WHICH BRINGS ME back to seventh grade. To Mrs. Kang’s classroom. To five hundred days of Discord.
The strange thing about that grief is that it should have been avoidable. The answers were already there. Written plainly, in 1976, before most of the damage was done. We had every chance to ask not just what technology could do, but what it was doing to us.
We just had to remember. And we didn’t.
I thought about this for a long time before I understood what it meant. My first instinct was to build an app, a software solution to a social problem, which is exactly the logic that created the problem. I built some version of it, and when I sat with it I realized: this feels wrong. It felt too deliberate, too clinical, in the same way a scheduled phone call with someone you used to just run into feels strained and airless.
The problem wasn’t the software I’d built. It was that software, by its nature, asks you to perform your connection. Every app puts you in front of a mirror. Open it and you see yourself — your contacts, your relationships, your messages. That realization was the first real design decision: this couldn’t live on a phone.
The second decision came from asking what was actually lost during lockdown, specifically. Not the social events. Not even the conversations. It was the background hum of being near people you love — the awareness that your friend is somewhere in the building, that if you looked up from your work you could probably find them. That quality of connection doesn’t require attention. It lives underneath it. Any tool designed to restore it couldn’t demand attention either.
So the device I’ve been building — I call it Talkbox — doesn’t send notifications. It doesn’t have a screen. It sits in your room the way a photograph sits in your room: quietly, without asking anything of you. When a friend is nearby, in the loose sense that they’ve opened their own device, a soft light shifts. If you feel like talking, you turn a knob and your voice streams to theirs — no interface, no call screen, no little green dot. Just the sound of someone living their life next to yours, as if the distance were thinner than it is.
I only discovered afterward that this concept had a name. Mark Weiser, a researcher at PARC two decades after Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, called it ubiquitous computingI — the idea that the most profound technologies are those that disappear, weaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. He was against computers you could bring to the beach precisely because all they would do is pull your attention away from the beach and onto the box. He wanted the opposite: presence without interruption.
What I find quietly astonishing is how we got to the same place. Weiser arrived at PARC close enough to Engelbart to breathe his ideas, far enough removed to dream past them. I found Engelbart in a research library at seventeen, trying to understand why I’d lost my friends. Neither of us was looking for the other’s answer. And yet.