I Was Somebody: My Weekend with Miranda July’s App

When I first heard about artist and filmmaker Miranda July‘s Somebody app (an extremely buggy version for the iPhone debuted last fall) I was pretty skeptical. I was like, ” Okay, Miranda July invented an app that makes strangers talk to each other? Whoop-de-do, it’s like poop-back-and-forth 2.0, how quirky.”

But, like, who am I kidding, I love quirky. And I kind of love talking to strangers.

So when Becca, a Miranda July superfan, texted a bunch of our friends last week and told us to download the new, actually functional version of Somebody, I was like, “oh, too bad they don’t have an Android version. None of those hipster apps have an Android version.” And when Becca posted on Facebook in real time about her first “terrifying and thrilling” experience using Somebody, in which a strange man appeared on her block and started yelling her name, I was like, “that sounds insane, but I really wish they had an Android version.” And then I checked, and they did have an Android version, and I installed it. (Don’t worry, it worked out okay for Becca! Download episode 23 of Becca’s podcast The Real Housewives of Bohemia to hear the full story of her encounter with Somebody.)

Somebody is free to install, and pretty easy to use. It looks cute and friendly, with simple, colorful graphics that resemble bubblegum or balloons; the aesthetic is both girly and minimalist, which can be hard to achieve. Come to think of it, “girly and minimalist” might not be a terrible way to describe the project itself: users are encouraged to jump in and perform affective labor for one another, but briefly, in a weirdly modular way. The copy on Somebodyapp.com describes the app as a “far-reaching public art project” that “twists our love of avatars and outsourcing”; on Facebook, Becca classified it as “urban horror.” Here’s how it works:

First, you choose a recipient from a list of Somebody users drawn from your Facebook or phone contacts (you don’t seem to be able to find friends from within the app itself.) Then you write that person a message, which can include gestures and actions like “fist bump” or “buy them a coffee,” as well as stage directions like “longingly” or “whispering.” Finally (or, as I’ve found, not really finally at all), you choose a “stand-in”—a Somebody—who is physically near your intended recipient. In theory, that Somebody will accept the mission, find your friend (with the help of a GPS-aided map and a profile photo), and pretend to be you while delivering your message to your friend, complete with the affect and gestures you asked for.

The location-tracking aspect is one of the main reasons the app qualifies as “urban horror”: Becca’s story, in which she was just sitting around in her living room working on her dissertation when she heard a stranger’s voice yelling her name in the street, evokes all kinds of horror genres for me, from siege films to ghost stories about revenants to the real-life horrors of stalking and domestic violence and doxing. Yet Becca’s story gave me the impression that, if Somebody’s power was slightly sinister, it was also magical: I imagined Somebody users as digital necromancers, possessing and animating random strangers and sending them into parks and restaurants and office buildings and houses to surprise unwitting friends. I imagined message recipients turning with delight or horror to hear the stranger at the next barstool speaking in the voice of a beloved pal. But of course that’s not what happens at all: a Somebody has to accept your mission, and your recipient has to confirm that now’s a good time to receive a message, before anyone gets to see anyone else’s location. Becca’s Somebody ambush must have been the result of a bug in the app or of human error, because I had a really hard time getting anyone to let me get anywhere near them, physically or virtually.

I installed the app on a Friday morning, when I was home taking care of my toddler. It occurred to me that caregivers of children (or dogs) might be ideal Somebody messengers: taking care of my kid makes it hard to do a lot of other things, so I don’t have many schedule constraints, but both my daughter and I like to get out of the house and travel around the neighborhood. I decided to check out my local “floating” messages—messages that hadn’t been delivered for some reason or other, and were now floating in the internet ether waiting to be picked up by nearby Somebody users, like a message in a bottle waiting to wash ashore. I selected a message intended to “reassure” an apparently worried woman named S who was currently a third of a mile away from me; I felt important when the app told me “you are somebody and you have a mission in progress.” A mission! After a few minutes, though, I got another notification: “For reasons we may never know,” S didn’t want to hear from me right now. I wrote messages to the two friends I had who were active on Somebody—one in LA, one in New Jersey—and selected local messengers, only to be told that now wasn’t a good time for them, either. My messages floated into the ether to join the message for S, waiting for someone to pick them up. So far, no one has.

My Somebody experience was amounting to an endless stream of anonymous rejection.

I had to move my car, so I gave up on Somebody and drove my kid to a singalong about a mile from our house. When the singalong was over and my meter had expired, I opened Somebody again. I figured I had an hour to kill before I was allowed to park on my street again, so I could really go anywhere to deliver a message. But I started with the closest option: a friendly message for someone named Dax, less than half a mile away.

When I got a notification that Dax was actually available to receive my message, I was shocked and excited and kind of scared. I strapped my daughter into her car seat and drove to the intersection where the app told me I would be able to find Dax. We parked in front of one of four enormous apartment buildings, got out of the car, and started wandering around, both of us calling “Dax! Dax!” Or at least I was calling “Dax!”; I think my daughter was calling “Jacks!”, probably hoping to run into her much-admired four-year-old cousin Jack. I don’t think July intended Somebody to involve quite so much yelling in the street; in the film she made as a promo/demo for Somebody, Somebodies casually walk up to their targets in the middle of parks and restaurants, public spaces where interaction with strangers is physically, if not psychologically, easy. But according to the map on my phone, Dax was deep inside a massive, multi-unit building; the app doesn’t let you send any messages to indicate that you’re lost or to ask for more information; like Becca’s Somebody, I had to rely on old-fashioned yelling. I had to frigging call Dax out in the middle of Dax’s neighborhood. Like this:

Or this:

After about five minutes of walking past every building in the intersection, just in case, I was starting to get pretty embarrassed. We must have really been irritating Dax’s neighbors. What were they thinking? Would they call the police? Would somebody punch me in the face? At the same time, I worried I wasn’t yelling loud enough to penetrate the building’s concrete walls. Should I be screaming at the top of my lungs? Surely not—my voice is pretty loud to begin with, and I couldn’t imagine any reasonable person yelling louder than I was. But, uh, was this something a reasonable person would even do? I became simultaneously more aggressive in my search and more apologetic in my affect: we ventured into one building’s lobby, into another building’s open courtyard, and each time I tried to explain myself to the people I ran into. “We’re playing this weird game,” I told them, between my shouts. “It’s kind of like a scavenger hunt?” To my relief, Dax’s neighbors smiled indulgently, probably thinking the game had something to do with my kid, who continued to scream “Jacks!” (and also “Pigeon!”) with gusto.

We almost gave up. I yelled to the unseen Dax that we were going home; I put my daughter back in her car seat; I made one last rueful loop around the block, weakly honking my horn a couple of times and yelling “Dax” out the window. I want to say that I don’t know why I was so desperate to deliver my message, but I do know. I’m an obedient person, who likes to do what I’m told. I like to honor my commitments. I do like making those strange, fleeting connections with strangers that happen so often when you live in a city, which Somebody seemed designed to orchestrate and gamify. And I hate to disappoint people. I worried that Dax was just messing with me, was enjoying watching me squirm; but I didn’t actually think that was the case. I was pretty sure we both wanted to make this connection, and it wasn’t going to be my fault that we didn’t.

But my kid needed a nap, so I started to drive home. I’d only gone about a block when I hit a stoplight and decided to check the app again, just in case, and I noticed that, even though I was driving away from Dax’s building, the little red arrow indicating Dax’s position was still right next to me. Urban horror for real: had Dax been in my car the whole time? Was Dax me? I looked to my left, and I saw a slim figure on the sidewalk just ahead, lugging an enormous neon-green laundry bag. The figure had pale skin and short black hair like Dax’s, and I could imagine the face in the profile photo wearing that funky hat and that furry white jacket. I pulled over.

“Are you Dax?” I yelled out the window, a total creeper. But Dax seemed happy to see me. Apparently Somebody had told Dax the mission was canceled, so Dax had decided it was time to do some laundry. Dax had lots of questions for me, but I felt compelled to stick to my mission, which was to channel Dax’s friend, the message sender. I can’t remember what my new name was, but let’s say it was Angie.

“It’s Angie,” I said, pulling over and turning on my hazards. “It’s Angie!”

Then I delivered my message: it’s hard to get together, but we’ll find another time. I called Dax “Lady Wandy,” a pet name that I’m not sure I pronounced right, but Dax seemed to like it. “That’s what she calls me!” Dax said.

The stage directions said I had to end the message with a hug. “Now I have to hug you,” I announced. I probably should have asked permission. I got out of the car and hugged Dax. Then Dax asked, “What’s your name?”

I remembered that you had to give your Somebody a rating, from one to five stars, so I said, “Oh, so you can rate me? It’s Caolan.” Dax said, “I have a message for you, too! Go on your phone and accept it.” I looked at my phone and lo! Once my mission had cleared, there was yet another notification: “Somebody would like to contact you! Is now a good time?” I clicked “OK.”

Dax said, “Hi Caolan! It’s Becca. You did it!”

So while I had been chasing Dax around, Dax had fished Becca’s floating message out of nothingness and had been waiting to deliver it to me. We were delighted with each other. We took two selfies, one on each person’s phone. I introduced Dax to my daughter, who was sitting calmly in the car, unfazed by the fact that I had become Angie and Dax had become Becca. It kind of felt like we should hang out or something: we lived in the same neighborhood, we were both crazy people. But I wanted to follow the rules, and it felt like I was supposed to just be a messenger, a proxy, not a real person. So I got back in the car and drove home.

I felt so proud of myself, which I think points to Somebody’s appeal as a performance or a game, rather than as social media. It was fun connecting with Dax, but I might have connected with Dax anyway—we live in the same neighborhood, we both seem to be pretty outgoing people, and maybe because I’m always walking around with an adorable baby and/or working in coffee shops and eager to procrastinate, I tend to have a lot of conversations with other outgoing people who live in my neighborhood. The difference is that Somebody applies explicit rules to those seemingly chaotic interactions. Both I and the guy who showed up on Becca’s block felt compelled to follow those rules: we risked embarrassment and conflict to deliver our messages, we did our best to perform the roles we’d been asked to play, we tried to avoid answering questions in propria persona, and we didn’t linger to chat. I talked to Becca about it and I think she thought it was a little weird, how closely people seemed to want to hew to the rules—but we decided that that’s what you do, when you agree to participate in performance art, or to play a game. With nothing to be gained except the game, or the performance, what would be the point of breaking the rules? Why would you even play to begin with?

Of course, many of the implicit rules of urban social life still do seem to trump the explicit rules of the Somebody mission. Dax and I had a success, but I haven’t been able to deliver a message since then. I was excited when my first Somebody message was delivered—to my sister-in-law Alison—and amused to learn that it had been delivered by my brother Rory, Alison’s husband.

Since then, six of the seven messages I’ve successfully sent through Somebody have been delivered to my friends by their live-in partners. That’s partly just convenience—your wife or boyfriend is usually the best person to get you a message. But it also shows how uncomfortable we feel engaging with strangers. I asked ten different people, all within 0.1 mile of a friend of mine, to deliver my message to her; it ended up floating until her male partner picked it up and delivered it. The same friend watched as the Somebody she’d recruited to deliver a message to her partner entered the restaurant where they were eating, looked at them, and left, abandoning his mission. I noticed Miranda July herself was within a mile of my friend in LA, so I asked her to deliver my message, but I guess she was too busy. I tried a second time to deliver a reassuring message to S, the first person I’d contacted through Somebody; this time, she indicated it was a good time for a message; but this mission ended with yet another creepy siege. As my kid and I circled S’s building, calling her name as we checked out the neighborhood dogs, S remained inside, maybe hoping we would leave, maybe waiting for us to guess her apartment number, waiting for us to prove ourselves to be truly magical Somebodies.

As an art project, Somebody is interested in the discomfort that produces these failures. The website declares, “here, finally, is an app that makes us nervous, giddy, and alert to the people around us.” The app is intended, at least in part, to make us aware of the awkwardness and fear that accompanies embodied experience; it encourages us to look up from our phones and reenter the real world. But for some of us the real world is more dangerous than it is for others. There’s a reason that my friends’ boyfriends were the only ones who would deliver their Somebody messages. When I was choosing a Somebody to bring a message to a female friend, I hesitated to choose men. As for me: I felt uncomfortable yelling Dax’s name on that Brooklyn corner. But I never felt truly unsafe, and that had everything to do with the fact that I’m a thirty-something white Brooklyn mom, a particular Somebody whose safety is rarely threatened, not in daylight; a Somebody whose Midwestern-mom body and adorable toddler made me seem non-threatening, despite all my yelling, and might have shielded me from suspicion or harassment.

July’s Somebody movie imagines the app as a device that allows for boundary-crossing through possession (you know, like how Whoopi Goldberg is really the one kissing Demi Moore in Ghost). Somebody the film finds humor and pathos in the incongruity between the Somebody and the message-sender: a macho, muscle-bound Black guy weeps as he delivers a thin, weeping white woman’s break-up message to her wimpy boyfriend; an elderly white woman intercedes in an argument between two Latina girls; a waitress in a restaurant proposes to July on behalf of her convict boyfriend. A houseplant starts ordering humans around like meat puppets.

The film’s tone is weird, hard to place. Is it exploiting racial and ethnic stereotypes, or subverting them? What assumptions is the film making about our sympathies and identifications? What assumptions is the app making? In real life, how big/tall/thin/young/white/quirky/threatening/unthreatening/pretty/”ordinary” do you need to be in order to feel comfortable delivering a message, or receiving one? As I look at my Facebook feed today, Tuesday, April 28, the day this piece goes live, it’s painfully obvious that so many of us have no idea how safe or unsafe our communities are, or what safety means, what it should look like. The Somebody app is not going to begin to help us feel safer, or come to a consensus about what safety should look like. But it’s possible that, like any good public-art project, it might provoke some of us to ask questions about who gets to be safe, and why, and how.

And this experiment is young. Its final results will depend on who does play, and how. As Becca and I debriefed over the phone—not through Somebody—after I met up with Dax, we decided that once the thrill wears off, we won’t use Somebody often. But, as Becca pointed out, if enough people play, it could be a pretty fun party game: at a crowded bar, you could turn on the app and “play” Somebody for the evening, temporarily turning the world into a boundless bachelorette party, a game of truth or dare, of charades. So, I don’t know, maybe you should sign up and play with us? We can try, for a little while, to be Somebody together.