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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.

In terms of identity, we don't just have to look at the modern 21st century to see that singular identity is too narrow. How many great historical authors and politicians wrote under pseudonyms?

The Supreme Court recognized this in 1995 when Justice Stevens wrote "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular."

That said, the author is either intentionally misleading or hopelessly naive. The vast majority of big-money startups (venture funded and making a lot of noise, the kind we hear about) are only interested in money, and the fastest way to make a lot of money is to get people with extra money to spend it on your product or service. Business isn't charity.

And as for Zuck, I'm confident he doesn't believe his "lack of integrity" line about identities. That's just a soundbite. What's almost certainly really in Zuck's head: "Having two identities for yourself is an example of decreasing your value to advertisers, our actual customers."

The empathy problem is a symptom, not the disease. Or possibly the excuse.

It has become fashionable to dismiss the humanities and arts not because of an inability to see outside of one's own bubble, but because it isn't directly linked to profit. The result is that any university context that probably won't result in research grants, business endorsements, or endowments later down the road is relegated to TAs or worse, online-only classes.

And, yes, as a result of this, many people can't see outside the context of problem space that will result in steady, short-term revenue.

It's perfectly sensible economics 101 (a subject which is very popular these days) in a country like the US with such great inbred enthusiasm for capitalism. If there is money to be made, people will find reasons to be excited about making it.

"It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices..."

Steve Jobs

"The liberal arts get short shrift in Silicon Valley"

Steve Jobs had something to say about that: "..it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing..."

Is this article really trying to say that one should not pursue a particular business model if that business model happens to hurt others?

Ah yes, those fucking selfish SV people. The fact that these people invent services to edit annoyance out of one's life is horrible. (insert eyes rolling here)

Seriously, I could practically taste the bile dripping off of those words as the author decried services which handle groceries and parking. What's the goal of that paragraph? Are we supposed to feel bad some people trade money for time? Guilty? Angry? My read is that they're trying to direct moral outrage at something, but didn't quite get around to telling me what or why I'm supposed to be outraged.

I'm starting to think "SV/startups suck because.." is the new rehash of "I quit $social_network and you should too" from a year or two ago. It's tired, it's preachy, it's shrill, and it doesn't contribute to any kind of productive discourse.

That essay is surprisingly scattershot and disorganized for a humanities doctoral candidate, much less one from Stanford. It's all over the place.