find my friends is a societal ill
"only god should know everyone’s location at all times"
hey 👋
we’re back on substack to talk about a topic that’s been brought to our attention at parties and dinners and whatnots: find my friends 🔦
we too were raised on Sims and would be lying if we said that an app where we can immediately see if everyone is in their correct place doesn’t pull at the heartstrings of our inner children 🥰 that being said, realizing that you are therefore also a sim is…. odd!
like instagram, find my friends is one of those apps we check mindlessly countless times per day. it helps us stay connected to our friends by knowing where they are at all times, and it gives us that information without having to ask for it. which fits quite nicely with our deeply rooted expectations of our virtual worlds 😌
it’s incredibly convenient to have this contract of sorts with our friends — i give you my location, you give me yours. it doesn’t matter if your friend has seemingly forgotten about your existence and left you on delivered for days or if they’ve developed a phobia of making a simple phone call. use find my friends, skip all that pesky conversation, see where they are in an instant! tracked your roommate at public records at 1am on a friday? probably having an awesome time (unless the narc bouncers kicked them out at the door?). friend at the office at 8pm on a thursday? probably dealing with some URGENT/HIGHPRIO 😤 thing at work (unless they’re just staring blankly at their monitor waiting to accept that the productive hours of the day are long gone).
when we’re given a piece of arbitrary information without any context, it’s easy to fill in the blanks and imagine our own versions of our friends’ lives (we are, after all, a very imaginative generation — what would happen if i put my sim in the pool without a ladder?). maybe the public records narcs did refuse your roommate and had you checked their location 5min later, you would’ve seen them on their way to their next haunt and called them. the information we’ve gathered is only relevant for a single instant, and we likely lack the attention span to live track our friends long enough to confirm or deny the stories we’ve cooked up. to know for sure requires more than just their whereabouts, maybe even some follow-up. our friend ✨ S ✨ describes it for us perfectly here:
“i’ve had friends text me asking why i’m hanging out with a certain person or why i’m at someone’s house, which feels intrusive. i’ve also known people whose friends have shown up unannounced to their location. sometimes I don’t want to hang out with all of my friends, all of the time. i love all of them, and enjoy their company, but i want to be able to choose who i hang out with, without judgement.”
feeling like you can’t behave as you wish without the threat of judgement of an ever-present eye watching your every move, you say????? suddenly find my friends is looking a little less like this:
and a wholee lot more like this:
“find my friends” removes the expectation of privacy from friendship while at the same time providing incomplete information. despite checking the app, we still wonder about things like:
if the friend we tracked at home is actually rotting on her couch and wants you to come over
if the friend whose location is turned off just went through a tunnel or is on their way to see the ex they declared no contact with
if the friend we tracked having a stroll in the park is in fact having a quarter life crisis and we must intervene
in short, we want to do less watching and more joining. at its core, this is what we hope to achieve with what we’re building at homeroom. wherever you are and whatever you’re up to, we want to make it as easy as possible to notify your friends that you want them to join you. our goal is to increase your ability to hang out in the moment, without assuming your post in the panopticon or having to track your friends. we think we can overcome the cons of Find My Friends with IRL activities — by inviting our friends along and actually committing to spontaneous, organic connection rather than continuous surveillance and potentially un-chill behavior. it would be awesome to just like, hang out with our people without all the hoopla, no?
in the meantime, happy tracking, we love you all 💌 see you next time 💨