A Nutrition Label for Your Attention

We read the label on a box of cereal without a second thought. We rarely get to read one for the things that take up our attention, and those, it turns out, have a long ingredients list. Most of it was added on purpose.

A connected device is engineered to hold you: a bright screen, a feed that never ends, software tuned to bring you back. None of that is an accident; it’s the recipe. A Bagby object is the opposite kind of thing (analog, with a single job and nothing else built in). So its label is short, and it’s all “free from.” Here’s what that means, ingredient by ingredient.

No blue light

A screen glows, brightest in the evening when the rest of the room is winding down. An analog clock face doesn’t glow at all; it’s wood and hands. A small button lights it when you actually want the time, then it goes dark again.

No tracking or data

Apps watch what you do and keep a record of it. A Bagby object watches nothing and stores nothing: there’s no account to make, no data to collect, and nothing to share, because there’s no software in it to do any of that.

No EMF

Anything that connects is sending and receiving wireless signal all the time; that’s what keeps it reachable. An analog Bagby object has no radios at all: no wifi, no Bluetooth, no cellular. Nothing transmitting, nothing to reach it. No signal, by design.

No AI

A feed decides what you see next, and gets better at it the longer you stay. There’s no model here making choices for you: a clock tells the time, a holder holds a phone. The object does its one thing the same way every day, and leaves the choosing to you.

No doomscrolling

Infinite scroll and autoplay are designed so there’s never a natural place to stop. An analog object has a built-in end: the alarm rings, the phone goes in the box, the page closes. It does its job and then it’s done, and so are you.

What “No Artificial Additives” means

It’s a clean-label promise, the same way a food label can say what it leaves out. Every line above is a plain statement of something absent; not a claim about your health, just a list of what isn’t in the thing. The whole idea of Bagby is in that short list: an honest object that does one thing completely, with nothing added to keep you there.

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