I do not need another way to scroll. I need fewer ways. This is, I think, the most honest sentence I have written this year. It is also the one almost nobody in the technology industry will agree with — partly because it implicates them, and partly because if they agreed with it, their stock charts would melt.
The interface as a diet
Every screen I use has been designed by someone whose performance review depends on keeping me on it. This is true for the laptop I'm typing on, the phone in my pocket, the watch on my wrist. It is also true — and this is the part nobody likes — for the email client and the calendar I depend on for work I actually love.
An interface is a kind of diet. It tells you, by what it makes easy and what it makes hard, what you should eat and what you should skip. Most modern interfaces have decided you should eat in front of the TV.
If every interface is now optimised for thirty seconds of dopamine, where do we go to think for thirty minutes?
What I want, actually
I want a phone that takes longer to do unimportant things. I want a calendar that doesn't suggest a meeting at 4:55 PM. I want a writing app that lets me edit slowly, that doesn't autocomplete my third thought before I've finished the second one.
An interface is a kind of diet. It tells you, by what it makes easy and what it makes hard, what you should eat and what you should skip.
I do not, to be clear, want a return to anything. I'm not romantic about typewriters. I'm not asking to live without notifications. I'm asking for tools designed by people who have read at least one full book in the last year, on paper, while sitting still.
What's actually at stake
This is a small essay about software. It is also a slightly larger essay about civic life. Because the people who can no longer read for thirty minutes are the same people who will, this November, be asked to read four-thousand-word ballot propositions about water rights.
If we have given those people thirty-second interfaces for a decade, the propositions will lose. Not because they are wrong, but because we have made the country impatient with anything that takes thirty minutes to consider.