It’s This for That

A website has been making the rounds over the past few days, called It’s This for That. It’s one of those simple, satirical text generators, of which there are dozens by now. This one target’s today’s technology startups, answering the question, “Wait, what does your startup do?” with a simple this-meets-that answer. Some examples:

These generators are often amusing enough for a diversion. But I was struck this time by how plausible most of the concepts seemed. I found myself muttering, “yeah, there’s a startup like that,” or “I wouldn’t be surprised to read about that one getting funded.” I wondered for a moment if It’s This for That was a particularly adept example, but of course it’s no different from any other generator: it takes a word from bucket A and matches it with another term from bucket B.

Then it hit me: it’s not that the generator is better at matching reality, but that reality has become absurd enough to be more likely to fit the results of the generator. A kind of inflationary absurdity, in which the value of reasonableness has fallen. An Amazon for adult dancers? Why not? Salesforce.com for collegiate Jewish women? Sure! An amber alert system for parking tickets? It’ll be on TechCrunch before you can log into your social game for highway accidents!