Hancock’s app is an oasis of calm - Bird Lovegod

A few years ago, app development was the big opportunity.

Everyone was trying to build one, raising hundreds of thousands to get started, and that was before onboarding users or running a full length ad in Old Street Station.

Dating apps, shopping apps, concierge apps, almost none survived the reality of the market. Many, like the deceased DOJO, were Londoncentric event listings. That bubble’s beyond popped.

That was then, and now apps are so cheap to build Matt Hancock can afford one of his very own.

I downloaded it last week and felt like the only one who had. I’ve checked it every day, which probably means I spend more time on Matts App than Matt himself. He’s only made a few posts, one, about eight months ago, something to do with a virus. Another about a horse race. And then suddenly a new one came through yesterday, a video announcement.

He’s making a new thing out of ‘science and scale’, not sure what that means.

He says he’s making a coherent whole out of it, forming a new organisation, “the National Institute for Health Protection, with a single relentless mission, protecting people from external threats to the public health, including biological weapons, and of course pandemics”.

Matts App is a space of calm and quiet from the stormy eye of Twitter. It’s a sanctuary from the irate incel echochamber of Facebook.

And it’s non-habit forming, unlike the newly addictive LinkedIn, promising and never delivering tantalizing carrots, all those feed posts, all of them from real people, intelligent people, business people, and yet not one of them quite giving that dopamine hit so desperately needed, so on to the next and next, data track marks left in cyber like Fatima’s footprints on a freshly polished dance floor.

Matts App isn’t like that.

But I love it. It’s so personal, he’s probably only had about 20 downloads by a handful of followers.

Some of them might even be real, they’re his friends and neighbours and constituents, and they post encouraging thoughts like “Well done.”

I’ve stopped trying to understand, there’s nothing to be learned here, nothing to be gained. The Covid case count is the weather forecast of 30 years ago, definitely inaccurate, probably wrong, but something to gather around even so.

It’s the new weather, our national obsession, that thing to talk about that no longer even needs naming, you know what It is.

And we are dear fools to expect our Government to control the weather, or the tides, or the seasons or the waves of viral load.

And they are bound ever to pretend they have this power, Covid Canutes, back second wave, back, promising and never delivering.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson