Co-ordinated youth
The app that feeds tech-savvy teenagers’ appetites for adventure by following random GPS references
Mia Cole, a 15-year-old Youtuber, set off alone into the woods. Guided only by her smartphone and an app giving her directions, she came upon an abandoned hunters’ outlook. On a wooden fence by the hut, she saw something disturbing. “There’s a fence, a wooden fence,” she says. “And right on the back of it, it just said ‘Mia’.”
The encounter is just one of many that Generation Z and Tiktok teenagers have been broadcasting as part of a new craze driven by the app Randonautica.
The app is designed to encourage users to explore their local area by giving them a random set of coordinates. Users set a radius of how far they are willing to travel and are encouraged to set an “intention”.
This could be a phrase or word that will allegedly take the user to a place with deeper meaning. Since its launch in February, Randonautica has become a stealthy viral sensation. Its followers – who call themselves “randonauts” – tell stories of being led to new and unexplored places, guided towards inexplicable coincidences that give them clues about their future or even expose paranormal activity.
The app itself is a seductive mixture of fringe science, mysticism and performance art. Drawing data from a “quantum random number generator” at the Australia National University, it assigns users a set of coordinates to visit and invites them to submit a “trip report” about their experience.
The app’s goal: to help users “break from their mundane day-to-day and take a journey of randomness into the world around them”.
“Technology has optimised away a lot of the serendipity that exists in our lives,” says Max Hawkins, a former
Google engineer who helped kickstart the fascination with random life when he spent two years living wherever and doing whatever his self-built randomiser apps told him to.
“It’s like living inside a recommendation algorithm, which is showing you the right thing, but you miss out on all the other possibilities. I see this as a way of reclaiming that.”
The weird part, however, comes from the “intention setting”. Before generating their target, randonauts are asked to take a moment to concentrate on what they want from it.
The app’s makers claim that this process can influence the number generator, somehow meddling with the fluctuations of energy in a laboratory on the other side of the world. “The experiment we are interested in is to test the effects of mind-matter interaction on sets of quantum random numbers,” says Lauren Sasich Woita, Randonautica spokesman.
It is partly this whiff of the occult that has propelled the app to more than 8m downloads. Randonauting already existed before Randonautica, which was built to streamline the process of receiving coordinates.
Teenagers around the world have spent months cooped up indoors, so you can see why filming a spooky adventure video in the woods might be a tempting prospect.
But the app’s biggest boost came in June from Tiktok and then Youtube stars posting videos of their trips. Randonautica’s terms ban anyone under 18, but a quick scan of highprofile videos reveals most are teenagers. Unsurprisingly, many of them disobey the app’s advice to keep a positive mindset and set an intention to find “evil” or “murder”.
The most unsettling trips have led people to dead bodies, with three teenagers in Seattle appearing to have found real human remains in a suitcase on a beach.
The app’s makers are sanguine about its darker side. “When you’re sending millions of people to random locations and searching the hidden corners of reality, you’re bound to find some pretty shocking stuff,” says co-founder Joshua Lengfelder. “It’s not the best press, but I’m not really that upset about it, because it’s kind of cool.”
Looking closely at the supposed science behind Randonautica is an adventure in itself.
The quantum random number generator is real enough, deriving its numbers from the “noise” produced by the natural oscillation of particles and energies within a vacuum.
“Vacuum fluctuations are the purest source of randomness,” Prof Ping Koy Lam, a quantum computing expert who maintains the apparatus, tells The Daily Telegraph. But he also says: “To our knowledge, there is no known and accepted theory that links this to our mind, will or consciousness.”
The app makers cite an outfit called the Global Consciousness Project. The GCP’S research grew out of a controversial and now-defunct Princeton University laboratory devoted to the study of psychic phenomena, which one physicist described as “an embarrassment to science”.
The GCP monitors the output of random number generators, looking for weird results correlating with large emotional events such as the fall of the Twin Towers. Other scientists have criticised its methodology.
Randonautica claims to be generating a similar data set. “If the user thinks about some subject, the quantum [random] data should deviate so that the user can find this subject,” it says on its website.
“I think it’s totally wrong,” says Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist who once debated with the new age mystic Deepak Chopra and will soon publish a new memoir about working with Stephen Hawking. “No, you cannot influence quantum processes with your mind.” Instead, he says, the magic of randonauting comes from humans’ innate drive to find patterns in the “noise” of nature. “You look at the
‘Technology has optimised away a lot of the serendipity in our lives. I see this as a way of reclaiming that’
‘When you’re sending millions of people to random locations, you’re bound to find some shocking stuff’
clouds and see faces, or people see Jesus in their peanut butter sandwich, because our minds are designed to understand the world by taking some shortcuts.”
Randonautica, then, is well-pitched to ensnare our brains with “intentions”. A cynic might say it is the perfect viral marketing strategy: tempt your users into entertaining fantasies that they will share with their friends.
The company admits that its data set suffers from confirmation bias, since the stories that generate trip reports are usually the most exciting ones.
Despite all the dubious science, Hawkins believes randonauting is still valuable. His years of living randomly have taught him that some form of intention-setting is still “essential”.
Perhaps, then, randonauting does have special powers. “It has an effect on your attention, on the things that you notice when you go out,” he says.
Even then, disappointment is possible. One pair of US teens focus on the heart-throb actor Timothée Chalamet. The app takes them to a house on a country road, which they then attempt, without much success, to connect to the actor and his films.
“It’s a really nice house? He may live there,” one of them says. “We don’t know. Randonauting seems fake.”
But maybe they were being too sceptical.