Creating Family-Friendly Tech: An Interview With Chris Kaspar

Here at IFS’s Family First Technology Initiative, we talk a lot about the vital role policy plays in protecting families from the risks of contemporary consumer technologies. Without legal safeguards like liability or a duty of care, the business models of Silicon Valley tycoons will continue to focus on maximizing engagement by any means possible to increase their bottom line. As these policy battles continue to play out, however, other tech companies have emerged that want to “flip the script” by developing every day digital items that protect and promote user’s well-being, rather than exploit their attention. Recently, I had the privilege to interview the executive of one of these companies, Chris Kaspar, CEO of Techless, the parent company of Wisephone, a simplified, browser-less, and family-friendly alternative to the smartphone. In this interview, we talk about how he and his colleagues are reimagining innovation and redeeming technology for families. 

Jared Hayden: In your mission statement, you share how Techless is striving to “redefine” consumer technology, writing, “I want to create practical and beautiful solutions that have healthy design principles driving them. I want to not settle for ‘ethical’ or ‘humane.’ I want to do what I can to redeem this industry.” What does redeeming consumer technology look like to you and how does that differ from what other tech companies are doing, even those in the “ethical” and “humane” tech spaces?

Chris Kaspar: I draw my policy from Praxis’s Redemptive Frame. Basically, there are three approaches to technology. The first is the exploitative way. In this case, tech companies win when others lose. The norm is to take advantage of people and make money. An example of this would be social media or anything that exploits our attention. 

The second way, or the “ethical” way, is a “Do No Harm” approach. Under this framing, tech companies are not here to hurt others. They are neutral. It’s a winning together type of scenario—tech companies help users; users help tech companies. Ultimately, this “neutral” approach yields a net negative for culture, society, and families. 

I long for tech companies to take a third approach where they lean into a positive, proactive, even sacrificial, perspective of redemption. Under this approach, users win when tech companies lose. It means that tech companies are proactively using their power to help users flourish, even if that costs them money, time, business, power, and influence. 

It means...tech companies...proactively using their power to help users flourish, even if that costs them money, time, business, power, and influence. 

The key distinction comes down to who is sacrificing. In the exploitative model, the consumer is sacrificing. In the ethical model, nobody is sacrificing. But in the redemptive model, the company itself is making sacrifices to better the user. Take algorithms, for example. For platforms that take this third way and, say, disincentivize sexual material or other negative content, their engagement goes down. The same thing happens when tech companies prioritize families. It's a whole lot easier for tech companies to turn a blind eye and not have parental controls. 

But what if tech companies waded into the mess, to empower parents and protect kids? That’s what I wanted to do with Techless. I wanted to develop tech that wasn’t just neutral, but that could help shape people's families, identities, and beliefs in ways that help them flourish.

Hayden: Your mission statement talks a lot about developing technology that helps people reclaim what matters most—relationships, wisdom, faith, purpose. Does the family factor into the work of your company? 

Kaspar: Here's the deal: tech defaults are largely anti-family. They intentionally isolate. Google becomes the parent. Chat GPT becomes the counselor. But doing this puts us into deeper silos of digital isolation. And as a result, all of the things that families normally provide are being replaced by technology.

Rather than pushing people deeper into digital worlds, Techless does the opposite. We intentionally have made hundreds of UX decisions and device policies that push people into deeper relationships with their families.

For example, if you ask AI an important question about family or health or relationship or something meaningful or spiritual, both ChatGPT and Geminia answer the question. Our AI tool doesn’t. It directs them to the people who are meant to help answer the important questions. 

We deliberately leave voids for parents and loved ones to fill. We're constantly pushing people towards real connection every chance that we get.

Techless also prioritizes the family in our data policy. We believe in interpersonal transparency, particularly within trusted family and friends—which is exactly the opposite of what tech companies do. We believe device usage should be shared with other trusted people. Smartphone shouldn’t be a black box. Parents should be able to see everything kids are doing on devices. Couples should be able to see everything their spouses are doing on devices. I don't know of any other company that's doing this—the combination of corporate privacy with interpersonal transparency.

But we’ve been ostracized and heavily penalized for this choice. We’ve even been taken down from Google Play Store. Ultimately, Techless intentionally leaves space that other companies don't. We deliberately leave voids for parents and loved ones to fill. We're constantly pushing people towards real connection every chance that we get.

Hayden: As you have written, Techless wants to “Imagine a world where our tech supports, instead of distracts from, our greatest purpose in life: our relationship with God and others.” How does faith inform your work and your mission?

Kaspar: Imagine a triangle: at one point is your relationship with God, at another is your relationship with yourself or identity, and at the third point is your relationship with others. This triangle represents our belief. At Techless, we see our work as redeeming each of these aspects of belief.

When it comes to belief, people get skittish. Who designs according to a set of beliefs? Why impose belief? But, in fact, every piece of technology is built around belief, whether religious or secular. It should be uncontroversial to say that we have a particular set of beliefs. We're doing exactly what Silicon Valley does. For example, ChatGPT just made a new policy to allow erotica on the platform. That was a boardroom conversation and decision based on various calculations and a set of beliefs. 

At Techless, I believe our fundamental convictions actually transcend the existing cultural norms, the cultural moments, the headlines, the profit and loss statements. Whether we’re talking operating systems or A.I., what we have written in our internal company documents applies just as much today as it did 400 years ago, before microphones or lightbulbs existed. And it will apply 1000 years from now. It's because of our beliefs—which we believe lead to human flourishing—that we are doing what we’re doing. 

From a belief perspective, AI should, generally and very gracefully, nudge users towards God's design for technology, family, and a healthy identity.

Hayden: Beyond basic design, what systems does Techless have in place to ensure that its Wisephone keeps users (especially kids) “safe from porn, social media, games, and doom scrolling”? 

Kaspar: Techless has a handful filtering systems. At the carrier level, at the device level, and at the app level. These are all functioning at the beta level and haven’t all been deployed to our broad customer base.

However, the heart of the issue—at least 90% of the challenge—is apps. Every single app is a different door to the online world. As time has gone on, Techless has focused less on these filtering systems and processes and more on app curation. Today, we’ve got some very sophisticated tools. We even have inner app hooks that allow us to cut certain things on and off within a given app. But app curation is the most important thing. 

We’ve built an internal system by which we evaluate apps. We look at the company and their corporate policies holistically to understand the app. Are there vulnerabilities? Are there loopholes? Are there workarounds? What's the purpose of it? Using this evaluative tool, we’ve found that about 85% of apps have serious problems. So, out of 10,000 apps, we only green light about 500.

Platform or operating system (OS) level design is important, too—which is why we built the Wisephone. Unless you have device level or platform level control, you can't integrate controls or filters well because the tech companies won’t work with you. So, while it would have been so much easier to just make some app to try to filter content, it doesn’t ultimately work. It was costly, but we had to go all the way down to the OS level to do what we needed to do.

Hayden: There’s a lot of buzz about AI right now, and whether it poses a danger to children and healthy family life. How does Techless see itself fitting within the AI landscape, if at all? Is AI informing any future products?

Kaspar: We are not anti-AI. We’re interested in asking: what does healthy AI look like? We want to be on the front side and build AI that doesn't have the negative consequences—where we can enjoy the best of it while avoiding the worst of it. Nobody's really talking about it that way. 

For us, it goes back to our internal policies. AI should push users towards human relationship. AI shouldn’t be a time-suck. AI shouldn’t peddle explicit content. And from a belief perspective, AI should, generally and very gracefully, nudge users towards God's design for technology, for family, for a healthy identity. That’s where we start. 

Currently, we have a tiny little AI chat bot where you can get very simple answers. It’s functionally a browser placement, which we don't have on Wisephone. So, for example, if you need to find out what the phone number is for your kid’s gymnastics class, you can ask it and get answers. But the answers are text-based rather than visual so that they won't lead users to distraction. 

There are some other extremely profound AI tools that we have in the pipeline. AI is an even better form of the healthy technology we want (beyond even the stuff we can code ourselves) because it can be driven by principles in deeply nuanced and sophisticated ways.