You Don't Have to Save the World with Your Gadget

And I really wish you’d stop pretending you can. It is perfectly all right just to have a little thing that makes people happy to use it. You do not, as a business, need to pretend that you are doing anything else other than making a neat little thing that people will enjoy. Because when you pretend otherwise, you can sound kind of silly.

To wit: the Daylight DC1. It is tablet with an e-ink like screen. It is simialr to those of the Kindle, for example, but can supposedly refresh at rates that can allow you to run videos and other graphical elements on them that are currently out of the state of the art for e-ink devices. It seems a potentially neat little device, combining the ese of reading and long battery life of e-ik devices with the interactivity of iPad like devices. Like I said, neat. Probably not 729 dollars neat, but still: neat.

And that should be enough! It is fine to make neat things! We all like neat things! But the CEO of the company producing it cannot, apparently, just make a neat thing. Nope — it has to be world changing in some way. See, this also doesn’t emit a lot of blue light. Blue light is something that supposedly, though the science on this is shaky, make it hard for you to sleep and exacerbates eye strain. This lack of blue light, apparently, will increase the great literature in the world.

No, seriously:

Daylight CEO Anjan Katta has said he started the company to both help himself combat eyestrain and distraction as well as to try to redefine our relationship with gadgets altogether. In recent months, he’s been waxing poetic a lot — particularly on crypto-friendly podcasts; Katta is evidently a big Bitcoin fan — about the problems with modern devices. “The thing I like to think about is,” he said on the Healthier Technology podcast last year, “what would have happened to, like, Tolstoy if he grew up like this. What would have happened to Maya Angelou if she had a distracting, blue light-emitting phone? Would she have still been able to write the poetry she did?

That is nuts. I promise you, mate, Maya Angelou would have been just fine with a little blue light in her life. And even if you want to argue that our devices are distracting, that is because the software on them is designed to engage us, designed to be distracting. Something a piece of hardware is going to have limited, at best, impact upon.

This kind of nonsense infects the business world., especially the tech business world. Everything is going to change the world. Everything is earth shattering. Everything is more important than the last thing. Part of this is obviously self-serving. If Uber for Guillotines is going to change the world, and is the Most Important Thing Ever in the History of Ever, then who the fsck is the government to regulate it?

A bigger part of this ridiculous notion, I think, is the desperate desire to pretend that they are important. They cannot or do not accept the notion that every human being is intrinsically important, and so they must justify to themselves and to us why they deserve the money, power, and accolades that capitalism accrues to them. It cannot be a function of luck and systematic power. No, they must be more important than doctors, teachers and firefighters! Must be! After all, they are removing blue light from the world! Maya Angelou is depending on them! Don’t you understand?!?

People have value just by being people. By participating in society, by treating each other well, by trying to make the world a little nicer everyday — that is value enough, worth enough. Not everyone has the calling or temperament to be a doctor or a teacher or a firefighter. Some people tinker. Some people create. Some people just get a job to pay for life and throw their passions into their hobbies or their friends or their families. And the world is made better by all of those people. It would be better still if certain businesspeople looked at teachers and nurses and firefighters and thought “Nice work, thank you!” rather than “I have to prove I am better than them!”

Maya Angelou would understand.