The Computer For The 21st Century, Revisited
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The Computer For The 21st Century, Revisited<br>Can Adaptive Software act as a harness for your attention?
Noam Tenne<br>Jul 14, 2026
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I’m on a journey to deep dive into the history of Ambient Computing and Adaptive Software, and so together with AI I curated a set of canonical works. Shoulders of giants, etc. Part of this motivation is to be able to study and understand what attempts didn’t work, and why. What can I learn from them to not repeat the same mistakes? Some of this is of course excavation, archeology and hypothesising, but valuable nonetheless.<br>The first piece to tackle is “The Computer For The 21st Century” by Mark Weiser, published in 1991.<br>My TLDR of it:<br>Computers trap you within the device itself. It’s frustrating and disruptive to your work because the device, while connected to the internet, is disconnected from context, your surroundings and any general awareness. The solution to this is ubiquitous and calm computing that disappears into the background and the objects around you, and this will be the computer of the future.
The paper paints a beautiful and idealistic world where computers just blend in, and don’t frustrate or distract us. All based on real physical device and software experiments executed at Xerox PARC.<br>The thing I found shocking, but not surprising, is that the author could see where usage patterns of personal computing were going. It really is forward-looking and deep. He identified problems with computing that still exist today, pointed out what was wrong and built an alternative.<br>Yet 30 years later, not only did the world not correct, it actually doubled down with mobile phones repeating the same patterns that he called to avoid. And where the author flagged frustration with computers in the 90s, I think in current times this is echoed as problems with attention, and exploitative attention-grabbing computing in the rise of mobile phones and social media. To clarify, the paper didn’t mention attention, that is me extending the concept. So, we still have these boxes that are connected to the internet, but disconnected from us, our surroundings and from what we care about right now at this moment.<br>What bugs me about it is “why?”. If their experiments proved a superior way of working, how come it never propagated into the mainstream?<br>It’s not often that the problem in these situations is a singular reason, or a big technical gap. The author cites what was at the time the best in class capabilities of compute, a fraction of what we have today. With them they were able to produce working devices and software, and predicted that they would be able to maximise it with further performance improvements.
Negative from the original article as published in Popular Science<br>I hypothesise that the problem was that the attitude was too extreme. The offer of ubiquitous and calm computing in theory can sound very enticing. It sounds like a utopian world. I don’t think it’s realistic and I think it denies things we have discovered about our nature and our brain.<br>A quote I loved is:<br>There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating.
Trying to interpret this for 2026: A walk in the woods floods your senses with more information than any computer system could. Light, sound, movement, temperature, the shape of every branch. Yet 35 years later, a walk in the woods is still considered a healthier activity than doomscrolling your phone.<br>Analysts like Ben Thompson or investors like Rory O’Driscoll from USV claim things like “people don’t want to work, people want to be entertained” (my paraphrasing). This is the second extreme and is mostly true for consumer software. The constant distraction and dopamine hits. On the other hand, we don’t normally associate professional software with entertainment, yet all these prompt boxes are super effective as entertainment-brain invading work tools. Slot machines in a casino-shaped factory.<br>Every now and then we see new devices which promise to be calm and disconnect us, with no notifications or distractions. It’s nice, but I think it’s a knee-jerk reaction and overcorrection to the over-exaggeration and over-attention-grabbing of the common devices and platforms. I also suspect that they will never be mainstream because they are denying the lizard brain, and the pleasures or the satisfaction that we can feel. People don’t buy calm. Yes, you can buy calm in the way of a nice spa, but you don’t want to live in a spa.<br>So the calm and ubiquitous computing leans into our patterns of familiarity, and objects disappear into the background, to the point where we are denying pleasure from the lizard brain. And the entertainment side leans into fucking getting bulimia from TikTok, and denies us the required focus and rest.<br>Both are denying a reality...