Remarkably different: What is "Calm Tech"?

Remarkably different: What is “Calm Tech”?

Last week, I speculated that the Apple Vision Pro flopped not just due to its high price, clunky form factor, and limited apps and content, but something deeper — a limit to how much stimulation humans actually want from technology.

A friend of mine was more pessimistic, arguing that we have no inherent resistance to virtual reality — and that when the technology matures, most people will spend their entire lives strapped into a headset, playing vidya and watching sportsball.

It’s a disturbing thought. But it raises an important question: what does a healthy relationship with technology actually look like?

Amber Case, a user experience designer and self-described “cyborg anthropologist,” has spent years exploring this question. Her philosophy of Calm Technology offers a guiding framework. Good tech, she argues, integrates seamlessly into our lives, requires minimal attention, and supports us without demanding more of our focus or energy.

Starting with eight core principles, Case has developed a Calm Tech certification awarded to a select group of products each year. Unsurprisingly, the Vision Pro didn’t make 2024’s list. Consider three of the principles it fails spectacularly:

• Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention.
• Technology should make use of the periphery.
• Technology should respect social norms.

Strapping a bulky headset to your face, cutting you off from your surroundings, is the antithesis of what calm technology should be. It’s not just isolating — it demands you adapt entirely to its needs, rather than the other way around.

So, what does a top-scoring calm tech product look like? Enter the reMarkable Paper Pro, which earns itself a glowing review — without a glowing screen. Built on the e-ink screen technology familiar to Kindle users, all of reMarkable’s devices are designed for focused work and digital minimalism, not mindless content consumption.

A reMarkable is thinner and lighter than an iPad or Galaxy Tab, with a far longer battery life, but really, the comparison ends there. Regular tablets with snappy processors and bright LED screens can “do everything,” but that often means you never get anything done. Their infinite functionality demands constant boundary-setting — a near-impossible task, especially when the world wide web of clickbait headlines and cat videos is just a tap away from ensnaring your attention.

E-ink tablets like the reMarkable succeed as calm tech because they impose those boundaries for you. You can’t scroll Facebook, binge Netflix, or watch YouTube. And so when you pick up that device and turn it on, you’ve already made the choice to do something that asks more of you — read a book, sketch a portrait, draft an essay.

The reMarkable is a device that fits into our world, that comes to us where we are, rather than taking us out of reality and into virtual space. It asks more of us, but we get more in return. That, to me, is a much more compelling vision of technology.