Impeaching Peach — The Illusion of “Magic” Isn’t So Peachy
The “Curated Self” refers to the personality people portray on social media platforms. On sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, people mostly show only the good side of their lives, not the bad. Peach is another new platform that allows people to create the illusion of their best moments. On Peach, you can use “magic words” that “give you quick access to fun and insightful things to share”. For example, you can post the current weather, the percentage of your battery, the song you’re listening to, or the amount of steps you’ve taken today. Peach seems great, but it’s just another app that lets people be fake.
Most people are very self conscious about what others think of them, so they curate themselves online to appear perfect. Instead of taking a selfie and instantly posting it, there’s a process of perfectionism. Is the angle right? — No, retake it. The lighting seems a little off, gotta add a filter! We become magicians and disguise our illusions as authenticity.
To criticize Peach directly, their UI easily allows people to be fake. I can type “move” which fetches the amount of steps I’ve taken today so I can post it, but I can also just create a new message with the feet emoji 👣 and type a false number of steps I’ve taken today. This is something that can be fixed in future updates, but the real point of this article is to call out the production of these types of apps, and focus on something that matters more.
We don’t need more platforms that allow people to brag and only show their happy moments. On the other side lies their unhappy, sad, and fragile moments. We should be focusing on building disruptive platforms that help people feel important other than how many likes they can get on a post.
// they don’t want you to plug in your article
I’d like to give a couple examples of what the creativity in Silicon Valley should be iterating on. With my colleague Freddie, we worked on Entangled, which is an Android watch face that passively solves the problem of loneliness. I’m also currently working on Impulse, which connects you to people who want to do the same activity as you right now — making people feel like there’s always someone there for them. As my colleague Freddie wrote in his article, we should aim to make people feel significant in this world. Right now the trend is gaining likes, but we should innovate on human connection; something that can’t be bought like followers, because it’s priceless.
// a major 🔑 to virality is controversy, just know. bless up 🙏
Since Peach was created by one of the founders of Vine, and Vine was “hacked” by a teen, and I’m not a teen, I thought it would be interesting to see if media publications would still repeat history and write an article with buzzwords like “Genius Young Adult Crashes Peach With Large Cat GIFs”, or something like that.
Peach’s API contains “width” and “height” attributes for images within messages. If I send an image on Peach, in this case, a cat GIF, I can modify the network request and change, say, the height, to be something absurdly large. The Peach server doesn’t validate the size of the images, and accepts the request. When the client loads the image, it loads it at the size the server responded with. A malicious user could do this (not me), either making the height a semi-large number, which would force users to scroll for an eternity in their feed, or a hugeee number, which would crash the device of anyone loading the image. You can also intercept some other network requests to spoof some things like your current location (fly me to the Moon?). If you’re bored and want to crash your phone, you can see the “epic hack” in action by adding me on Peach (username: CaliAlec). I’ll be eating some 🍑 until Peach fixes this issue and ruins my fun. 😂
