Randonautica: the exploration app of your dreams/nightmares
Human remains, abandoned houses, car crashes; look and you just might find...
I’m on a Victorian residential street in Southeast London, looking at a car crash. Four or five middle aged men are standing outside two bashed up cars, which have clearly just collided. Arms are crossed, and voices are raised, but not to alarming levels. What is alarming is the 50s bouffant hairstyle on one of the men. Think Silvio from the Sopranos, but way, way bigger. And the kind of black, so black it could be a tear in spacetime. In his brightly coloured bowling shirt, he actually looks less mobster and much more like something out of a B-52s video. His skin is either eerily pale, or just looks that way compared to his darker than dark hair. The altercation is taking place directly outside a greenish house, covered in painted human eyes.
I was sent here by a quantum random number generator in Australia. Or – more specifically – the Randonautica app. If you’ve missed the online hype, Randonautica is an app that, using your location, produces a random set of coordinates anywhere between one and ten kilometres from where you are. The idea is that you use this to explore areas that – in another universe – may have never blipped on your radar. Then there’s the woo-woo part. You’re also encouraged to – via visualisation - set an “intention” for your journey. While the coordinates are being generated, you’re supposed to think of something you want to see or experience on your journey, say; “puppies” or “a sense of wonder”.
Since its launch earlier this year, the app has accumulated eight million users, or “randonauts”. Thanks in no small part, surely, to lockdown-induced boredom. Many of these users are teens, who have turned their Randonautica jaunts into a whole new genre of TikTok or YouTube video. The subreddit r/randonauts is packed full of users’ pictures and videos of what are often eerie and coincidental experiences on the app. “The intention was ‘Aliens’” writes Redditor ihateuall, who stumbled upon – according to the accompanying photo – some sort of dilapidated, space-age shed. “Intension [sic] was abandoned house and…” says a post by another user, who was apparently sent to… an abandoned house.
Coming from Redddit, the veracity of these accounts is obviously anyone’s guess. But the consensus amongst those posting about the app does seem to be that Randonautica is creepy. In June, a viral TikTok in which a group of teen randonauts in Seattle find a suitcase full of human remains, led to a police investigation. Their “intention”? “Travel”. And so escalated the conspiracy theories: Randonautica had deliberately sent those kids to a corpse; Randonautica is tracking its users for malign purposes; Randonautica is – in general – sinister as fuck. Solid evidence for any of which is limited at best.
But, having now been on five Randonautica adventures myself, I concur that there’s something unsettling about it. The intention my partner and I set for the car crash trip was “music”. We ended up on a housing estate in New Cross, right next to the train tracks. Apart from some kids playing football, the location was quiet. There was no music to speak of. In fact, the entire forty minute walk had been notably lacking in music (unless you count the discordant chime of an ice cream van). But, as we looked on at the “car crash outside eye house” vignette, the scent of fate was heavy. As someone already prone to magical thinking, the knowledge that an entirely random sequence of numbers guided me to such a surreal and intriguing scene, weighed on my mind.
Of all the places I could be in the entire world, I was there. For anyone who – like me – loves to make a decision on a coin toss, or basically treat the entire world as a labyrinth of personally-relevant signs and codes, Randonautica is a wet dream. On your way to one of these random locations, your eyes are open in a way they wouldn’t be if you were popping to Sainsbury’s for some milk. You notice everything. You walk even familiar streets, inhaling a mist of pure expectation.
On my most recent Randonautica outing, specifically with this newsletter in mind, I set the intention “spooky as hell”. I walked for about ten minutes, until reaching a grassy vacant lot behind Peckham Road. My location was a particularly large bald patch in the grass. Around the back of a Caribbean takeaway, a man was barbequing, and the air was deliciously smoky. I walked around the vacant lot – under the understandably suspicious eye of the barbequing man – looking for something, anything scary. There were a lot of chicken bones which I guess would be terrifying, were I a chicken. Empty cans. Cigarette butts.
But most notably perhaps, my own, lingering, superstitious unease.
We need to form a committee for this to work.