Many Kickstarter failures blunder into the gutter on the back of inept pitches and underwhelming products. This one, however, featured a fairly slick video for a good-looking object that seemed to do its job very well.
That job, however, is not one that most people in a reasonable emotional state could want done.
The “Notice” faithfully transmits the silhouette-envelope-globe notification panel from Facebook onto a Zuckerberg-blue plastic box in front of your monitor, keeping you aware of pending messages, events and friend requests via red LED numbers and noises.
Are we really so damaged as a culture that we need to be reassured that something is happening on Facebook even in the furtive moments when we have other sites up on our screens?
Facebook already feels like an ogre with a rope, constantly yanking me in to look at its holiday photos. Why would I want to invite that ogre through the screen and into the physical world?
Life could only become more tense with this thing staring me in the face, huffing tinnily and quacking numbers in red light to remind me I should be online.
Yes, you can set a threshold below which it won’t bother you, but it will still be there: the ogre’s rope, looped around your attention span and ready to be tugged.
And the reward for funding? Your name moulded into the casing of every unit made. I’d rather have my name inscribed on Geneva-banned cluster munitions.
Luckily, the Notice only achieved $4,169 of its steep $20k goal, but that’s $4,169 too much for my confidence in consumer sanity. What’s next, an implant that clamps to the base of your skull and shunts Twitter directly into your visual cortex?
Probably.
Content from our partners
Related
