Yeah, he may well be right and I might be totally barking up the wrong tree. But that just seems so depressing I can't help but tilt at this particular windmill. The hope is that his theory will become obsolete if the activity of programming changes radically enough.

I started out thinking you couldn't solve social problems with technical solutions. Now I think social problems arise in the context of configurations of technical energy barriers. Making something easier can make good behavior more or less likely to arise. So it behooves technologists to think hard about what they make easier. But this is getting abstract, and I need to show examples of what I'm trying, what I'm keeping and what I'm discarding. If you send me an email I'll show you what I have.