Comment by roughly
19 days ago
The “Calm technology” thing always annoys me, because it skips every economic, social, and psychological reason for the current state of affairs and presents itself as some kind of wondrous discovery, as opposed to “the way things were before we invented the MBA.” A willing blindness to predators doesn’t provide a particularly useful toolkit.
I would be interested to hear you elaborate on this more. I feel like I almost get what you are saying but am not confident I actually understand.
Yeah, so - the whole Calm Technology(™) feels like someone looked at the dopamine casino of modern tech and said "well, this is all wrong" - which, yes - and then proceeded to try to treat it like a design problem, which it is emphatically not. Not only are the people who made the dopamine casino aware of what makes "calm technology"(™), they're experts in it, because the entire design process of most modern tech is explicitly designed not to be "calm," because the entire economic incentive structure is pushing dopamine casinos. People aren't building "uncalm" technology by mistake, they're building it because the modern tech business structure and environment rewards addictive software.
If the "Calm Tech"(™) people/institute/whatever actually wanted to move the needle, they'd be lobbying for regulations, building tools for consumers to fight back, or trying to do anything at all that actually shifts the underlying institutional and incentive structures. As it sits, they're the equivalent of a recess monitor suggesting maybe the bully would be happier if he shared the toys with the other kids - and frankly, given the degree of branding around the whole thing, it all starts to smell more like "influencer" than "genuine attempt to improve technology."