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Blockedt!

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

The video was completed in 2018 during the peak of anxiety around Facebook’s impact on the 2016 election, predating a flurry of discourse interrogating the political implications of social media: from the term “doom scrolling,” popularized during the COVID-19 lockdown to describe bleary-eyed surfing of grim news events, to the black square Instagram posts meant to signal racial solidarity during the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, but that instead prompted wide skepticism of empty institutional gestures.