Nostalgic smartphone app Gudak limits your picture-taking capacity and forces you to wait three days to “develop” your photos. Here are some other apps we’d like to see, to take us back to a better time when technology wasn’t so useful:
ChekWritr: This app not only slows down your online payments to the speed of snail mail, it converts your bills back to coffee-stained receipt paper. Experience the excitement of wondering if your utilities will be shut off while you relish the satisfaction of killing trees again!
NeverNote: Searching and storing your documents in “The Cloud” is for latte-sipping ingrates. With NeverNote, your files are scattered haphazardly onto a messy virtual desk. Every week, one of your files will be randomly eaten by Heidi, the “NeverNote Dog.” Damn dog!
TwoBooks: Choosing an e-book is impossible with all those choices. TwoBooks reduces your storage capacity to one megabyte and simplifies your options to a capsule collection of two classics: The Bible, and a Harlequin called The Billionaire’s Pregnant Mistress and the Breast Pump of Deceit.
VinylPod – Take a picture of your roomiest shelf and upload it to VinylPod. Hopefully it’s big, because VinylPod only holds as much music as would physically fit in the form of vinyl 78s on that shelf. The longer you listen, the more the bit rate degrades. Wow, just like a real record!
Cursve: Texting lacks the human touch of a handwritten letter. For those who never learned to make squiggles on paper, Cursve sends your texts to a calligrapher who prints them on bespoke parchment and delivers them on a penny farthing.
Tut-Tutr: This replaces Twitter. It’s just an old Sicilian woman named Antonia who follows you around shrieking at you in Latin as she tries to baptize you.
AbaCus: There’s no beating the original Sumerian counting system. AbaCus is here to replace your smartphone’s ugly calculator with a lovely and infuriating system of moveable beads. Calculating a tip has never been more tedious!
MailOrdr: Does Tinder make you feel unlucky in love? Instead of swiping through an endless parade of sexy faces, MailOrdr sends three homely, God-fearing, and very single Latvian villagers right to your door. Send back those you don’t hit it off with, or keep all three! MailOrdr even replaces your chosen one free of charge should they die of tuberculosis.
RainsAComin: Nothing kills Mother Nature’s magic like technology that prepares you for her deadly surprises. RainsAComin replaces your phone’s weather app with a photo-realistic avatar of a grimy, Dust Bowl-era old-timer who shouts “there’s rain a comin!” or “it’s gonna be a dry one, I feel it in my bones!”
UberDactyl: Still Uber, but the drivers are underpaid Pterodactyls.
Starcart: Starcart replaces your Instacart shopper with a handful of stardust. One day, billions of years from now, it will be a sustainable vegetable garden.