In Defense of Fart Apps
The Significance of Fun
I recently had the privilege of attending Google Zeitgeist, an annual invite-only event hosted by the search giant, where luminaries gather to share ideas on how to change the world.
We heard speakers like Malcolm Gladwell and Larry Page, or a doctor who cured cancer using HIV, and a kid who achieved fusion at the age of 14.
There were many tear-jerker moments, like when one of Dr. June’s patients related how the HIV experiment miraculously saved his life. Or when Gabrielle Giffords walked gingerly onto stage and mustered her strength to remind us all to “fight, fight, fight” against gun violence. I was continually humbled, moved and motivated to accomplish more and think bigger.
YET in the midst of this full throttle do-gooder reverie, there was a moment when my BS radar went off in a major way.
It was during Pablos Holman’s speech. Pablos is this really impressive hacker dude who started an invention lab that attempts to solve the world’s biggest problems, like eradicating malaria, and developing cheaper ways to keep things cold. Mad props where deserved.
What got me, though, was when he started ranting about all the smart kids he can’t convince to work for him because they’re WASTING THEIR TIME MAKING FART APPS. Stop making fart apps, he urged, and join him in his fight to do something meaningful.
It’s easy to ridicule entertainment apps, especially if you’ve devoted your life to more obviously samaritan pursuits. Maybe Pablos is too busy saving the world to have fun, but he’s overlooked something important in the process, about the very people he’s trying to save:
People want to have fun.
So it follows, technologies that aim to make the world a smarter, more equitable, and more productive place manage to reach lots of people, more often than not, by entertaining them.
Take electricity, for example. As discussed in a recent NYTimes op-ed, electricity adoption in the third world is being driven by people’s obsession with soap operas. Or cell phones. It turns out that farmers in India care more about messaging their friends than about accessing realtime crop prices:
“Too many people presume that what the poor want from the Internet are the crucial necessities of life. In reality, the enchantment of the Internet is that it’s a lot of fun. And fun, even in poor countries, is a profound human need.”
Have you ever seen a freezer in the third world? It’s rare, but when you find one, it’s usually full of ice cream.
Listening to Pablos, I realized how easy it was to waste all your time trying to change the world, while missing the point entirely. People care, first and foremost, about happiness.
How can any of us make the world a better place without understanding that most basic human need?
Happily, there were some samaritans on stage that seemed to get it. One of the most dazzling presenters,Debbie Sterling,is a female engineer from Stanford who created the hit toy GoldieBlox, with the goal of sparking young girls’ interest in engineering. Joel Klein, former Chancellor of New York City Schools, said that one of the biggest problems in education today is that we bore our kids to death.
As we barrel through life trying our best to have more impact than the guy sitting next to us, let us not forget to stop from time to time and ask ourselves this: can we truly impart happiness to others without first pursuing it ourselves?
