It's about the history of calm technology. It should take about 3 minutes.
That's all this is.
In 1995, two researchers at Xerox PARC — Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown — hung a plastic string from a small motor in the ceiling of their office. The motor was connected to the building's ethernet cable. When network traffic was light, the string barely moved. When it was heavy, the string whirled.
They called it a "Dangling String," and it became one of the most cited examples in the history of human-computer interaction. Not because it was technologically impressive — it was a motor and a string — but because of what it represented.
The Dangling String communicated information without demanding attention. You could glance at it and know whether the network was busy. You could ignore it entirely. It lived at the periphery of your awareness, moving to the center only when you chose to notice it.
Weiser and Brown wrote a paper about this. They called the concept "calm technology" — technology that engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, moving between the two as needed. Technology that informs but doesn't demand. That exists in the room without dominating it.
They imagined a future where computers would be so woven into the fabric of daily life that they'd become invisible — not in the sense of disappearing, but in the sense of not requiring your active attention to function. Like electricity. Like running water. Like the hum of an air conditioner you only notice when it stops.
That was 1995. They were describing a world of ambient awareness, of information that flows to you naturally rather than interrupting you urgently.
Thirty years later, we built the opposite.
Phase 1 was a calm reading experience. Clean typography, no distractions, the text you came to read. Phase 2 added the standard toolkit of modern web design: cookie banners, notification popups, newsletter modals, autoplay video, chat widgets, urgency banners, and page shakes.
The article didn't change. The words were the same. But the experience was completely different. That's what anxious software does — it takes something simple and buries it under a pile of someone else's priorities.
The Dangling String worked because it respected the asymmetry between information and attention. There's always more information than attention. The string knew this — it broadcast continuously but never interrupted.
Modern software inverts this. Every app assumes it's the most important thing on your screen. Every notification assumes it's the most important thing in your day. Every popup assumes you have nothing better to do than react to it right now.
The calm alternative isn't to show less information. It's to stop assuming that every piece of information requires an interruption. The Dangling String showed real-time network data — complex, constantly changing data — and it did so with a piece of plastic and a motor. No badges. No alerts. No push notifications.
Weiser died in 1999, four years after writing the calm technology paper. He didn't live to see the smartphone, the notification badge, the infinite scroll, the cookie banner, or the chat widget. But he predicted all of it — not the specific forms, but the failure mode. He warned that as computers proliferated, the danger wasn't that they'd be too slow or too dumb. The danger was that they'd be too needy.
He was right.