Big Tech is using design philosophy as a smokescreen
"Calm technology" is all the rage but big tech companies are leveraging the concept to distract from the ways their business models cause us harm, writes Rima Sabina Aouf.
What do Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses, an AI dream journal and a smart-home status display made from a plank of timber have in common? Add to that an AI compass, all these dumbphones and an omniscient lapel badge?
Apart from inspiring a sort of consumerist vertigo when viewed in quick succession, they are all devices marketed with promises to bring calm or presence to our digitally cluttered lives.
If almost any device can be spun as "calm", calmness in technology means nothing
As a tech and design writer, I saw dozens of these products hit my inbox in 2025, each making either implicit or explicit reference to a design philosophy known as calm technology. A response to information overload coined in the early days of the internet, this approach foregrounds products that are informative but quiet; ignorable and unobtrusive but life-enhancing.
Some of the gadgets above fit this description. Some are interesting provocations. And others are manifestations of a worrying trend: that big tech companies are using the language of calm technology to keep us locked into their systems – systems that are built on the monetisation of our attention and the exploitation of our personal data, and that have put so much power into the hands of a few private companies that it cannot be observed with any feeling remotely resembling "calm".
OpenAI's Sam Altman and his collaborator Jony Ive are two of the big names in tech to speak publicly in 2025 about their intent to replace or reimagine smartphones with a calmer device. But it's hard to feel particularly zen hearing this from a company that has diluted its mission to benefit humanity with every passing year, most recently by laying out an enshittification-based roadmap to profitability that relies on placing advertising within ChatGPT responses, despite Altman previously stating that he found the idea of combining ads with AI "uniquely unsettling".
That's without mentioning the multiple suicides that have been linked to the chatbot, and the fact that its emergence prompted tech experts to sign an open letter warning of "profound risks to society and humanity".
Meanwhile, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has also spoken about his intent to replace smartphones with a calmer device that delivers "a feeling of presence". But it's laughable that the Meta glasses, which subject you and everyone around you to constant surveillance and are made by a tech conglomerate whose Wikipedia article on controversies runs to 22 pages, could be launched into the world with the same intent as Terra, a screenless neighbourhood exploration tool made by users with their own hands.
It's becoming clear that if almost any device can be spun as "calm", calmness in technology means nothing. What actually matters – and what should guide our choices about which technologies to adopt and design in 2026 – is privacy and ownership.
Meta's ability to serve targeted advertising and control the content you see is about to be supercharged
It should be acknowledged that there's a lot that's impressive about the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. The smart wristband, a type of removable neural interface, efficiently solves the problem of how to interact silently and touchscreenlessly in public with AI, and its inclusivity could be particularly transformative for the disabled community.
But this class of product is going to involve the creation of a whole lot more data – no longer just users' conscious internet activity but the unconscious biometric data from the neural band and the unconsented-to images of people who walk in front of them while the camera is recording, which is anytime the user asks a question about their surroundings.
All of this data is owned by Meta, sent back to its servers, stored and used. And with an AI assistant in your ear and a screen an inch from your eyeball, Meta's ability to serve targeted advertising and control the content you see based on this information is about to be supercharged.
Not only with Meta products, but especially with Meta products given the company's 20-year history of data scandals and addictive design, we need to ask ourselves if the novelty that a new device brings to our lives is worth the trade-off.
It probably didn't have to be this way. When pioneering 1990s computer scientists Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown first wrote about calm technology, they imagined it sitting within their world of "ubiquitous computing", where technology is so seamlessly embedded around us that the stresses of screen interaction and the bleating of personal devices can fall away. It sounds like this could be the moment we're entering now, enabled by the rise of AI and the Internet of Things.
And yet, although Weiser and Brown didn't write much on privacy and security, when they did, they imagined norms developing in a very different way. Extensive encryption and privacy protections were baked into their vision. Constant cloud connectivity, maximal data extraction and centralised control were not, and they could not have foreseen the ways that these things would become the presumptive right of the world's biggest businesses.
Many technologists I've spoken to see the unknowns of today's privacy landscape as teething issues that will soon be settled. But they will not be settled in a vacuum. The actions of individuals, industry groups and governments matter right now more than ever.
These companies aren't aiming to free us from our digital dependencies; they just want to own the next system we depend on
Even what is settled is not necessarily settled forever, as demonstrated by the European Commission's recent move to water down its landmark GDPR privacy regulations and AI Act under pressure from the US. The EU's AI regulations may not be perfect, but they provide rules on transparency, copyright, safety and security – issues that genuinely stress people out, with worries about AI coming across consistently on consumer attitude surveys (and the Pew Research Center's even identifying the EU as the most trusted regulator ahead of the US and China).
Composed with the input of nearly 1,000 experts and civil society groups, these regulations have obvious legitimacy. It's here that Big Tech companies show how highly they really value our wellbeing, as a slowdown on AI development would almost certainly advantage humanity, but their lobbying has made the prospect vanishingly small.
There's no shortage of positive alternative visions for tech that's both calm and in the public interest. The Calm Tech Institute's certified product list rounds up several, focusing on experiences that feel nearly analogue, while for more imaginative applications, Dutch design studio Modem never ceases to inspire, with a focus on open sourcing, on-device processing and the joys of simplicity.
For the services that have become part of our every day, NGOs like Privacy International have done the hard work defining what safe and secure AI assistants look like, and Swiss company Proton provides an increasingly complete ecosystem of real alternatives.
And perhaps most promisingly of all for systemic change, movements to break away from US platform dominance have hit the mainstream, from personal "deGoogling" efforts to state-level digital sovereignty and infrastructure initiatives.
Right now, Big Tech is using design philosophy as a smokescreen, talking about calmness and presence to distract us from the ways their business models and practices harm us. These companies aren't aiming to free us from our digital dependencies; they just want to own the next system we depend on. It's time to stop letting them control the narrative, before we wake up to find we've swapped smartphones and hallucinating chatbots for a more deeply entrenched set of stresses.
At the start of 2026, I got a press release for a new phone. European made, the Punkt MC03 has monochrome app icons and a non-distracting text-based home screen. It is textbook calm, and yet the company's statements barely mentioned it. Instead, they talked about privacy, security and giving users control over their data. Calmness was a given. It was background. And it felt like a sign of things to come.
Rima Sabina Aouf is a freelance design and technology journalist and a Dezeen contributing editor. Follow her on Instagram @rimasabina.
The photo is courtesy of Meta.
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