Nobody Cares

• 17 January 2025
• links,
• culture,
• design,
• grant slatton,
• product design,
• society,
• usa

Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don't care.

I find myself simultaneously vehemently disagreeing with AND agreeing with Nobody Cares by Grant Slatton . Agree:

• There are many many many areas of life that suck. Like the author, I can't help myself but notice all of the poorly-designed things I encounter. Hell, I even made websites about lousy experiences.
• The world could — and very much should — be better than it is.
• People should care and strive to do good. How To Be Perfect is a great book that uses the story of returning a shopping cart to its proper place as a through line. This book feels very relevant to this article.
• Certain cultures care more than others. I think this dynamic could be in part due to collectivist vs individualist (or in America's case, hyper-individualistic) societies.
• Many aspects of modern America feel very much like solipsism run amok. America's hyper-individualistic culture doesn't yield healthy results. This article I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People comes to mind.

Disagree

• Nobody cares (at least in the design sense). I very much disagree with the sentiment that things are poorly designed because people don't care. Years of consulting has taught me that people generally do care and want to do a good — no, great! — job, but they have to contend with myriad cultural/interpersonal/power dynamics and time/money/resources/bandwidth realities. This sets up conditions where a person's willingness to go the extra mile can cross over into dangerous territory (burnout, discipline, getting fired, etc). I'd counter that people operating in systems generally do care, but the broader systems (corporations, cities, environments, governments, etc) don't have a singular conscience or perspective. Systems matter, and changing systems to prioritize and incentivize care is hard work because systems are made of people with different perspectives and priorities.
• Snowballs of care don't happen. It's a shame the author's own experience making improvements to his community didn't seem to result in a caring snowball. But there are many examples of that phenomenon happening. He's right that the amount of activists initiating positive change are relatively few, but they can create the conditions for many other people to get involved and participate at a different level. Community gardens, open source software, and lots and lots of other projects/systems have a small, passionate core and outer rings of participants and users.

I like this kind of provocative writing. It gets ya thinking!