Send Your Kid To App This Summer: There's A Camp For That

This summer, more young people than ever will be engaged in app development. When you think of app designers, you probably imagine shaggy 25 year olds with an idea for a hyper-efficient mobile payment system burning in their hearts like a $1.75 Jesus candle. Ambitious, slightly insane college or post-college people will probably always lead when it comes to software imagineering, but increasingly, the very young are becoming involved. And it's bullshit.

Listening to an NPR story about teen summer unemployment, which is maybe twice what it was during boom times, I was made aware that more young people than ever are attending 24/7 app camps. The story reasoned that smart young people may not want to waste their time on low-paying jobs when they can learn valuable app skills. Parents may consider competitive college admissions and then decide to shell out a huge wad of cash in exchange for life skills in the unreality industry. I suppose it has a sickening logic to it: if you can afford to keep your kid out of the workforce, why not send them to the trendiest, most sickeningly competitive and failure-ridden sector of the economy?

App camps like iD (internalDrive), located at over 60 universities in the USA teaches skills in both user experience and coding, while feeding the neoliberal job anxiety of parents who can afford $3,500 for two weeks of 24-hour supervision, meals, and classes. According to the site, coding curricula includes iPhone and Android SDK, Objective-C, Xcode, as well as Java. They also teach robotics, so eventually the computers will be able to code themselves and develop a broken education system of their own.

To be fair, my problem with app camp is the same problem I have with all app culture. I'm just picking on app camp because it targets impressionable high schoolers. The reason I don't like apps is because they feed off venture capital hype and tend to draw valuable attention and resources away from real problems business people need to solve: the broken financial sector, energy, food insecurity, etc.

All the smart ambitious people my age are working on apps, when they should probably be building real-life businesses with higher profit margins and more real potential to fix problems and create jobs. App culture, rather than solving problems from scratch, frequently just consolidates all existing virtual experiences (gaming, online shopping, social networking) on to one ubiquitous personal computer. Efficient? Yes. Profitable? For some. Good for the economy? Ask the people who used to make calculators.

To be fair, the debate about whether technology creates or destroys jobs is a long and contentious one. There is no consensus about the role of technology in the economy. Economists on both sides point to an increase in wages and quality of life throughout the industrial revolution – but beyond that (and especially in the first decade of the 21st century) there is no agreement. My instinct is that technology has probably hit a Malcolm Gladwell-esque tipping point, when it comes to its influence on quality of life. Think: reality TV, Predator drones and 3D porn.

For kids in app camps, technology certainly virtualizes real human experiences – summer is spent with a screen instead of over a grill or mowing a lawn. And this becomes a problem for the economy of older people as well. We can't fix this global shitstorm by living in a 24/7 augmented reality video game – even if something along those lines is inevitable, in terms of advancing consumer technology. Real people need real jobs, not half-baked ideas for helping people interact with less “friction.”

At least we know what we’d have done at app camp.

On the last day of camp, a boy was reluctant to leave: He still had no idea how to fix the User Experience on his Virginity Reducer App.

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