WristRot

Doomscrolling for your wrist.

After a long day at the medium screen, you’re sitting in front of the big screen, too tired to reach for the small screen. Introducing the tiny screen.

WristRot is an infinite short-form video feed for Apple Watch: crown-driven, autoplaying, endless. Every clip is public-domain or openly licensed film — atomic-age safety films and newsreels from the Internet Archive, space launches, 1950s commercials, silent comedies scored with pre-1923 recordings, and a sprinkling of Creative-Commons modern footage — cut to six seconds and dressed in the full costume of a modern feed: usernames, likes, captions, ads.

None of it is real. The likes are fake (yours is real). Comments are disabled — you’re on a watch. The point is the costume: short-form video’s grammar is now so familiar that it works on anything, including a 1951 civil-defense film on a 46-millimeter screen. That should worry you slightly. Enjoy.

Support

Questions, bugs, existential concerns: support@samstone.org

Long-press any clip in the app to see its real source, year, and attribution (Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, or Flickr).

Sponsorship

The feed has ad slots. They currently advertise invented brands and the developer’s other apps. If you’d like your real brand in there, in deadpan 1950s-newsreel style: support@samstone.org. Flat fee, you get the screenshot rights.

Privacy

WristRot collects nothing. Full policy.

Premium Rot ($1.99, one time): removes the ads. The rot remains.