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In a digital world of perfectly-shot 'hot dog legs' and oh-so-perfect status updates, we need to inject more mischief. Where is the Monty Python of mobile or the South Park of social?

"The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year." -- Voltaire


Despite the increasing amount of time we're spending looking at screens or tapping glass, it would appear that the opportunities for mischief are in as much peril as global bee colonies. Where once they were firmly pushed into our cheek multiple times a day, now our tongues loll atrophying in our mouths.

Fun, mischief, hijinks, shenanigans -- call it what you want. It matters. The health benefits of laughter are well known. Humour protects the heart, prevents stress, releases endorphins and much more besides. Still there's a disturbing lack of it out there. The digital world appears to be a mashup of the sublime and the ridiculous, the insufferably po-faced and trollish or the unimaginably useful and beneficial.

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The world needs to find the digital equivalent of the

Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, count to three (not five) and cast it out into the world. Society needs a Monty Python of mobile or a South Park of social. We need dozens of them. The abundance of attention, eyeballs and fingertips out there deserve things that provokes frequent snorts and occasional bellows of laughter and fun.


I'm not talking about the digital equivalent of pulling someone's finger. There will always be a place for whoopee cushions, fart apps or content that feels like a chilling premonition of Idiocracy's <span class="s1">Ow! My Balls!. My particular interest lies in the idea of mischief and (mild) mayhem as a standalone service or as something that's part of a bigger idea.

The speed at which a simple idea like this can become a business is incredible. The unlucky amongst you might occasionally get flashbacks to Farmville. Updates from that app were ubiquitous in 2009 and 2010. Like many others, my friends and I hated them. So we did something about it. We created something to screw with the people who were polluting our newsfeeds.

Enter Farmvillain. Our app allowed you to post updates that looked almost identical to those posted by its namesake. The content though, was a little different. You could give your friend's herd mad cow disease. You could salt the earth on their farms. You could burn their barns. You could do all of that and much, much more.

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What started as a reaction to some moderate annoyance turned into a phenomenon. Within weeks we had hundreds of thousands of daily active users. Within a few months, we'd reached millions of people, received a warning about getting sued by Chuck Norris and licensed the app and IP to a massive American games company.


The reason for our success was simple. In a newsfeed that was equal parts spam and oh-so-serious updates, we offered something different. Farmvillain gave users the chance to have fun at their friend's expense. We'd given people the opportunities Voltaire mentioned, and they took them. Millions of them.

In a world of perfectly shot hot dog legs against two-tone sea-and-sky backgrounds and oh-so-perfect status updates, we have a need that Maslow didn't spell out in his famous hierarchy, but one which exists nonetheless -- the need to have <span

class="s1">fun. We're going some way towards meeting that basic human requirement, but there's still a lot to do.

It's been fascinating to watch the oddball uses people find for <span class="s1">Vine, Snapchat, <span class="s1">Mindie and others. It's been incredible to see how much of an influence places like Reddit, 4chan, FunnyOrDie and others have on internet and popular culture. Then there are those ideas and apps that surprise and delight because of their sheer silliness. I love the overt stupidity behind <span class="s1">Americlap, a game where you have to clap as loud and as long as possible to keep an American flag from hitting the ground. I can't get enough of the innate simplicity of Yo (it does what it says on the tin). I'm stupidly addicted to French Girls, an app that allows random punters around the world to draw your portrait based on a selfie you submit.

What's even more interesting is the increasing amount of mischief permeating ideas and apps that have some utility value.

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There's just enough tongue in cheek in apps like Go Fucking Do It and <span class="s1">Carrot Fit to elevate them above the mundane task-tracking and myriad fitness apps already out there.

To me though, there is no finer expression of digital silliness out there than Dogecoin. There's something so utterly, perfectly bonkers about the entire universe of <span class="s1">Doge. It's a meme that grew on Reddit, made its way into the real world and spawned a currency along the way.

It's been plastered on a NASCAR car. It's been used to send the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the Sochi Olympics. You can even use it to buy <span class="s1">lemonade on a hot day. It's something that was started for fun. That fun has grown into a currency which just happens to have a <span class="s1">market cap of more than $36 million.

All of the platforms, apps and sites I mentioned above are simple ideas and simple executions. They might not be self-driving electric cars, world-changing foodstuffs or any of the other big problems people in Silicon Valleys, Alleys, Roundabouts and Oases around the world are trying to solve. That doesn't make them dumb. They all create moments that matter during people's days. They're morsels of wit and humour that give their users a lift. They make them roll their eyes, shake their heads, snort involuntarily or laugh uncontrollably. They're not complicated.


They're just fun.

As a society, we need more of those moments. Life is not a laugh-a-minute place, nor should it be -- though we'd all have better abs if it were. It can be tough, grim and difficult a lot of the time, so the things that lift us out of that need to elevate us, engage us, make us think, make us pause for a second and maybe make us laugh. We need to recognise those hundreds of opportunities for doing mischief that exist every day and start figuring out how to take them.

Eamonn Carey is a mentor at Techstars London, an advisor to Kiip and head of digital at MHP Communications in London.

You can find him on Twitter at @eamonncarey