“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.”
NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it: parks, cafes, street corners and other public places.
Other users come, but people “meet without meeting.” Users arrive alone, unplugged and aren’t allowed talk to anyone, presumably taking comfort in the fact that other NoSo users are there sharing their experience. “Allow the NoSo experience to envelope you,” the site suggests. The video on the home page of the site describes the other details. A sample event is here.
It’s an obvious play on Flash Mobs, although, of course, without publicity.
This also appears to be a semi-serious endeavor.. The NoSo founders (Artists Christina Ray and Kurt Bigenho) were interviewed by 10ZenMonkeys:
We invite people to take a break from their every day experiences carrying around laptops and cellphones, and give them the chance to just disengage from the noise, the social network, the constant communication that’s going on around us all the time. We let them just experience the absence of that — the feeling of being without all those distractions. And a NoSo could happen in a number of different places. It could happen on a street corner, or in a cafe, or in an installation in a gallery setting.