The Internet this week has been buzzing about the rise of Yo, the incomparably stupid new mobile app that has raised more than $1 million and whose sole purpose is to let you send a message that just reads “Yo” to your friends. In fact, Yo is such a flat-out brain-dead idea that it’s inspired iMore’s Derek Kessler to do the one thing no one should ever do with apps like these: Think about their broader implications for the future of the human race.
“Yo is dumb,” he states bluntly. “It’s a dumb concept, it’s a dumb use scenario, it’s a dumb app. That it’s taken on this bizarre life of its own is utterly perplexing and flummoxing. For all the great things that our smartphones do, there’s so much stupid s— like this that just, I, I don’t know what to say.”
This is, of course, the sad truth: People just love stupid crap. So while the Internet has opened up a vast treasure trove of knowledge in which you watch course videos at Yale for free and get access to every great book ever written whose copyright has expired, most people are happy to just search for sideboob pictures on The Huffington Post and post cat picture memes. People love stupid crap, it’s a core feature of human nature and there’s really nothing to be done about it.
Kessler, however, really lets it get to his head by the end of his rant against Yo.
“Yo is a cry for attention,” he writes. “Not from the user, and not from the developer. It’s a a howl in the darkness, begging for somebody, anybody, to rescue us from this insanity.”
While we agree that Yo is indeed very stupid, we don’t think that its popularity is a sign of humanity’s impending collapse. No, we already got that sign much earlier this year in the form of Flappy Bird.
