They said it couldn't be done, but London – already the stupidest place in the entire world – has somehow managed to become even stupider. Stupider than when it built a cable car to the middle of nowhere. Stupider than when it decided to make rickshaws a thing. Stupider, even, than when it convinced thousands of self-regarding sockless nimrods to spend two hours queueing up to buy overpriced hamburgers from a man covered in inept prison tattoos in a pop-up skip.

The culprit for this brave new dawn of stupid is an organisation called Talk to Me London. The theory is that modern city-dwellers don't engage with one another enough, and that we could create a sparkling new utopia if only we did. "Our vision," its website states, "is to build a friendlier city through encouraging small conversations between strangers."

Now, immediately, that's enough to set alarm bells clanging. Talk? To strangers? Isn't that the opposite of everything we were taught at school? I'm sure my daily curriculum involved three minutes of maths followed by six hours of being shrieked at by a policeman who was convinced that all strangers wanted to coax people into vans via a combination of sweets and puppies. And now Talk to Me London is preaching the opposite?

Surely the point of living in a city is that you don't have to talk to anybody. That's certainly a big part of why I moved to one. I grew up in a small town, where everyone knew who you were and how you were and perpetually wanted to know how your mother was doing. And while that's fine now and again, it can be incredibly constricting once you reach adolescence and start trying to carve out an identity for yourself. (Incidentally, if you are curious about how my mother is doing, the answer is: slightly annoyed about last week's column but not enough to hold a grudge now that we've had a chat and she has read it again and I've realised that I should have taken her side a bit more. Thanks for asking.)

The appeal of a big city is its facelessness. There are constantly so many people milling around that it's easy to blend in and become a blank dot in the crowd. Nobody notices you in a city, because everyone's either mucking about on their phone or imagining that they're the star of a never-ending feature film about how brilliant everyone thinks they are. That's the other good thing about cities. People move there because they're ambitious, and a big part of ambition is to apparently be self-interested to the point of total blindness. It means that cities are full of the worst people alive, but at least nobody ever wants to stop and chat.

I've been in cities where people talk to each other, you see, and it's weird. They see you using your phone and ask to borrow it so they can Facebook their mum. They go to great lengths telling you how big their house is, and that you wouldn't be able to buy a bedsit in London for the amount they paid for it. Once, while I was abroad, a man stood up in a tube carriage and started screaming "GEORGE BUSH!" at me for reasons I still haven't figured out. Another time, a businessman repeated the alphabet all the way through again and again until I gave him a doughnut. Strangers talking to each other in big cities is unnatural. No good can come of it.

The most tragic aspect of Talk to Me London, though, is how it plans to spread its message. In August, it'll hand out 300,000 badges. If you wear the badge, it means you're displaying a willingness to have a discussion with someone you don't know. The idea is that friendships will be forged, stories will be shared and we'll all thrive together under a newfound sense of grassroots community spirit. But what would actually happen is that, two seconds after you put it on, someone would come barrelling up to you without introduction and spend 45 minutes ranting on about whatever their cat did that morning, even though you're just trying to buy some Weetabix in a cornershop. Then you'll bin the badge and lock yourself away somewhere safe for ever.

It's my suspicion that we're already relying too much on badge-based communication. Women now take to public transport wearing "Baby on Board" badges; the subtext being, "I am pregnant, not overweight. I won't be mortally offended if you offer me your seat." There are wristbands you can buy to show the world that you're single and willing to be chatted up. And now we need to wear badges so that other people can talk to us too?

It's all such a faff. The logical endpoint is that soon badges will exist for every possible mood and scenario, and we'll all have to spend weeks memorising a thick highway code to figure out what they all actually mean. Which will be a waste of time, because the only one that anyone would ever wear is the one that says: "Can't you see I'm trying to play Angry Birds here?"

I'm sure Talk to Me London is a perfectly well-intentioned idea. But it's redundant. If you want to talk to somebody, the visual cues are already there. Just take a look around you. The elderly woman who looks lost and nervous and out of her depth? It's probably OK to talk to her; in fact, you're probably a bit of a monster if you don't. The surly, scowling bloke hammering a stream of angry text messages into his phone with his back to everyone? Chances are he wants to be left alone. And the nimrod with chilly ankles waiting outside a skip to pay £20 for something he could buy at McDonald's for a quid? Don't talk to him either. I mean, he might want you to talk to him. But don't. Life's too short.