to the edge of this loose circle, the men in fatigues wearing sunglasses poke and prod them with the barrels of their guns, and goad them back towards the center of the clearing. You might find it surprising to see this, if you were to see it, because you might have driven past this place every day coming to and from work, dozens or hundreds of times, possibly, and in all those times you had never noticed there was anything in those woods, you had no idea there was anything like that there, that there was anything in there at all except trees, “I would have thought I would have heard about something like this on the news,” you might think, and because you’re so surprised, and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on, what you’re looking at, what’s the meaning of this thing you’re seeing here on the side of the road, these cops, these people kneeling on the ground, this footpath, this fence and this clearing and the men in fatigues and the people in orange jumpsuits, all of this, you might get distracted and slow down as you’re driving past, and not just a little bit but dangerously slow, dangerously below the speed limit, and then the app would detect this, and start making an obnoxious chirping sound to refocus your attention on the road and get you back on track, following the rules of the road, driving defensively, worrying about your own business instead of someone else’s. Things like this.
An app that tells you everything that’s happening everywhere in the world all at once. Also, an app that’s just like that app, except it doesn’t ever tell you about anything you don’t want to know about.
An app that steals your memories without you ever noticing.
An app for people who love emulsified meat.
An augmented reality app that, when you point your phone up towards the sky at night, will show you what sort of constellations you would be seeing right now if terrorists had just cut the electricity all at once, everywhere, all over the world.