Handy New App Helps You Avoid Everyone Ever

There are a few people I avoid at all costs. There’s the guy whose apartment I projectile vomited the guacamole I had eaten earlier that night, the college roommate who knows I cry every time I poop, and those kids who I had a big falling out with over Brian Eno (If they don’t like Brian Eno, they are not your friend).* They’re the kind I’ll do outlandish, Mr. Bean-like things to avoid, whether that means hiding behind a copy “Buddhism for Dummies” at Barnes and Noble or haphazardly crossing the street and causing a bike accident because, SERIOUSLY if that girl from the dorms sees me, we’ll look at each other and make that face where she’s like, “I know,” and you’re like, “You know” and another little piece of me will die inside. And I really need to stop dying inside.

Hell Is Other People makes it so you don’t have to act like Mr. Bean (unless you want to, honey.) The app is the anti-Four Square, if you will. Instead of telling you where people on your social network are hanging out as if to encourage you to go get margs with those annoying bridesmaids from your cousin’s wedding, the app calculates where you should go to keep a “safe distance” from those bridesmaids who unironically love Real Housewives of Orange County. Seriously, though, you need to keep an critical distance from that shit.

Scott Garner, the app’s creator, sounds like my kind of guy:

This project is partially a satire, partially a commentary on my disdain for “social media”, and partially an exploration of my own difficulties with social anxiety.

The only catch: you’ve got to be social media “friends” with whoever you’re avoiding to make the app works. Which is fine, because the people you hate are usually the ones you obsessively stalk, except not IRL. IRL is a whole ‘nother world, one in which you can’t interact using only coy emoticons. And for people who hate interacting without coy emoticons, there’s Hell Is Other People. May we be blessed more anti-social networks in the future, Amen.