Your App Won't Save the World

Your App Won't Save the World
theindustry.cc

Might be a bit harsh, but nothing bugs me more than a hater or someone with a dissenting opinion that offers little-to-no actionable suggestion or thought-provoking message. I read this and think "Hm, ok".

I agree that there's an issue with grandiosity, but I'm still unsure if it's a net positive or negative for society. Out of the millions working to change the world, maybe one will develop a solution that will truly affect the lives of others for the better. Or perhaps if we lower expectations and live life only to survive, we may be happier with ourselves overall. Who knows. Perhaps the trick is both raising the bar and lowering it and pushing ourselves to be content with falling anywhere in the middle.

I do believe a lot of (most?) startup culture applies powerful minds to small problems... which is in support of your headline...

However - why not think of capitalism (and the apps it rides in on) as a medium, or a technology? In this way, it can be used to transform culture. This may not change "human nature," whatever supposed boundaries that has (fwiw, I think it will)... but capitalism&tech applied as such can absolutely save lives, if not the world.

Whatabout an app that uses our network culture to problem solve something like the spread of disease? That counts as "saving the world" in my book.

Of course, "saving the world" usually comes with a shadow of imperialism, but that is another story for another day..

I do grow tired of this idea of "primitive" people being a bunch of savages. One would think with the explosion of knowledge in anthropology we've acquired in the last century that the average person (and especially, the non-average person) would better understand just how wrong Hobbes was with his "nasty, brutish and short" comment.

Civilization as we know it is an attempt to adapt humans to societies at scale, ie. beyond ~200 or so people - and so far, it has worked badly. We're heavily optimized for tribal societies, which isn't surprising given that we developed and improved them over tens of thousands of years, compared to a mere four thousand for civilization.

Let me note that this isn't an indictment against civilization. As with any new thing (say, cars vs. horses, or guns vs. bows) the new development will initially be notably worse than the older one. Guns were around for hundreds of years before they replaced bows, and even then it took hundreds of years more before they made the leap to automatics that has made them so effective today.

Civilization is little different - we've tried all sorts of things, some of which have worked in some ways, many of which have collapsed under their own weight of corruption, inequality or other problems. And things are getting better. But this idea that "non-civilized" people are chaotic or savages really needs to go.

> In fact, if the world is to be saved, it won’t be through human devices.

> Our image of primitive man is that he was a bumbling, grunting idiot.

Since the author is Christian (shown prominently anywhere his name appears), these three sentences make me question what he means by the word 'save.' If he means it in the 'spiritual Christian sense,' then of course no app will do that. And the 'our image' of primitive man seems like the Christian one, influenced by the concept of original sin.

> The world is governed much more by human nature than we’d like to admit, and human nature doesn’t change.

It seems to me that human nature can very much be influenced by technology. Slavery used to be commonplace, with many people (including the strongly religious) having no moral opposition to it. Massive atrocities throughout history have taken place because they were outside the public eye. Hateful words were much easier to speak in the past, before being caught by a recording device was a possibility. The fact that knowledge can now be spread quicker to the rest of the world (something that apps these days can sometimes help with) keeps a lot of this 'human nature' in check.

Just looking at the world today, it's hard to say that technology has not made a significant (and probably net positive) change in how people think and behave.