Opinion

You can leave your phones on

Social media is for the birds. It's time we got automated.

November 24, 2013 6:00AM ET

by Curtis Brown @MisterBossy

Flaneur, an app for the user who disdains corporeal connection of any kind.

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ITHACA, N.Y. — From the Patent Office: Over last Thanksgiving dinner, I swore my family to secrecy and unveiled my then-latest invention. The mobile app I was developing, I told them, would make me very rich and human interaction as we know it obsolete.

“I’d give thanks for that,” my sister put in brightly, while my father, eyes as distant as his mouth was full, assumed the busy air of a crossing guard and waved me on.

“Longing for connectedness, but too busy for Facebook? Flaneur —”

The crossing guard’s flat palm went up.

“It’s a French word,” I explained. “A Gallicism, if you will.”

Father looked like he wouldn’t.

“Baudelaire said it was the flaneur’s passion to ‘set up house in the heart of the multitude,’ to ‘become one flesh with the crowd,’” I intoned. “My app lets you do that for $2.”

Everyone resumed chewing.

“Look,” I said, agitated. “It’s absurd to have digitized friendship but still be doing all the legwork — adding friends, confirming friends, ‘liking’ their stupid posts. Social media is like a tax calculator that leaves you to do the long division.”

This app, dear reader, would have changed all that. With all the power of the NSA’s Boundless Informant, it would have siphoned, distilled and data-mined not only your public information but also all your keystrokes, screen strokes and searches, even the frequency with which you check your email, converting the resulting mess of ones and zeros into a compatibility algorithm and beaming it out relentlessly — like the amorous, roving eye of a lonely lighthouse — to all receptive devices within a set radius.

“Grindr for dorks instead of queers,” my brother said, folding his napkin and pushing his chair back.

“It isn’t for hookups. In fact, the typical Flaneur user disdains corporeal connection of any kind.”

“Like I said.”

When Flaneur locates a match (someone across the cafe, or sitting near you on the bus), it begins “talking” — finding out what he’s reading, if she comes here often, his greatest fear, her greatest dream, all the intimate bric-a-brac of unique identity you’ve loaded into the damn thing on the condition that it be disgorged only into the cell phone of someone very special, a stranger with a compatibility rating of, say, 80 percent or above.

Flaneur has settings galore. Your overall compatibility rating breaks down into individual scores for interests, temperament, ideology, education and class background. You can control the pace of the relationship, keeping an aura of mystery about yourself, such that deeply personal data — you’re afraid of commitment, for example, or you consider yourself a beach person — is released only on a third chance encounter.

Spatial coordinates are restored to virtual life. When asked how you spent your morning, you can glance at your phone and say, “Well! Turns out I met an oboist who shares my passion for waste management. It looks like we were at McDonald’s.”

Flaneur leaves modern man’s bubble of solipsism unperforated.

Meanwhile, unemployed, unfashionable or otherwise unsuitable types can be detected by their unpromising to-ings and fro-ings, and automatically blocked, blacklisted, maligned or misled. Friends, lovers and associates who fail to develop new interests can be cut loose like dead weight. This can be emotionally wrenching or at least sort of disruptive in real life. Not on Flaneur! Half the time you don’t even know it happened.

Because all of this hums along, fully automated. And you, dear user, what are you doing while these rewarding encounters, ambiguous suspensions and necessary terminations take place? Working. Browsing. Tweeting. Choosing your next playlist. In a word, chilling. In five words, doing what makes you you. In 20 words, you’re passively refining your compatibility algorithm by doing what lets Flaneur understand your unique soul’s self in the first place. This 20-word definition is the most important. It means your next encounter will be that much more awesome!

It’s said that privacy in the digital age is going the way of Hamlet’s ghost, but with Flaneur it retakes the stage, triumphant as Fortinbras. Seekers and fans of privacy, consider the following: You could meet your new best friend, a future business associate or mentor, even the love of your life — and keep your headphones on throughout the experience. No more losing the thread of reverie to the untimely intrusions of new and interesting people. No more having to think or speak just because it’s a “social” situation.

“Flaneur leaves modern man’s bubble of solipsism unperforated,” I explained to Lucky, my brother-in-law’s dog, as my mother finished clearing the dishes.

I said this as a selling point, but Lucky, a blind and fragrant yellow Labrador, looked troubled. Somewhere behind her rheumy, sea-gray eyes, she seemed to glean how this modern man might become a mystery even to himself. Especially if he hasn’t the foggiest idea what has been happening in his social life since he last uploaded data from his cell phone into his laptop, which may have been a week ago or a year ago, depending on how busy he is.

If such a man had a novel writing itself in the pocket of his trousers, a vast Bildungsroman teeming with characters, with himself as its central protagonist — would he have the time or inclination to read it? Conversely, might he, like Hamlet’s ghost, carry on socializing well past the point of biological death?

“You have a point,” I told Lucky.

Later I encountered my father in the hallway, brushing his teeth. My father is an exceptionally thorough toothbrusher, and tends to pace the parapets of the family home while he’s at it. Pivoting slowly and circling back at the end of the hall, he spotted me and, with his lower jaw steady and level, rocked his head back as he passed, saying something foamy I didn’t quite catch.

“Write it,” he repeated, having spat vigorously into the sink. I was standing in the doorway in my boxers. “Write it up as satire,” he said.

“But, Dad, I don’t want to satirize anybody. I want to make a gazillion dollars.”

“Start small, son,” he said, lowering his nightshades and adjusting his codpiece.

Curtis Brown is a writer based in Montreal. His work has appeared in Bidoun and the Beirut Daily Star.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.