Lose yourself

December 19, 2014 8:17 AM

Dérive is a smartphone app inspired by the Situationists that encourages you to wander your city. You can use the general deck, use one for Abu Dhabi, Biella, Ithaca, Johannesburg, Kampala, New York City, Paris or San Francisco, or make your own
posted by the man of twists and turns (16 comments total)

Just don't drink and dérive.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:21 AM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

posted by the man of twists and turns

I see what you did approximately close to there.
posted by srboisvert at 8:34 AM on December 19, 2014 [9 favorites]

This is very promising! I'm excited.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:37 AM on December 19, 2014

I've been thinking about the situationsts a lot lately , particularly their concept of The Spectacle.

As early as 1958, in the situationist manifesto, Debord described official culture as a "rigged game", where conservative powers forbid subversive ideas to have direct access to the public discourse. Such ideas get first trivialized and sterilized, and then they are safely incorporated back within mainstream society, where they can be exploited to add new flavors to old dominant ideas.

More détournement required.
posted by Artw at 8:47 AM on December 19, 2014 [4 favorites]

NYC: "Find something ephemeral". Hmm. I mean, this garbage pile will probably be gone in a few days
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:55 AM on December 19, 2014

Beneath the garbage pile, the beach!
posted by Artw at 9:01 AM on December 19, 2014 [6 favorites]

Such ideas get first trivialized and sterilized, and then they are safely incorporated back within mainstream society, where they can be exploited to add new flavors to old dominant ideas.

I thought about this a lot in college (like you do...) and I figure that it's an erosion process. It takes a lot of energetic wind and water over a long time, but eventually the old stone changes shape.
posted by Foosnark at 9:10 AM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

It takes the ideals of the Situationists and merges it with digital means in order to create a tool that would imply an exploration of urban space in a random unplanned way as a game.

I can only imagine the withering rhetorical blast the dérive-as-app would garner from Debord. The fact that it's surveilling your dérive and sending data to 3rd parties like Facebook alone would probably drive him into a the mid-century French intellectual equivalent of a berserker rage.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:13 AM on December 19, 2014 [5 favorites]

I can only imagine the withering rhetorical blast the dérive-as-app would garner from Debord. The fact that it's a surveilling your dérive and sending data to 3rd parties like Facebook alone would probably drive him into a the mid-century French intellectual equivalent of a berserker rage.

He would probably dig the wipespread rejection of CNN and the authorities portrayal of Fergusson, but the you'd tell him that construct was shattered by social media, and hoo boy...
posted by Artw at 9:32 AM on December 19, 2014

is one of the instructions "smash this device"?

freedom is not free, it seems, if the app is selling you into the advertisement machine. Are you really losing yourself if you're just turning over the keys to the app? is the new tyranny of structurelessness merely the old tyranny of machine logic that's smarter than you?

someone could make an open source application that has the same prompts, without the tracking.

or you could smash your smartphones and just walk off the job. god speed.
posted by eustatic at 10:04 AM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

I used to live in a downtown area and would get summer-long layoffs most years. I didn't have Dérive back then--I had to settle for a big bag of weed and my walking shoes.
posted by TrialByMedia at 10:38 AM on December 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

Find a bus stop, wait here till a bus passes by

Have the devs never been to San Francisco or are they just cruel?
posted by Blue Meanie at 10:45 AM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Or you could go Dicewalking.
posted by user92371 at 12:19 PM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Is there a way to just see all the "cards"? Interested to try this, as a dumbphone user. I love a good dérive but it's incredibly hard to pull yourself away from your own habits when walking in a city you're familiar with!
posted by threeants at 3:46 PM on December 19, 2014

So it's kind of the opposite of a dérive? It reflects back the psychogeograpy of a place through a transgeographic medium like a funhouse mirror constructed entirely out of the not at all rare material missingthepointium.
posted by anateus at 4:13 PM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Heh, came here to say that it isn't a dérive, which was said better than I could already - but (to be accurate) it also isn't an app either, it's a website. An "app" is a program that runs on your computer - this website isn't any more of an "app" than Metafilter is.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:18 PM on December 19, 2014