Lessons for Big Tech from the ‘anti-social’ photo app

Just over 1,440 days ago, I installed a new photo-sharing app. Last month, after using it for exactly one minute almost every day since, I “finished” it.

This is not standard operating procedure for smartphone software. Few apps are designed for completion, instead preferring to ape the bottomless feeds of Facebook and Twitter. Most want to lure you in for daily use, but I have found only one that locks you out again after just 60 seconds.

The app in question, Minutiae, is more art project than start-up. Over the past four years, Minutiae has sent me a notification at a random minute every day, giving me just a few frantic seconds to photograph whatever was around me at that moment.

My Minutiae archive was only fully accessible once 1,440 days were up (equal to the number of minutes in 24 hours). The result is a document of my existence unlike any I would otherwise photograph, let alone post on Instagram.

It is often mundane, occasionally moving, and inescapably me. Despite being a self-declared “anti-social” app, it also offers lessons for other social media companies.

Minutiae’s creators, Martin Adolfsson and Daniel Wilson, met at the New Museum’s incubator programme in Manhattan for those working on ideas straddling art, design and tech. “It morphed from something we did on a whim, as a bit of a counter-reaction to social media, into a more gradual visual archive of real life,” says Adolfsson. “You’re really forced to think on your feet and it becomes a brutally honest self-portrait of what your life really looks like, whether you like it or not.”

Since I paid $15 to install the app in 2017 (and wrote a column about its novelty), I have lived in four apartments, three cities and on two continents. Plenty of photos are just too revealing to put on social media: stockpiled loo roll, my embarrassingly large shoe collection, neglected houseplants.

During lockdown, avoiding repetitive photos became a daily stimulus to creativity. I was amused to see how my home office evolved from a laptop on a pile of books to an ever-growing array of screens and accessories.

Then there are pictures that appear boring but hold personal resonance: the FT’s old newsroom, packed with people; a suit hung up ready for a funeral; a deserted Las Vegas casino in the aftermath of a mass shooting I reported on; clouds looming behind palm trees that later became a holiday-ending tropical storm.

Minutiae is not entirely anti-social. During that daily one‑minute window, I was able to flick through photos from another anonymous user with whom I had been paired. The frantic peek inside offices and living rooms from Indonesia, Turkey or Nowheresville, US, felt refreshingly real and almost too intimate.

Despite Adolfsson’s insistence that Minutiae is “an art project in the form of an app”, other software developers should pay attention.

If an app only asks for one minute out of my day, I may be more likely to keep using it, instead of getting lost in an endless scroll that I later regret. Minutiae has had only 25,000 downloads but about 40 per cent of the people who signed up in 2017 completed their 1,440-photo cycle, which is a far higher retention rate than most apps, says Adolfsson.

A new cluster of photo-sharing start-ups are also taking inspiration from Minutiae, seeking more “authentic expression” (in the words of one). BeReal sends a simultaneous notification to groups of friends, giving two minutes to snap a pic (which feels like an eternity compared with Minutiae). Poparazzi, which topped the US App Store charts last week, wants to kill selfies by only letting people post photos of their friends, not themselves. Even Instagram is now letting users turn off “like” counts from their news feeds, an idea first posited by Snapchat a decade ago.

Whether these venture-backed social start-ups can endure without the network effects of more aggressive viral sharing remains to be seen. But for a small‑scale project, Minutiae has had an outsized impact: it proved that constraints — even when artificially imposed — can be much more satisfying than information overload.

After a lockdown year in which arguments about screen addiction gave way to an all-screen, all-the-time existence, perhaps Instagram fatigue may finally be setting in. At the very least, Minutiae and its ilk are a timely reminder to reset our relationship with our phones and replace the infinite scroll with a full stop.

Tim Bradshaw is the FT’s global technology correspondent

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