Who Is The End User?

On Theology and Product Design

I’m hosting an “Ask Me Anything” series with Interintellect on Philosophy, Theology, Spirituality, and Poetry. The first salon is January 27th at 8:30 PM EST. Reserve your ticket here.

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Arvind Narayanan tells a parable about the Ed tech company Blackboard:

Arvind Narayanan @random_walker

My university just announced that it’s dumping Blackboard, and there was much rejoicing. Why is Blackboard universally reviled? There’s a standard story of why "enterprise software" sucks. If you’ll bear with me, I think this is best appreciated by talking about… baby clothes!

I’m partial to the story, because I used Blackboard as an undergrad and found that it did not spark joy. Narayanan’s point is that Blackboard wasn’t made for students or teachers, but for administrators, and that’s why it’s bad. A product’s fate is dependent on its “end user.” This is a kind of Aristotelian argument. The end user is the “telos” at which a product should aim. Pick the wrong aim and you will design for the wrong thing.

This line of thinking got me contemplating the history of philosophy and theology in terms of the question of who is “the end user”:

Zohar Atkins @ZoharAtkins

The end user is Leviticus: God Deuteronomy: Community Prophets: The Poor Plato: The Soul Aristotle: The Rational Animal Kant: The Universal “I” Hegel: The Absolute World Spirit Marx: The Proletariat Freud: The Unconscious Baudrillard: The Matrix Levinas: The Other Zen: Nothing

If you design a religion to serve God it will feel very different than if you design it to serve people, or a specific demographic of people. A lot of theological and philosophical debates turn on the question of identifying the end user.

Take Marx. Marx was very pro-worker, seeing capital as fundamentally extractive and exploitative. But Marxist thought, because it is into labor, is not so friendly to those who cannot work. The socialist utopians with whom Marx tangled believed people had a right not to work. The end user of Marxism isn’t the unemployed person, but the factory worker.

In Plato, the end user is the virtue-seeking soul, not society as a whole, which may arguably suffer if everyone just retreats into the pursuit of private virtue (at least, this would be the Machiavellian argument).