How to Reach the Unconverted?

Someone recently re-tooted a link to Donald Norman’s article from 2019 about how most modern design is actively hostile to the aged: labels that cannot be read without a flashlight and magnifying glass, touch screens that cannot be used by people whose eye-hand coordination is not what it was, and so on. It reminded me that I hadn’t praised Johnson and Finn’s excellent book Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population in a while, so I tooted about that.

One of the first replies said, “This is great, but it opens with a hideous flaw: an appeal to businesses, founded on what great consumers old people can be.” Coincidentally, I had also just tooted that I’m currently forcing myself through a textbook on ethics for engineers, and the first answer it gives to, “Why be ethical?” is, “Studies show that ethical companies are more profitable (though only in the long run).”

So here’s my problem. On the one hand, I strongly object to treating profit as the unanswerable root justification for everything. On the other hand, “treat people decently because it’s the right thing to do” doesn’t change minds. It doesn’t convince people who aren’t already convinced, particularly not 20-something straight white/Asian male programmers who’ve grown up on a toxic diet of whatever misogynist bullshit YouTube’s algorithms are pushing these days. This is why I haven’t tried to write Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code: I haven’t yet thought of a way to make it appealing to people whose minds we need to change.

I despise Freakonomics, but I can’t help but admire how well crafted it was. Instead of saying straight out, “All human activity can and should be explained in terms of selfish profit maximization,” the authors sidle up to the reader and say, “Psst—hey buddy, do you want to feel smarter than everyone else?” Their convoluted just-so stories range from interesting to banal to ridiculous, but were possibly the most effective propaganda of the last fifty years, and I don’t know of any riposte from my side of the house that’s half as engaging. We hector when we should seduce; we write as if being right was enough, and then wonder why we keep losing fights.