hot cousins near you
Sup spammin’ fam, Már is back to brighten your day. Today’s topic: incest.
Now, like most of you, I haven’t been able to go to parties in the last few months. Of course that sucks, but I’ve found there's a fortunate by-product of not being able to meet new people over drinks. I no longer get the question “isn’t it true that you have an app to stop you from fucking your cousin?”
Wait, what?
Lemme explain. I’m from Iceland and whenever I tell people that, I get the usual fawning "OMG I’ve always wanted to go" or "I visited last year AND IT WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE ON EARTH AND I WANNA POKE MY EYES OUT BECAUSE THEY'LL NEVER WITNESS SUCH BEAUTY AGAIN" — you know, the usual.
But there’s also one myth that almost every single person I’ve met seems to believe:
“You guys, have like, a dating app that checks whether you’re too related to date, right? You know, cuz all the incest.”
False.
Back in 2013 (seven years ago!), some jokesters at the Icelandic ‘Sad Engineer Studios’ created a feature to test out smartphones’ ‘bump’ function for a genealogy app. They jokingly named it Sifjaspellsspillirinn (gotta love the Icelandic language), or the ‘Incest Desistor/Disruptor’ where you’d ‘bump phones, before you bump uglies.’
The world media absolutely LOVED this story — LOL these sheep farmers on the edge of the world have an app to keep them from fucking their cousins — and threw out headlines such as “Some Icelanders Are Accidentally Dating a Relative and Now There’s an App for That,” “Kissing cousins? Icelandic app warns if your date is a relative,” and the BBC even doing a special video segment titled “Icelandic phone app stops you dating close relatives.”
But let me be clear, I’ve never met an Icelandic person using a ‘cousin dating app’ or the ‘bump uglies’ feature, ever. You hear that, BBC?!
These are the nerds responsible for me having to answers questions about incest at every single party.
...but if I’m being completely honest, the reason why this myth is still being brought up in random parties, seven years after its inception, is because it’s also kinda true.
In Iceland, we have incredibly detailed genealogy records going back to basically the first settlers in 874. Those records have also been digitized and *sigh* it’s also now an app called Íslendingabók, a.k.a. ‘The Book of Icelanders.’
You can look up any other Icelander in the app, and get a detailed outline of how exactly you’re related — and most of us Icelanders are.
We aren’t that related though, and it's a small country so we know who's supposed to be on our no-no list for dating (although we only draw the line at 3rd cousins, rest is our sexual playground).
So when Icelanders throw big festivals, odds might only be 1/1000 that you might hook up with your cousin. But as Hafsteinn Einarsson with the University of Iceland’s Social Science Research Institute put it: “Although the odds are small for an individual, the odds 1/1000 mean that such incidents can occur regularly in society. People simply have sex that often.”
In conclusion, technically you could use the genealogy app to check if you’re dating your cousin (my girlfriend and I are 7th/8th cousins), but it’s not made for that. However, that’s a much more boring story for the outside world.
Anyways, at least you’ve now got a fresh and boring new anecdote on Icelandic incest tech which you can whip out at your next party (which I guess will be in 2021?). You’re welcome.
Top trending tech news
🤖 Microsoft’s pause on facial recognition sales could speed up federal rules (Neural)
🎮 Sony revealed the Playstation 5 (TNW)
What we’re talking about
Zoom justice, vaccines, and Quibi...
👀 How fair is 'Zoom justice?'
💉 Here's an informative coronavirus vaccine tracker. (NY Times)
🐦 Twitter's new test will guilt you for retweeting unread articles.
🚗 Uber and Lyft will risk closure in California if they don’t provide employee benefits to drivers.
🤔 How can we turn filming the police into the end of police brutality? (MIT Tech Review)
💻 Tech and engineering terms such as 'master' and 'slave' might need an update. (CNET)
🤖 Quibi’s app is slowly improving — but is the world ready for it?
🚲 Uber is scrapping its unusable Jump ebikes.
Tweet of the day
Pretty ugly poll
Last time, Callum asked if three hours a day too long to spend on your phone. 62% of you said "Hold my beer and check out THESE Screen Time stats."
Today:
Dating your third cousin is...
● Crime against nature!
● Fun story for family gatherings
We'll leave you with this...
Love you, mean it,
TNW Editorial
