I don't believe that the article's criticism would be effective also against art (also, games can be art) -- striving to make something beautiful that illustrates the human condition or makes us feel something, is a non-trivial effort; art can galvanize us socially [0] [1] and can effect meaningful change.
While Yo may prove to have some value, the author's post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.
None of those fields beat the "change the world" drum as hard as tech startups do. This article seems to be an attempt to an attempt to reconcile action and rhetoric by asking "us" to live up to it.
So yes, you can poke the hole that you do. But that's just pretending to miss the point.
Personally, I think the reconciliation is rhetoric coming back to earth. It's self-perpetuating saccharine and delusion that should probably stop.
There are people that care about the things that you care about, and there are people who make apps like Yo. The latter aren't listening, the former have already heard the message.
Ditto. While I'm never going to use this Yo here thing, I don't consider it to be something that never should have existed.
Yo and the mere fact that it exists means that the per-unit cost, monetary or in terms of effort, of making something more useful has fallen, once again. The barrier of entry for something more innovative than Yo has dropped and people, at large, have become just that tiny bit more receptive to something even more interesting than Yo.
Ten years ago, just the concept of Yo actually working and having a user base in the millions would have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. If aspects of the present might be a little over the this-is-amazing hill, then that's not too much of a doomsday portent for the future as it's being made out to be.
With the exception of games, the items you mention aren't distracting much engineering talent from solving the big stuff. With $1.2m, Yo can directly compete for talent that might otherwise go to graduate school or make progress in a more serious venture.
Right. It's just distracting chefs, artists, ecologists, photographers, etc. Clearly these people neither have engineering talent nor could contribute in any other way to McCann's chosen causes.
Engineers maintain the world that we see. They build roads, bridges, the internet, and so forth.
Artist (writers, game designer, etc etc) create things that we can enjoy using the infrastructures that engineers built. Without these artistic creations, the world would be a very boring place.
More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn't care for.