A phone company operating out of a converted warehouse on Cremorne Street has launched a handset whose core selling point is that owning one should, ideally, result in you forgetting you own it.
The device, called the Nirodha One, was designed with input from a panel of Buddhist teachers the company will not name individually, out of what a spokesperson described as "the panel's own wishes regarding attachment to credit." Before any app opens, an "intention gate" asks what the user came for. There are no notification badges. Social apps, where installed at all, end their feeds after a fixed scroll and will not refresh further that day. There are no like counts or follower totals anywhere in the operating system. A "right speech" filter holds outgoing angry messages for ten seconds before sending, asking only whether this is necessary. Pick the phone up too often in one sitting and it may, instead of unlocking, offer a line such as "You unlocked me to look for something. Who is looking?"
Daniel Ischa, a 34-year-old actuary from Richmond, bought one in September on his GP's advice and has since become devoted to the handset's one piece of actual data: a weekly "Stillness Score" measuring how rarely it was touched. He checks this figure most mornings, has it compared automatically against three friends who also switched, and was, by his own account, "pretty wrecked" last Tuesday on learning a friend in Carnegie had gone four points lower. He has since set a second phone, an old one kept specifically for this purpose, to remind him at 7am and 9pm to put the Nirodha down, and has taken to recording his Stillness Score in a small notebook he carries for the purpose.
"The whole idea is you stop measuring yourself against things," Mr Ischa said, while refreshing the leaderboard a second time. "I'm basically there."
The company's founder, speaking from the Cremorne office, confirmed the firm's chief success metric is minutes of use avoided per customer, which he said is also the reason its investors are nervous: a hardware company whose product improves precisely as customers stop touching it has had a difficult year raising funds from people who usually ask about engagement. The phone carries a ten-year repairability guarantee and an evening prompt inviting the user to dedicate whatever merit the day produced to somebody else, a feature Mr Ischa says he has not yet had a free moment to use.