App Design for the Impractical, Pt. Two
Common sense is that not everything that makes us happy necessarily makes us well, and not every act toward well being will make us happy. This key issue is at the heart of many critiques of Bentham’s Utilitarianism, and something that his pupils have and still continue to struggle with.
Both hardware and software can make people happy without necessarily contributing to their well being. Hardware first: people are alternately addicted to food, drugs, shopping and relationships (to name some notables). Although in some proportion anyone of them can be called “good”, the elation they create can distract from their ill consequences. Obesity, neurological disorders, debt and co-dependence can all be consequences of the unlimited pursuit of happiness (or some other subjective experience that we confuse for happiness).
Challenging both the Utilitarians and Kant (who is not yet discussed in this series), Friedrich Nietzsche launched a revolution in Modern ethics when he called on the virtue theorists of Ancient Greece to explain the difference between Good and Evil. Something is good when it achieves its purpose, he echoed. However in Nietzsche’s view, the purpose of each individual thing was to have power over every other thing. St Augustine (354–430 A D) called this “libido dominandi”, but as a Christian saint he obviously did not celebrate it. The phenomenon is more famously known as the “will to power”.
Now for software: that’s what Top Ten was for. This application was meant to maximize the immediacy of content delivery by revolving around the top ten most recent headlines at any given moment, and allow users to interact with each other regarding those headlines. In the Modern Era, we often confuse what is new for what is good and call it “progressive”. I as the designer meant to capitalize on this confusion. If I were to deploy the app and it blew up, I would reap the benefit. Meanwhile the users would become similarly infatuated through the benefit of constantly staying current, and also trying to outwit other users with their hot takes regarding whatever headline passed through the pipeline.
In truth Nietzsche’s revival reflects the virtues of Homer’s Dark Ages (1200–800 B C) rather than the philosopher whom we know to be its most famous champion. Aristotle, writing as much as a thousand years after Homer and about two thousand years before Nietzsche approached virtue with a little more subtlety. Each thing might essentially seek to persist in a power struggle with every other thing, but there’s a difference between a tree in the forest that chokes smaller plants of the Sun’s light without remorse and a human, who is a social creature and rational. When observing the scales of different attributes that we find either valuable or corrupting, he elected the “Golden Mean” between utterly selfish, reckless or cruel behavior, and the puritanism that his teacher, Plato, was known to campaign for.
I designed a game with a friend at the Flatiron School while learning JavaScript. It was called “World Domination.” In the game, you and two other players are politicians. You select political issues of concern in our society and can add more over the course of successive turns. Each topic has a certain number of sympathizers, and by selecting those topics you gain those sympathizers as followers. Each follower yields a point of power, and the politician with the most power at the end of four rounds wins. By designing the game, the utility I had in mind was some sort of happiness or joy in the user who played. I simultaneously meant to comment on the very disturbing nature of politicians, who seem very much to fall in line with Nietzsche’s model of a world that is simply a contest of wills. Lacking their own, some select issues based on the amount of people will agree with them.
World Domination is a gesture to that phenomenon.
Special thanks to Joe Jamsky, who developed this app with me, for staying up late.
