The news about a new app named Pooper quickly went viral on the internet. Pooper is described as an “Uber for dog poop” app that offers to pick up your dog’s waste on demand for a monthly fee. The app’s website features a well-made promotional video and claims that all you need to do is take a photo of your dog’s poop, and a person in a Prius will arrive to collect it for you. However, it has been revealed that Pooper is actually an “art project” developed by Ben Becker and Elliot Glass.
Becker and Glass built the website and produced the company’s promo video on their own, enlisting the help of friends Evan Koga and Louis Stephens at Pacific Sound House to help with a custom soundtrack for the video. The video was intentionally lighthearted, because the creators figured that if someone was actually launching a poop-scooping business, they would likely do their best to embrace the levity of their product’s function as well.
Part of the goal of Pooper was to create as convincing a world around the product as possible. This meant not just building a website but crafting a branding package and designing a UI that was all kind of within this aesthetic that would feel believable in the current Silicon Valley. The duo borrowed language from other sharing economy videos and services for the website and video, loading it with buzzwords and visuals that made it look on par with other real services out there.
The creators conducted press interviews using those words, to make themselves sound more like “tech bros.” Over the past several days, the two pranksters say they’ve gotten between 30,000-40,000 hits on their website. In addition to collecting sign-ups to become scoopers and poopers, the creators also were approached by a number of investors looking to get in “on the ground floor” of the app, as well as a few companies that wanted to partner with them.
Despite appearances in the Washington Post, The Next Web, The Daily Dot, and several radio and talk shows, the app is actually an “art project” created by Becker and Glass. Pooper is the first project in a larger series of projects Becker and Glass plan to make. All the things that they release aren’t going to be very obvious. They’re going to continue to put content out there that makes people question what they’re reading in the news, what they’re looking at online, and on a deeper level, what their relationship is to technology.
One thing they’re not going to do: actually make Pooper. They’re never going to release this app. They’re not going to contribute to the downfall of society. The two see the general acceptance of the app and its premise as a litmus test of sorts of where we are as a society as a whole. As it continues this way, they’re just wondering, where do you draw the line? Where do we as a society even care about drawing that line? They just wanted to spark that conversation in an entertaining way and see where it goes.
