Combs, who takes a backseat to Brown as the company’s de facto spokesperson, tends to answer questions with numbers and data, his hands twitching toward a tablet nearby. He signs his emails with emojis–a bear, a red heart, a sun–describes himself on the company’s website as an “escaped circus bear” and favors collared shirts unbuttoned to the sternum, revealing a tan wilderness of chest hair. Brown, the more garrulous of the two, is fluent in the unself-conscious informality of the West Coast tech scene. The founders of Boundless Mind are in some ways a study in opposites. It’s been marketed as a phone that should be used as little as possible. In Germany, a growing number of corporations, including Volkswagen and BMW, have begun restricting how employees can send or receive nonemergency emails after hours, and in Brooklyn, a tiny device manufacturer, Light, is promoting a new “dumb phone” that does little more than make calls.
In San Francisco, “technology mindfulness” conferences, like Wisdom 2.0, have sprung up alongside tech-free private schools, tech-free meet-ups, and apps like Moment and Onward, which are designed to help people curb their phone use. Others have championed the idea of tech detox. Former Google employee Tristan Harris and early Facebook investor Roger McNamee have accused the tech giants of deliberately creating addictive products, without regard for human or social health, and this year, two major Apple shareholders publicly called on the company to design a less-addictive iPhone. In the past year, Silicon Valley insiders have raised the alarm about the real-world impact of all this persuasive tech. “Your kid’s brain is being engineered to get him to stay on his phone.” “Your kid is not weak-willed because he can’t get off his phone,” Brown says. Snapchat’s interface distributes badges to users who maintain daily streaks–a nifty system built in part on humans’ well-studied psychological need to bank progress. Its designers determine which videos, news stories and friends’ comments appear at the top of your feed, as well as how often you’re informed of new notifications. Facebook’s platform, for example, is not neutral.
Most of the time, the goal is unambiguous: the companies want to get us to spend as much time as possible on their platforms. New York University psychologist Adam Alter describes the current state of tech obsession as a “full-blown epidemic.”Įvery major consumer tech company operating today–from behemoths like Amazon to the lone programmer building the next Candy Crush–uses some form of persuasive technology. Last year, the American Psychological Association found that 65% of us believe that periodically unplugging would improve our mental health, and a 2017 University of Texas study found that the mere presence of our smartphones, face down on the desk in front of us, undercuts our ability to perform basic cognitive tasks. But many of us are seized these days with a feeling that it’s not good. There’s no good consensus about what all this screen time means for children’s brains, adolescents’ moods or the future of our democratic institutions. It’s our habits and addictions.”Įvery day, we check our phones an average of 47 times–every 19 minutes of our waking lives–and spend roughly five hours total peering at their silvery glow. “Now it’s cheeseburgers and social media. “It used to be that pathogens and cars were killing us,” Brown says. The company wants to disrupt America’s addiction to technology. In fact, Boundless Mind’s mission is almost the opposite. And unlike most tech entrepreneurs, they are not trying to build the next big thing that will go viral. Dalton Combs, 32, the co-founders of Boundless Mind, are hardly the college dropouts of tech lore they’re trained neuroscientists. But that, more or less, is where the Silicon Valley stereotypes end.
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