Pooper purports to be a light-hearted but ultimately serious subscription service startup that will send a "scooper" to pick up your dog's poop after you take a photo of it and tag its location. Maybe you've seen their funny, well-produced rollout video on your social media feeds or read somewhat arched brow coverage of the venture in San Francisco magazine. While Pooper is in "private beta" in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York according to a representative, it will arrive by the fall. Suuuuure.

As "the first app-based subscription waste removal service of it’s kind," the representative's statement continues, "we understand there may be an initial hesitance or skepticism about Pooper, but we are confident the public is ready to embrace such a technology." O rly???

In fact, as the "company" brazenly and, you know, sort of honestly tells us, it aims to "draw the kind of attention that becomes a water-cooler conversation of 'can you believe this is real?'" Pooper, it seems, hopes that enough people asking whether or not their effort is real will, in some sense, make it real.

"From the start we planned on a marketing first approach with the app as a way to build the brand and showcase the tech. This was originally intended as a non-traditional way to pitch for more VC, showcasing not only how great the app was, but how fun and unique the advertising and rollout could be."

So, just like any other piece-of-crap Kickstarter idea, Pooper is an advertisement for a product that really only plans to exist, that really can only afford to exist, if it convinces us it might be real. Does it need to convince us that it SHOULD be real? No. It just needs to get us talking, or so Pooper seems to think, and together we'll, like, will it into being or something. Even that isn't really true, and is at best interesting on an existential level. No, Pooper is what it smells like: a steaming pile of marketing shit, and now I feel like I need to clean my shoes. Good vid tho!

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