Calm technologies that excite me

Summary

I believe that technology should be an enabler, not a subjugator. The tinkerers that love messing with dials and diving into code should continue to do so! But otherwise, technology should help you do a thing and then stand back as you hold the reins of your human experience. I’ll try to write more about this later on. For now, though, my main gripe with my tech interactions is how everything has steps. I have to jump through multiple hoops to reach the one thing I want to do in the moment. And even when I am doing a thing, there’s always something else that’s trying to grab my attention — an SMS, a UPI reward unlocked, or a spam call for a credit card. Even when the device isn’t trying to distract me, I now have an inbuilt Distractor 5000 in my head that impulsively checks all communication channels, just because it can. The drawback of having a rectangle that can do everything is that it can do literally everything, all the time. That can be, safe to say, quite turbulent. An image of happy times with my Kindle and iPod Shuffle. There was a brief Golden Age I experienced in middle school; I would use a Kindle for reading, my mom’s iPod Shuffle for listening to music, and the family computer for any Internet shenanigans. Time felt more dedicated and worry-free back then, even if that’s partly because I was still in school. :P Replicating that exact setup today would have its own problems, ofcourse — music players would be more useful if they had Bluetooth, and e-readers would be more useful with an independent Internet connection (and without companies locking down the software). But we’ve gotten good at building devices that communicate well with each other, and can do more things when they are offline. What I dream of is an era of Focused Compute™, where devices target one human function and exist as a thin layer to smoothly do that function. What excites me is that we’re already getting there, from new competing entrants to old products that are being seen in a d...