Pirate's Cove

Grist writer Holly Richmond is really pumped up about this

There’s no reason for offices to be lit up all night if no one’s around. If seeing a bright skyline pisses you off as much as it inspires awe, LightsOut will help you channel your annoyance.

The app LightsOut was just born at Boston’s Cleanweb Hackathon earlier this month, where it won the grand prize, so you can’t blame creator Spencer Lawrence for not having a slick, fully functional app yet. (It should be more user-ready in seven months, after help from an accelerator program.) Lawrence, a former energy auditor, and his friend John Massie got plenty of inspiration for LightsOut just by walking around during the hackathon:

It’s not fully developed quite yet, doesn’t seem to be working well on the web, but it is coming (from the link in the second paragraph excerpt)

The idea of LightsOut–a new, and as yet not fully developed app–is to give people that power. It’s a way for people who care about inefficiency and unsustainable behavior to report on it. Think of it like a crowdsourced energy audit.

Seems as if this is a great harassment tool. Back to Grist

So rather than spewing a frustrated sigh at energy waste, you can take action by snapping a photo, uploading it to LightsOut, and briefly describing the issue. (Well, you might wanna wait til the app’s fully functional.) It’s not just for electricity waste, either — leaky faucets and the like are fair game, too. Maybe as with street harassment reporting app Hollaback, LightsOut will bring attention and change behavior.

I reckon that Holly missed the point of Hollaback, bless her heart. Hollaback looks to stop sexual harassment (mostly along typical left wing lines, but, standard harassment, such as posting nude photos for purpose of blackmail). LightsOut could be deemed a form of harassment.

Maybe we need to create an app to upload photos of Warmists being hypocrites?