Want to Rid Yourself of the Kardashians for Good? There’s an App For That
Our collective obsession with a handful of folks by the name of Kim, Kanye, Kris, Kendall, Kylie, Kourtney, Khloe, Bruce, and, yes, even Rob is at such a fever pitch, that one developer has basically done God’s work and created a browser extension that—wait for it—scours your feed and blocks anything and everything related to the Kardashian-Jenner crew.
#KardBlock is the creation of 21-year-old British viral marketer James Shamsi, who confronted his pop culture fatigue head-on by creating a way to make the Internet a Kardashian-free zone. Can someone hand this kid the Nobel Prize, already?
“Basically, what was happening was that there were Kardashians everywhere, and I wanted to do something about that, Shamsi told The Daily Beast. “Did you hear that Kim just released a book of her selfies, like yesterday or the day before? Her selfies! I didn’t sign up to these sites to hear about things like that. I am interested in deeper issues. But every platform seems interested in Kardashian news to the point that everything else gets crushed.”
It’s a sad fact that he’s absolutely right—what started as a mindless interest in some silly reality stars has become a full-blown international fixation that drives traffic for websites, moves magazines on newsstands (ahem, Vogue) and crushes it in TV ratings—and so #KardBlock was born.
According to the Daily Beast, Shamsi says that upwards of 20,000 people have signed up for the beta version of the week-old tool, and—when it’s done—won’t only eradicate mention of the distracting family, but will try and transform your mindless consumption of infotainment.
“The concept here is to replace Kardashian links with ones to charitable causes of all kind,” Shamsi said. “But our ultimate goal is even bigger than just that. We are looking to disrupt the entire digital advertising space. We want to replace all advertising with donation links and important news widgets.”
What about the Kardashians bringing attention to the Armenian genocide, or embracing Bruce Jenner’s gender identity issues? Couldn’t that be considered important news? As the Daily Beast points out, technically, the family has never been more substantive.
“They will raise awareness for 30 seconds, and then one of them will take their top off and that will be news for days and days and days,” Shamsi said. “They could be doing great things, but they often choose not to, which to me is an irritant. So we are leveraging the power they could be using to try to do something better, not for profit.”
If you click over to #KardBlock’s site, you’ll see a manifesto of sorts, which succinctly explains the extension’s functionality:
“If there’s anything on your newsfeed, the website you’re on, whatever… we simply make it disappear .You won’t ever know the stories about the Kardashians are there, because you won’t ever see them.We are also working on customization to block content related to Justin Bieber. Why? So you can see more of the real issues.”
Whether or not his goal—admirable, certainly—will succeed remains to be seen, but it pays to know there are folks out there as bored with hearing about Kim’s hair color or Kylie’s crop tops as you are. Although, without any mention of the Kardashians, the internet will be probably sound like a lot like THIS.
