The Situationist: App encourages random interactions with strangers

Fancy making your life more surprising and unpredictable? Fancy having strangers coming up to you in the street and high-fiving you?

There’s an app for that. An app called Situationist. More than just a piece of software, the Situationist is based on a Marxist philosophy about how we should all interact more with the world and how strangers could be our friends..

They explain:

“Situationist is an iPhone app that makes your everyday life more thrilling and unpredictable. It alerts members to each other’s proximity and gets them to interact in random “situations”. These situations vary from the friendly “Hug me for 5 seconds exactly” or “Compliment me on my haircut”, to the subversive eg “Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station“.

It’s sort of like hacking social interaction. I’m scared. But also excited.

Most of the interactions you can request from strangers are fairly safe and cute: high-fives, waves, compliments. But you can also ask strangers to chat you up, massage your shoulder or to give you all the money in your left pocket – ones for the social thrill-seekers rather than the more timid among us.