UX, Mind Control, and being a Superhero

Too often while slaving to turn 1’s into 0’s we forget that coding is, in fact, a superpower. And not just because you can talk to robots (which is, itself, super dope): if you code you have the ability to turn thoughts in your head into apps that induce those same thoughts in your users’ heads.

Really. I mean it: this is a superpower. Dr. Charles Xavier status.

When you design software, you are creating a tool that will induce certain patterns of neural activity in the brains of your users as they use your app. And in the act of using your app, your users agree to let you steer their thoughts and behaviors for a few moments. Every component you build will influence some neurons to fire and others not to in deliberate ways. Your users’ attention, their emotions, their actions, and their nascent habits — for just a brief part of their day — are yours.

So if you’re designing apps, you aren’t just designing software: you’re designing minds.

30 years ago we could have dismissed this; very few people interacted with software, and only sparsely at that. But in 2016 everyone’s a software person. Because unless you live under a rock in remote Mongolia, you live inside software now (but let me not dismiss remote Mongolia: Android’s penetration in the greater Chinese market has been stellar.). Bottom line: if you’re interested in participating in the Post-Industrial world, you’re gonna spend most of your waking time in software.

So in the same way that a construction architect controls how people can use a space (as an emergent property of her design), software architects now have an increasingly large power over how people think. At the scale of billions of minds. With almost no marginal cost per user. And almost no regulation. That’s freaking [terrifying/awesome]. And as new tools of automated persuasion emerge that amplify this existing power further, we’re charged to pause and take stock of what we’re building and why we’re building it. (Disclaimer)

When a developer builds an app, she’s taking a stance on how people should live. How they should behave or think. She does this through countless small design decisions while building her app: what sorts of user behaviors will her app have? What behaviors will it encourage? Discourage? We know how different design decisions can sway or bias users towards or away from different action paths. But the UI buttons have to get put somewhere. And a choice about font size or font color has to get made eventually, right? So as she makes these decisions — even as mundane or purely ornamental as they might seem — she is influencing how people will behave. Should the interface for transferring cash from my checking to my savings account be easy to find? Or hard to find? And what does that say about whether or not I should be saving money? While every users’ path advancing through her app will be different, the design decisions she makes can load the die. She is deciding how users’ behavior — and minds — will work. In a larger sense she is shaping more than how her users will aggregately behave, she’s realizing a statement about how they should behave.

Each choice we make — as toolbuilders — promote or condone different behaviors, different ways of being. Users start forming habits in response to our apps. If we’re talking about a single person using a single app forming a single new healthy habit, this is a delightful vignette. The kind of thing you’d see in an ad. A young boy beats childhood obesity in a single montage with some luck, the help of his digital coach, and a quenching Diet Coke. Super cute.

But we’re talking about the whole net here. The greater Post Industrial world. All of us, glued to our devices, constantly being molded by the software we inhabit.

Through this lens, the imperative to use your developer superpower for good feels a hell of a lot stronger. Here there are no neutral design decisions. No button is ‘just a button’. Our decisions to include one app feature at the expense of another is not just a development priority problem, it’s an aesthetics problem of the human condition. We are, through our products, setting the boundary conditions for how people will think, work, play, and love. Though certainly we never requested this responsibility, the nature of our work now begs of us: what is the right and proper way people ought live? And however we answer that question — whatever we build — that’s what people will do. That’s how they’ll live. And that’s a huge burden.

So, if there are no neutral consequences to what we build and how we build, we need to make stuff that encourages human thriving.

I’m feeling out what that code means to me. And what it could mean to all of us who make software. This problem is way bigger than me. It’s rife with contemporary extensions of other classic ethics problems. I don’t have final answers and I’m certain to refine this thesis with time. But I think I like “encourage human thriving” so far.

Of course, “human thriving” could be casually dismissed as a blasé trope, naively optimistic, or an over-generalizing catch-all. But the alternatives to this code feel worse to me. They either deny the accelerating role software plays in shaping us (a dangerous option), or they throw up their hands in a dismissive and fatalist “not my problem” or “so it goes”. Hip, but distasteful.

So before you shave your head, purchase a cape, or start looking at hollowed-out skull-shaped volcano islands on Westside Rentals, consider Uncle Ben and the ethical imperative you have to use your mind control for good. Many of the most tenacious problems in the Post-Industrial world (and increasingly the Emerging world too) are largely problems of motivation and behavior (think: Type-II Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease, Debt). And we’re not dumb: apps alone won’t fix the world. But there are still low-hanging-fruit digital solutions to some of these yet unbuilt. And you are a developer. So pick a hard problem. Something that hurts, or something worth solving. And start building.

Go be a superhero.