Let's Get Lost: Whats the Point of an App That Helps You Find Your Friends in the Club?

We've all been there: it's gone midnight, you're drunk, that overpriced blend of rat poison, cat piss and amphetamines is starting to make your fingers tingle and your head hurt, everything's getting a bit slippy, a bit sloppy, a bit totally not actually very fun anymore really. You've lost your bearings. You've lost your debit card. You've lost your friends.

In these circumstances, in these situations that play out in every club in every city in the world, every night of the year, you've got two options. The first involves blind panic and blapping out text after text, SMS SOS' zipping about with gay abandon, faux-casual "hey where r u i am by toilets come find me"'s turning into "please find me i am at toilets still please hurry"s which become rapid-fire "HELP"s. These punctuation free bleats and whimpers, these tapped-out, speedily-swiped cries for salvation usually, eventually, provided the club has decent signal, work, and you and your pals are reunited in the noxious nirvana of the smoking area. Crisis averted.

The second option involves risk and daring. Why not — and go with me on this — get lost? Why not subsume yourself to possibility and potentiality? Why not let go of it all and make new friends, forge new experiences, craft hitherto unknown narratives?

The developers of Unified, a new app that grandiosely claims to be "Empowering Nightlife" (their capitals, not mine), are clearly big fans of the first option. The app, which launches on the 1st of July, rolling out initially in Ibiza — venues such as Sankeys, Cafe Del Mar and Eden have already signed up — allows users to locate their friends in specific clubs with literal pinpoint accuracy. As the clubber weaves round dark corners and cavorts through toilets, bars, and smoking areas, they can update their location in-app and alert other app-using buddies as to their whereabouts. Which, when I put my safety goggles on, is an unequivocally good thing. It theoretically diminishes the sense of vulnerability we can all experience in dark rooms that thump and thud to the sound of kickdrums and drug deals, cuts down on unnecessary traipsing, and probably goes some way to rescuing friendships that are in danger of evaporating under a deluge of "WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU I HAVE BEEN WIATING FOR FIVE FCKIN MINUTS" texts.

The thing is, though, the club — taken as an overarching idea and as a series of literal physical spaces — is about abandon. The club is somewhere that exists outside of the fixity and mundanity of life as lived. It is an escape, a potential paradise that offers unparalleled opportunities for vanishment and reinvention. If there's anywhere in the world where being lost, getting lost, becoming lost is viable and pleasurable, it's in a nightclub.

In his seminal, meandering, synaesthetic, hauntological autobiography Berlin Childhood around 1900, the German cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin states that:

"Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley."

Benjamin's point — that the idea of being lost in a surrounding one claims to know requires a kind of dissociation and an understanding and acceptance of one's infinitesimally small place in the world —is transferrable to the world of the club.

Think about why you go clubbing in the first place. You go to dance. You go to drink. You go to socialize and forget through remembrance. You go to become someone other than the you that trudges onto the bus in the morning, the you that skim reads the Metro to joylessly garner favs on Twitter, the you that worries about eating enough quinoa and drinking enough water, the you that goes to bed dreading doing the same fucking thing day in day out for the rest of your life. That's why we go out. That's why we mine our overdrafts and skip sensible meals. That's why we wear the same battered Vans with twin big toe holes for twelve solid months. That's why we haven't signed up to the gym yet despite our alarming mid-20s weight gain. And that's why we need to get lost.

To get lost is to become unencumbered, untethered. In a period where, and stop me if I sound a little Hard Fi at this juncture, we are under constant surveillance, a time in which every late night loo roll purchases is monitored and noted, there's more need than ever to go off the map. For some this involves self-serving, insufferably boring, insufferably indulgent forays into craft retreats in the Cotswolds or a mindless mindfulness and meditation meltdown in Malta. For others it can be as simple as turning Gmail push notifications off for a day, or taking a night bus rather than an Uber. However short lived and self-deceiving our escapism might be, it is more necessary than ever.

Losing a friend in a nightclub is an irritation, true. You trade in the experience of the night for a badly mixed cocktail of annoyance, worry, and stress. The music sounds duller, the fags feel harsher, the toilets look and smell grimmer. You sink into a low level depression, constantly peering at your phone, or over your shoulder, convinced that the dude over there in the Palace t-shirt and Old Skools is your mate in the Palace t-shirt and Old Skools rather than one of the 27 blokes in here wearing a Palace t-shirt and Old Skools. But you know what? Embrace it. Grow up.

What happens when you lose your pals? You make new ones. You dance. You have conversations with strangers that reach places you and your friends have long since abandoned the hope of hitting. You enjoy yourself rather than enjoying a form of yourself that you've created that exists when you're around friends for the imagined benefit of said friends. Turn your phone off. Leave it in the cloakroom. Get lost. Stay lost. Uninstall Unified ASAP.

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