I find the author's contention that we can solve this by paying more attention to the liberal arts franky self-serving. He presents no evidence for his assertio

I find the author's contention that we can solve this by paying more attention to the liberal arts franky self-serving. He presents no evidence for his assertion that a) there's a lack of people with a liberal arts background in large tech companies or b) that people with such a background design better social software than those without. I see this as a structural problem rather than a problem of empathy. As long as you have one or two companies writing social software meant for universal use, you'll find areas where they lack imagination and fail to serve the interests of human beings different from them. The fact that we're trying to shoehorn everyone into One True Social Network is a bizarre artifact of the way we currently fund the Internet. The same criticisms that apply to central planned economies also hold for this kind of universal social software. Even given the smartest engineers in the world all reading Proust on weekends, it's just arrogant to imagine you can think one step ahead of billions of users, and anticipate their every need.