-Do you mind if I hug you? – asks Anjan Katta. This isn’t the typical way to end a product presentation, but considering the product and its creator, I wasn’t too surprised. Katta, a bearded guy with shaggy hair, showed up at WIRED’s San Francisco office dressed as if he were going on a summer hike in the mountains. He immediately started thinking about the idealistic beginnings of personal computing and the amazing characters who created this magic and the knowledge he had gleaned in part through my writings. And he seemed like a hugger.
The device that Katta pulls out of his backpack – an electronic ink tablet called… Daylight DC1 – is largely a reflection of its creator, a spiritual object driven more by ideals than by commercialism. “It’s almost an attempt to bring the hippie back to PCs,” he says, lamenting the loss of that spirit. “He was replaced by shareholders – what happened with that bike for the mind idealism?” Katty’s device wants to put us back in the same saddle, pulling us out of the morass of unsatisfying, empty interactions with our phones and shoddy apps. The only thing it has to beat is Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and the public , who probably won’t opt for a monochromatic gadget costing over $700. No wonder she needs a hug.
Alan Kay, the visionary who imagined the way we would use portable digital devices, once said that Apple’s Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I think Katta wants to create the first computer that is worth meditating on. It hopes to join the ranks of tech’s early heroes by specifying what Daylight doesn’t — multitasking, eyestrain, or a distracting deluge of notifications.
Courtesy of Daylight Computer Co.
Instead, the sharp “Live Paper” display silently refreshes page after page. (Katty’s team has developed its own PDF rendering scheme.) The included Wacom pencil allows users to write comments and scribbles on the surface with the same ease as in the latest Field Notes notebook. Browsing the web in monochrome may not be stunning, but it does seem to lower your blood pressure. Daylight tries to be the Criterion hardware collection that makes everything else look like it Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
To fully understand the Daylight device, take a look at Katty’s origin story. He describes himself as “a person with severe ADHD who has been a dilettante his whole life.” He was born in Ireland, where his parents emigrated from India, and then the family moved to a small mining town in Canada. Katta did not speak English well, so he learned about the world from the books his father read to him. Even as the family moved to Vancouver and Katta became more socially adept and discovered a passion for entrepreneurship, he retained that enthusiasm. He loved science, games, and books about the early history of computers. The only college he applied to was Stanford because to him it symbolized the creativity of Silicon Valley people like Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. “It was a place where mischief-makers did cool things,” he says. “Stanford was the place where I was finally accepted.”
But over the years Katta attended Stanford – from 2012 to 2016 – he became disillusioned. “I expected disrespect and innovation, but I felt the energy of a McKinsey-Goldman Sachs banker, because that’s how you get rich,” he says. While his peers interned at Google and Facebook, Katta spent his summers climbing Kilimanjaro and hiking to Everest Base Camp. He loved spending time at the Computer History Museum in nearby Mountain View, soaking up stories about the early pioneers of personal computers and dismayed by how the narrative about technology had changed from charming geeks to predatory bros.
“What happened to everything I read in those books?” He says. “After I graduated, I thought Fuck it and I traveled with a backpack for two years. He returned to his parents’ basement in Vancouver, deeply depressed. Katta stewed for months, reading about science and focusing on how our devices had turned into what he considered a machine of misery. “These are dopamine slot machines that make us the worst versions of ourselves,” he says.