The App of the Summer Is Just a Random-Number Generator
It took me a week to find a plastic water bottle full of what could only be pee.
That was after the abandoned house taped off with gas leak warnings, but before I spun around on an unfamiliar block deep in Brooklyn to see three dalmatians wiggling toward me. When I saw the bottle lying in the middle of the sidewalk, it felt like a rite of passage.
This is my summer activity: walking around, or “randonauting” in internet parlance. Water bottles full of pee are known as “piss bottles” in the randonaut community, an inside joke that has inspired T-shirts. It’s pretty simple, as jokes go: If you spend enough time exploring the world at random, you will stumble upon a bottle full of pee.
Randonauting is also simple. You can do it using the free app Randonautica, which asks you for your location, prompts you to select one of a handful of different “entropy” generators—which one you choose should not really matter—and then asks you to focus your mind, allegedly, be influenced by your mind interacting with the machine, or not, and you can choose to go there, or not, and submit a report of what you find, or not. (You can generate 10 sets of coordinates a day for free and pay to generate more.) The app’s logo, fittingly, is an owl, because owls see in the dark; randonauts see what other people don’t. In particular, they see what they otherwise wouldn’t.
