Randonauting Promised Adventure. He took it to the trash

I find the same problem looking for meaning when I turn on the app. Maybe I tried to briefly get an explanation when the truck left the tuna behind … Douglas Adams wrote “so long, and thank you for the fish”. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he also said that the meaning of life was 42), but in the end I closed the application in despair. What is the reality of randonauting, and how do social networks hide it? Is that “WOW factor” really an issue, or is there more of its most extreme stories in the app? Is it possible to find something if nothing else?

Darius Nitisor, a 21-year-old Amazon employee from London, has used Randonautica “probably a hundred times” since he saw TikTok’s suitcase story and downloaded the app. On his first adventure, Nitisor set his intention as “something calming”. He was taken to a park 45 minutes from his home and on his return he met an old friend. Many Randonauts say they have experienced the “phenomenon of long-lost friends,” that someone they didn’t see for a while stays in the exact location created by the app.

But the majority of Nitisor’s randonauting trips have been disappointing, leading to nothing to do with his intention. “I kept hearing all these stories, but I couldn’t find anything obvious,” he says. “Nine out of 10, nothing clear happens.” Twice, he put his “football” into his goal and was taken to a field and a workout, but Nitisor wonders if it was just a coincidence, especially with all the other mistakes. Gradually he stopped using the app.

“There’s no way to find anything; there’s something in everyone, ”says Randonautica founder Auburn Salcedo. Salcedo and co-founders Joshua Lengfelder say the app uses “intelligence-matter-interaction” technology, which means that when you choose your intention, you’re supposedly influencing a random quantum number generator with your thoughts. If all this sounds a little woo-woo, that’s fine. The principles of Randonautica are spectacularly unproven, if well thought out. For Salcedo, the overall goal of the app is simple: “One of the main things we want is to add novelty to people’s lives through randomness.”

Exploring the world around you, Salcedo says, can “get you out of your daily life” and help you feel happier. “Doing something at random can open your mind. It gives you this kind of feeling of releasing endorphins,” he says. But Randounatica has a big problem with fake news, with TikTok turning on suitcase videos, Salcedo said he “changed the feeling” of randonauting.

“We started to see a lot of what I would take to be persecuted,” he says. Lengfelder says TikToker uses keywords that the algorithm prefers to generate clicks, and shakes up a few examples: “warning, scary, scary, Randonautica scary adventure.” Moreover, a large part of this content is falsified. TikTok’s second most popular video tagged #Randonautica is a scary jump clip “in a shady park in the middle of nowhere”. The video ends with a terrifying image running straight towards the camera.