Where's the Fart App for the AI Age?
AI cognition is here, delight isn't.
Christmas Day, 2008: iFart hits #1 on the app store. 39K downloads, $27K net in twenty-four hours. Joel Comm struck gold.
Competition heats up fast — rival app Pull My Finger demands fifty thousand dollars for fart infringement.
Within a year the app store is consumed by farts — over 500 of them.
Every tech era rides atop two things: a serious thing — like spreadsheets, search, email. And a delight thing. It might look like garbage at first, but that’s where the winners grow.
Spacewar! Invented computer gaming when a bunch of 1960s grad students got busy wasting the cycles on a million-dollar PDP-1 minicomputer. Teens on AOL Instant Messenger in the 90s started posting updates to their away status buddy lists predating Twitter and all the socials. In 2005, the first YouTube video posted was 19 seconds featuring elephants and their long trunks. Jawed Karim, YouTube founder, called it “Hot or Not for video.”
We’re at an inflection point right now. Enterprise AI is gelling — agents, workflows, orchestration. Business adoption of AI is going so fast the hyper-scalers don’t have enough hyper or scale to cover demand. Everyone is scrambling for capacity. Noise about frontier models is dying down — nobody asks which model anymore. Back in the early Internet did you care what version of the TCP stack you were running?
The AI cognition unit is clear, but where’s the delight unit?
AI slop had a moment, now it’s cooked. OpenAI’s TikTok copy app Sora had a spike of viral growth and six months later they shut it down. Sora hit #1 on the App Store five days after launch, but ultimately burned through $1M/day in compute against $2M lifetime revenue.
That AI slop filling up Meta’s feeds — nobody wants that, it’s garbage. When anyone can create content the value drops to zero. The hunt is on for real vibes, true taste. The junk phase was just an appetizer.
Sure you can vibe code an app in an afternoon and if it solves a problem for you (or delights you) that’s a-ok but good luck stuffing it into the old containers like the app store. They’re not just full, they are fully enshittified — Doctorow’s word — fifteen years of stuffing the stores until discovery died and now everyone downloads the same twenty apps.
Our creative capacity persists, and AI nurtures it — but there's no channel to carry it. History holds another lesson here — creativity will find an outlet, but where? When printing got cheap, we made pamphlets. When video was in everyone’s pocket we made YouTube.
Desire doesn’t expire — never forget the ever popular successor to iFart:
Poop Map launched five years later with a single button UX: Drop the poop, going viral on TikTok in 2021 hitting #1 thirteen years after iFart. Of course iFart is still on the store, still getting press in 2026. Junk has staying power over spreadsheets: delight compounds, while utility churns.
So although the feeds won’t go quietly, they aren’t the place for the future AI fart shocks. Zuckerberg can buy every startup he can find, but bolting stuff onto the feed isn’t working anymore.
AI’s fart app is probably out there already, in some vague vaporous form. Kids messing around sharing creations in private chats. Researchers tiring of training, searching for distraction. Another thing history shows is that it will be something without precedent. Something unintended that we can’t yet imagine.
Farts are stranger than fiction.
Look for something supremely stupid — truly a waste of the most powerful technology ever built. Technologists building serious agent workflows won’t see it coming. Meta will try to buy it, but they’ll miss.
Keep your eyes peeled come Christmas Day 2027.