This weekend, a crowd of hackers, makers, and artists descended upon Noisebridge for the San Francisco Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas "Hackathon" to build apps in categories like "Technological Intertweengularity," "Existential Chat Bots," and "SaaS (Servitude as a Service)".I arrived with the goal of building an app for that last category, "Servitude as a Service," by making Picnic: an app that orders random delivery food to a random location, and then orders you an Uber to take you there. This is partly inspired by the concept of the dérive, an improvisational tour of urban space. I wanted to create a sense of spontaneity and exploration, contrasted with Picnic and third-party service providers being mostly in control of my destiny.
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Image: Max Goodman
Picnic works as a Chrome extension which adds a big red button to your toolbar:
When clicked, the app will pick a random location within ~10 miles and display an (often amusingly bleak) view on Google Street View:
Then it opens up Eat24 and finds a random restaurant, filling an order with random items, complete with random tip. An Uber is dispatched to your current location, and you're off to the races.---Initially, figuring out how to automate the meal and car orders puzzled me. Eat24, the food delivery website I wanted to use, did not have a visible API. Uber's is very well thought out, but I would have spent a lot of precious development time setting it up. In software development, it's important to recognize when it's necessary to do things the right way, and when it's worthwhile to just hack.I realized that if I was already signed into both websites on my computer, I could remote control these websites to carry out the orders. This is one of the wonderful things about the web: the browser is open to be tinkered with, and if you understand the basics, you can interact and experiment with a broad range of apps and services.Doing it this way is very fragile: The websites may change at any time, breaking the scripts. However, I just needed it to work a few times over a short time period.An unexpected benefit of this approach is that watching the app operate is really fun. Seeing Picnic add nonsensical combinations of pizza toppings (while being unable to intervene) is very entertaining. There's a strong sense that one you press the big red button, you've lost control of the process and are now at the whims of Picnic, wherever it takes you.
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---Saturday was wonderful. I was propelled by the energy of Noisebridge, the sound of saws, hammers, and laughter, and hearing about everyone's cool project ideas. After about 10 hours of tinkering I had a prototype of Picnic that could perform the whole process. I arrived at the second day of the hackathon, ready to embark on my first picnic ever. This is the tale of that maiden voyage.
After one false start (a bizarre error from Eat24), Picnic revealed how and where my adventure would take place: an unfamiliar address 5 miles south in Daly City. Picnic also randomly selected a Mediterranean restaurant called Melody, from which it ordered an omelet (extra almonds, potatoes on the side), dolmas (it specified "gluten free"), and some coconut water.
Here's the menu for today: Dolmas, Coconut Water, and a Lebanese Omlet. The app generated a very generous tip… Max GoodmanMay 15, 2016
A couple minutes later, a car arrived to take me to my meal. The ride took me through parts of the city I had never seen before. I made small talk with the driver, but was too embarrassed to tell him that his efforts today were being spent on the arbitrary whims of a robot's random number generator.It was a cool sunny day, and the hills of South San Francisco shimmered in the distance. About 10 minutes later, I arrived! At a… Chevron gas station!
All-in-all, this was going way better than planned, so I was happy. My hacky random address generator works by selecting random point on the map and looking up its street address. If the random point happens to be over water, it gets snapped to the nearest location on land. Because of this, previous test runs revealed a tendency to send you to remote parts of Alameda. There was also this one time it almost ordered brain:
After walking a few laps around the gas station, my meal arrived faster than planned. Later on, several participants at the hackathon remarked that Melody usually takes a long time to deliver. Perhaps Picnic's generous tip paid off. The driver called me up because he was confused that his destination was a gas station. He found me though, and was willing to pose for a photo!
… until I noticed there were no utensils.I sadly packed up my food and began to frantically search for eating implements. The gas station? NOPE. The gas station across the street? NOOOOPE. I went to a nearby motel, where I listened in disbelief as the attendant insisted that usually, they have hundreds, but today they were all out.
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After another sad loop around the block, I was beginning to lose hope. Visions of eating my omelet with my bare hands haunted me. Then I realized there was another hotel I hadn't tried. As I walked up, I discovered a little shared dining room with the door open! And it had… no utensils in sight.Out of desperation, I started rummaging around the drawers and cabinets, looking for anything I could eat my rapidly cooling omelet with.
Image: Max Goodman
I spotted my salvation! But it turned out to be all knives. Then I heard a voice behind me: "Can I help you sir…?"
I got caught stealing plastic cutlery from a hotel
Reflecting on this whole experience, one of the most interesting things about arriving at this random gas station was that because it was my destination, I was able to view it in a new light. Because I had no control over my destiny, it felt like perhaps I was taken to this place for a purpose which would soon become apparent.Since I arrived much faster than the delivery, there was lots of extra time to walk around and smell the flowers. In any other context I would have thought this idle time was a waste, but because I knew the delivery was coming soon, there was nothing better to do but wait. That was surprisingly relaxing.About an hour and a half after I embarked on this adventure, I finished my meal and prepared to say goodbye to this place. My picnic taught me a few things: With the right perspective, even a quiet gas station at the edge of the city can be an interesting place to visit. That aimlessness is a necessary state of mind, worth making time for. (Also that I don't really like dolmas very much, but that's okay.) And finally, to be ready for a picnic anywhere at any time, you'd really better bring your own utensils.
There is a quiet beauty to this place. I feel at peace and at home. This is my picnic spot. Max GoodmanMay 15, 2016
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