I manage a little app called Dérive app. Based on ideas by the Situationists, the app helps to get you lost. That is to say, it presents you with task cards, prompts, that make you more aware of your surroundings and, hopefully, less influenced by them.

When I started working on the app, back in 2012, my initial objective was to create a fun way to explore public space. But, over time, expanding my understanding of the deeper manipulations we face in the public, and now also private, space, the app kickstarted a much broader internalisation of an anti-capitalist attitude. The app trained me to see how money shapes personal experience wherever it touches it.

This has changed how I travel. For example, I now try to walk from and to airports, when reasonably possible. Not because airport roads are beautiful, but because the periphery can reveal more than the centre. The centre performs, the periphery, intending to be purely functional, leaks. It’s not designed to impress.

This isn’t always convenient; I recently had a 24-hour stopover at Milan Malpensa, and discovered that it was effectively forbidden to leave the airport on foot, only highways leaving the travel hub. I had to speed walk along a busy highway and through a long tunnel to get to a local road, which would lead me to my accommodation, worrying that police could pick me up for doing something typically considered illegal.

Dérive app began as a kind of alternative guide, but perhaps it’s better to see it as an unreliable guide. It does not tell users where to go; instead, it teachers users to mistrust what they are being told should be their first impression.

Dérive app has been around for a good amount of time. It’s gone through a number of iterations, trying to find a balance between usability, cost, functionality, and self-sustainability. 

Recently, I’ve been working on its next iteration. Functionally similar to the fairly mature app it already has become, but with a more attractive interface, and a much cleaner backend. But also with one major new feature: the ability to auto-generate task cards for any location at any time, based on parameters you can set for yourself. 

This latest version is currently in public beta. You can try it out here. Use a mobile phone. And, to make it more practical to use, add it to your phone’s home-screen. In a month or two, I hope to roll out this version as the updated app for both iOS and Android.

The new feature I mention above, auto-generated cards for any location, is free when used in small doses, but costs real money to facilitate. If you run into its limits, you can purchase a subscription. 

Until the end of the year, if you get a subscription, you can get 3 months free, by using this coupon: 

IMNOTLOSTATALL

Try it out and, if you encounter an issue, or have questions or suggestions, please let me know.

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Not wanting to leave you completely without my thoughts of the previous weeks, particularly because I know you have been starved of my rants since, a month ago, my wife took my spot in telling you about the precarity of women walking, I have to mention the offline festival the Summer of Ludd, anticapitalist but in New York. Closer to my home, right next door in São Paulo, MASP is hosting an exhibition highlighting anti-colonial resistance by indigenous and formerly enslaved populations. Meanwhile, in Scotland, train stations will see demonstrations against rising energy costs, called Kick in the Teeth.

It’s sadly true that Keiko Fujimori won the Peruvian presidential elections by a sliver, while, perhaps even worse, Abelardo de la Espriella narrowly won the elections in Colombia. However, in both cases, the margin was razor-thin. I firmly believe that a significant portion of both these societal abusers’ votes were from those not having been served by the ever deteriorating systems they suffer under. Right-wing politicians might be populist in their rhetoric, they cannot also serve the many, while also pandering to the few of the financial elite. That is to say, it’s more than likely that life, for the majority of those who voted for those right-wing candidates, will get worse in the coming presidential term, which in turn makes it more likely that the next presidential elections will flip to a more radical left.

I certainly, illustrated by the three events I mention above, see more and more pushback from the left against the abuse of the capitalist class. So, as the world deteriorates, there is hope, yet.

Of course, the alternative could be that Trump and his selfish cronies quite literally destroy the world as we know it, first. 

Better check out that new version of Dérive app before it's too late.

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