Calm technology

Daisy Alioto in conversation with Anjan Katta.

If you were alive this week, it was impossible to miss rampant jokes about not looking directly at the sun during April 8th’s solar eclipse—but most days, the real optical killer is in our pockets, disguised as the miniature dopamine machine I like to call my phone. We’ve recently written about software branding as well as the state of hardware—both the new toys, and the new challenges. If you liked those stories, you’ll like today’s interview with Anjan Katta, the founder behind the alluringly named Daylight Computer.

Daisy Alioto: I’ve been trying to pay more attention to what’s happening in hardware because I think the consumer relationship to hardware is shifting in real time and not enough people are talking about it outside of really tech-industry-oriented blogs.

Anjan Katta: Do you buy into the premise that hardware is nature?

DA: In my world, I’ve seen the retreat to tangible things more in categories like print books, print magazines, and stuff like perfume, things that can’t be replicated digitally. 

I think people just want things that they can hold and touch, honestly, and that’s a natural impulse, but I don’t know, I think hardware is just a reflection of our relationship to objects generally, I don’t think it’s a special category.

AK: Fascinating. 

DA: What do you think?

AK: I think no one can argue that getting more holistic is not some aspect of progress. To me, a human is somebody who is emotional, relational, social, physiological, mental, it’s the whole Howard Gardner many intelligences, all the different senses we have and the ways of being, and all the needs we have—whether you meet them consciously or they get pushed into the subconscious and you find weird ways to meet them, they exist. And so it seems to me like when you are basically disintermediating so much of our life through computational objects—it doesn’t matter what you do at the software level, it doesn’t matter if you have the greatest AI thing on top of it, so much of your experience is being impacted by the actual physical substrate and the constraints that physical substrate places. For example, I’m not going to be able to do many calls outside today on my iPhone like this because, the battery life is going to be terrible with my screen at full blast—it just becomes unrealistic to work outside. This is just not a realistic thing to do, to work outside. And so much of my life, then, has to be built around not working outside. It’s not practical to have to do this—it’s really healthy for people to be entrained with their circadian rhythms for a lot of reasons, the sounds and sights of the outdoors are immensely helpful, especially if you have ADHD.

Myopia is caused by being inside all the time. And so it seems to me that we are letting down so much of how humans work with these current pieces of computing hardware. It’s not holistic; it doesn’t look into circadian biology, it doesn't look into the way humans allocate attention. It’s all set to manipulate it. 

DA: How far back do you trace the origins of the technology and the principles of circadian rhythms that have gone into Daylight Computer? Like do you go all the way back to the sundial? When does the modern history of circadian-aware technology really start?

AK: I’m a bit of a nerd, but, to me, all of these things, whether they’re software or hardware or even business models or marketing manipulations, they’re all examples of evolutionary mismatch. 

Evolutionary mismatch is redefining the way a human is built and that a lot of these vulnerabilities and unhealthy behaviors and the path of least resistance not often being aligned with our intention, is not necessarily a bug, it’s a feature. In the sense that it is great to have an incredible orienting response when you see red back in the day, but it’s a form of evolutionary mismatch to then take that thing that was built for a certain purpose and now use it because Monica commented on something on your reel. 

It’s an evolutionary mismatch to be staring at little tiny symbols indoors all the time. Cause guess what you’re using? You’re using the ability a human developed to notice paw prints, which were the first symbols. There’s a beautiful book called The Art of Tracking and Origin of Science which talks about how the human ability to [recognize] paw prints, those were the first letters, those were the first 2D representations of 3D concepts, and that was always exercised outdoors, off of reflected light, off of sunlight. 

And so the fact that we’re taking those occipital functions and, at both a cognitive level and at a mechanical-physical-eye level, and we’re using it inside all the time, of course we’re going to have myopia. Of course we’re going to have cognitive eye strain, of course we’re going to have physical muscular strains and headaches and things like that. Just go down the list—ergonomics, distraction, addiction, opening 500 tabs, the blue light from the device, the lack of infrared from the device, the EMFs, however you want to go, every single thing is an evolutionary mismatch. And what does that mean? 

The way you solve it is you don’t work backwards from a supply chain, you don’t work backwards from Tim Cook gets 66% margin on this. You work backwards from physiology, from evolutionary theory, from deep understandings of human psychology and the way we work. And to me that’s just like a different character of person, and it’s kind of scary because sometimes your thing will be less sexy, but it’s healthier. 

There’s actually a phenomenon called screen apnea where we breathe less when we look at normal screens; this doesn’t happen on a Kindle, it doesn’t happen on paper. Literally all of us are a little more anxious and little more tight because our breathing rate gets messed up when looking at screens. That’s an evolutionary mismatch—we’re not meant to be looking at something that is emitting light that isn’t reflecting light. That’s the stars, that’s fire, the Eskimos have things they wear to stop glare from snow. For me, I like to call it, “How do we bring evolutionary harmony?” 

ICYMI