Ever wonder what the free market in full indulgence mode looks like? Browse the list of Apple's Web apps.
Editor's note: You asked for it, and you got it! Back by popular demand is our "Tirade" humor column.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually type the complete works of William Shakespeare. Well, the monkey's still at work; no Shakespeare yet. But I'm convinced that all the monkey-babble typed to this point has not gone unused, that Apple and its legion of app developers continually sift through the mountains of nonsense words for ideas.
What else but arbitrary chimpanzee finger-pecking could explain the existence of such apps as DagensMuffin, which dares to ask "Do you like muffins?" and invites you to "Tap your way to more than 800 muffin recipes in English, French, German, Swedish and Finnish."
Or the Alice the chat-bot app, where you can "chat with Alice the chattie-bot, tell her about yourself, ask her questions, do whatever you want. You will be surprised by her intelligence!" I firmly believe a monkey could have typed that.
Or the high-concept I Can Has Cheezburger app, which I trust needs no explanation but certainly could use an editor.
Fact is, over 100,000 apps are now available, and Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch users have downloaded over 3 billion of them over the past 18 months. I know we're all supposed to nod our heads in grateful appreciation at this point, because every app downloaded represents human evolution at work right before our very eyes and because the three pillars of true happiness in life—Access, Information, and Entertainment—stand a little higher today. But I'm not convinced. I don't think any app is a good app simply because it exists.
Big numbers are rendered rather less impressive when one stops to consider what, if any, value they represent. I will admit that I haven't combed through the entire list of 100,000 apps, and I will concede that many could come in handy, but a random sampling shows a significant number of them involve pitched battles against armies of the undead.
Countless others are just plain head-scratchers. For instance, the distinct apps for computing your age in—I kid you not—Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer years, turkey years, T-Rex years, turnip years, octopus years…anything you can imagine.
There are apps for playing Rock Paper Scissors, apps for viewing Donald Duck comic strips in Dutch, and apps for having "underwater adventures with a mermaid and her aquatic friends." There's an app for every quirk known to man.
The apps list is also rife with "atmospherics," code-based representations of pleasing experiences in the "organic" world, like roaring fireplaces, though I would think some significant fireplace-related sub-experiences, like curling up in front of one and…I don't know…feeling heat are quite impossible to replicate on a tiny, sterile iPhone screen.
Then there's the Koi Pond app. This perennial best-seller is no simple cartoon pond filled with cartoon fish. No, no, dear troglodyte. It is your opportunity to participate in a mystical interspecies flirtation. The app's description—written either by a frustrated romance novelist with a financial interest in Koi Pond's success or our monkey friend—reads: Picture a pond of crystal clear water. Picture bright, playful koi swimming through its shallow depths. So close. . . . Can you touch them? You run your fingers across the cool surface of the pond. Water ripples away from your touch. The koi, disturbed, dart away. Only to quickly forget and swim close to you once more.
Explain to me why that's not really, really creepy.
Might I suggest that if your thing is harassing dim-witted fake little objects that want nothing to do with you, your time would be better spent stalking Paris Hilton. No. Wait. Now that I think about it, Paris probably wouldn't just "dart away" if you repeatedly disturbed her. She'd probably dispatch one of her bodyguards to pummel you. Better stick with the coy kois.
Are we really so desperate to fill every snippet of unoccupied time and attention that we don't even bother asking "With what?" anymore? Maybe that's to be expected in a free market gone utterly bonkers, where each individual is a niche unto themselves (could there be more than one individual on Earth who wants to know how old he'd be if he were a kumquat?) and each individual a potential development company. (Let's stipulate that the "How old are you in kumquat years?" app is not supported by sophisticated market research, nor was it endorsed by a Board of Directors. Rather it is the whim of one individual software developer—a recreational user of hallucinogens would be my guess.)
I wouldn't count on this app madness stopping anytime soon. Nobody is capable of putting on the brakes, because nobody's in charge and everybody's in charge and because in a dark room somewhere, that monkey just keeps on typing.
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