Mother Jones

In Silicon Valley, a group of mostly white, mostly male twentysomethings have built a multibillion-dollar empire of sharing apps: shared housing (AirBnB), shared cars (Uber), shared dog-sitting (DogVacay)…you get the idea. But the so-called “sharing economy” doesn’t actually share equally with everyone. One fake app wants to change that.

WellDeserved is an app that helps you “monetize” your privilege—be it racial, gender-based, or socioeconomic—by sharing it (temporarily, of course) with other people. The fictional app was the winning entry at last month’s Comedy Hack Day in San Francisco, where creative agency Cultivated Wit challenged contestants to come up with a comedic app idea and pitch it to judges, all in 48 hours.

The app’s promo video will make you laugh and cry: A Google employee sells his free Google lunch to a guest for $10, a dude charges a black man $5 to hail a cab on his behalf, and another guy walks a woman home so she won’t get catcalled, asking himself, “Why don’t I walk with them, spare them the harassment, and charge ’em like five bucks?”

The creators’ (fake) plan for making the (fake) app work is summed up perfectly: “Our business plan is that VCs will just give us money. Because this is San Francisco, and we have an idea.”

This post has been updated.

Original post: 

This Fake App Just Summed Up Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley