Mayor of Nowhere

Foursquare’s pitch was always a little strange when you looked at it directly: you go somewhere real, you tap your phone, and in return you get a badge. Imaginary mayoral status over your dentist’s waiting room. The pleasure was thin but it scratched something—the urge to leave a mark, to have your presence somewhere counted.

Placescore, which launched in 2014, tried to add competitive teeth to that premise. Instead of just checking in, you sorted colored dots and played a quick game at whatever location you’d walked into. Beat the other players, claim the venue. The mechanic was slightly more engaging than a rubber stamp, and slightly less dignified, but it pointed at the same desire: presence as possession.

Location apps promised to layer meaning onto geography—to make the map personal, to turn a neighborhood into a record of your passage through it. What they mostly delivered was a gamified logbook. I am here. I was here. I win.

The whole genre quietly collapsed. Foursquare is a business-intelligence company now. The checking-in era dissolved into Instagram geotags and Snap Maps and whatever comes next. The need to say I was here and have someone confirm it isn’t going away—we just keep finding new containers for it, each one a little more frictionless and a little less honest about what we’re actually doing.