Diagnosis: Rabies
by John Perich
Photo: © Depositphotos.com/tashatuvango

Like all bubbles, the collapse of the app market looks inevitable in hindsight. All the classic signs can be picked out of the rubble: increasingly sophisticated means of production that required increasingly larger investments of capital, decreasing margins, stagnating demand. But the heady gains that accrued to app development shops and the venture capitalists who backed them blinded the participants to the dangers until it was too late.

As we emerge from the eleventh year of our slow recovery, consumers and producers alike greet the economic news with cautious optimism. So it remains to skeptics, historians, and Cassandras to issue the necessary warnings. While we have no idea what markets or enterprises the death of the “Web” and the birth of the Oekumatrix* will bring, we see no reason to believe that the boom-bust cycle has stopped. The bubbles that burst before may burst again, with results more dire than the last time.

* We will resist the bastardized abbreviation “OE” for as long as we can, although it appears inevitable.

To recap briefly: the mobile datasphere grew exponentially. Demand for consumer apps exceeded the available supply of developers. The investors who backed the development houses that cranked these apps out turned their attention to focused algorithmic intelligences (FAI) that could generate thousands of apps in the time it took a team of humans to generate one.

Most of these apps were incomprehensible garbage, but this became the consumer’s problem. Development houses flooded the marketplace with apps, letting word of mouth, recommendation algorithms, and starred reviews solve the problem of quality control. The marketplace owners tried cracking down on app spewers, but FAI were just as adept at churning out new business names and d/b/as as they were flashing puzzle races.

It called to mind the thought experiment of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters–only, instead of checking each monkey’s work to see which one had produced Hamlet, the owners produced each resulting script as a full-blown play and waited to see which one the critics recognized.

Diagnosis: Rabies was simultaneously the apotheosis of the art and its death knell. It retained imaginative elements that a consumer of human-designed apps might recognize:

• A randomly generated menagerie of impossible creatures, animated as friendly cartoons;

• A wide variety of diagnostic tools available to the player: oscilloscopes, rectal thermometers, bubbling test tubes, and more, with shinier and more refined diagnostics available for premium downloads;

• A simple yet engaging glossy interface.

Strangers to history might struggle to comprehend how Diagnosis: Rabies captured the world’s imagination the same way that Tetris, Mario Kart, Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Candy Crush, Flappy Bird, 2048, Chili Farm, Rabbit Fight, Meet a Cow, Card by Card, Which Is Red?, Watch Your Eyes, The Orb Hates You, Slickest of Sicknesses, and Get These Hamsters High did. Looking back on it as one might a drunken blackout, we struggle to explain it ourselves. No matter what sort of creature the app presented or what its symptoms were, the diagnosis was invariably rabies. Factory data of over seventy-four million plays indicates that no diagnosis besides rabies was ever returned. Forensic examination of the source code indicates that no diagnosis besides rabies was even possible.

A number of players took advantage of the game’s fixation to rack up unreasonably high scores, blitzing through multiple diagnoses as quickly as possible. But it seems the majority of players insisted on playing through each iteration completely, as if there were other possibilities. No matter how many times the familiar ping sounded and the cartoon doctor emerged with her clipboard indicating rabies, players seemed to wonder if this time might be different, if the usual rules would not apply.

Sadly, the rules still applied, both in Diagnosis: Rabies and in the marketplace. When users tired of the game, and of hunting through tens of thousands of apps in search for an entertaining diversion, the app economy collapsed. Thousands of developers were put out of work, and the hundreds of firms that had invested in them went bankrupt. The succeeding bailout saved some of the firms, but shattered consumer faith in the app market. This time, the diagnosis was fatal.

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John Perich is a writer living and working in Boston. His series of gritty crime thrillers – Too Close to Miss, Too Hard to Handle, and Too Late to Run – are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book retailers.