Among the most irritating words to mark the digital era is “There’s an app for that.” Yes, indeed there is. There’s an app for that. For whatever it is. It’s on the fourth page of your iPhone library, buried just below Bejeweled and above OpenTable. It gets updated regularly and automatically, which is good, because you never use it. You tried once; you took three minutes to fiddle with it while watching reruns of The Office. Then you forgot you’d downloaded it. But at least the subscription is set to autorenew after the free trial ends, and you’ll never remember to cancel it, so at least you’re doing your part to enrich our era’s aristocratic overlords.

Our collective cynicism about the offerings of the tech bro intelligentsia is now such that, whenever there’s an app release, a new tool to solve an old problem, we are wary of it. The drive to app-ify every last bit of contemporary life is a toxic mix of techno-solutionism and ever-creeping capitalist takeover of every facet of existence. We are now wise to the bargain. It’s never free, the cost is the collecting and selling of our data, tracking, and oversubscribing us at every twist and turn. Distrust of the capitalist class has been amplified by tech capitalists, who often border on cartoonishly evil.

Eyeing the latest app, YouIn?, designed to anonymously facilitate unionization, I was as skeptical as ever. Unionization is the last area of working life we ought to allow the capitalist tech class to exploit. Indeed, unions ought to serve as a bulwark against the pathologies of contemporary finance and techno-solutionism. And yet, the tool could have some promise and it ought to be given a chance to show it. Every so often, an app serves a great purpose and lives up to its advertising as, if you’ll indulge the built-for-purpose phrase, a game changer.