Our house is getting a new phone.
It’s called a Tin Can. If you spend a lot of time mingling with the kindergarten set, these things are white hot right now. Go to any playground in America and you’re bound to hear parents chatting about them.
There’s not a parent I know who isn’t worried about kids and technology.
That’s why the Tin Can exists. If it weren’t for the underlying fear we have of internet safety, it would be a laughable invention, like Elon Musk “inventing” public buses, or Adam Neumann coming up with the concept of roommates.
The Tin Can is not just a repackaged landline a la Ma Bell. It solves the fundamental problem of the internet in 2026, which is that there are too damn many people out there using it. In 1998, when my family signed up for AOL, we didn’t have to worry about hackers in Bulgaria trying to steal our identity, or video games with a massive worldwide user based viewed by predators as a vector for targeting children. By default, the only people I chatted with on AIM were people I knew from school. But now the internet suffers from the same problem that traditional phone service does: its functionality has been hollowed out by expansive commercialization. If you connect a landline today, even if you never give out your phone number, you can expect a nonstop stream of marketing calls. In fact, it’s intriguing to note that the term “spam,” which originated on the internet with Usenet and email, is now commonly used to refer to phone calls as well.
Functionally, a Tin Can is the same as an old fashioned phone, but with lots of safety features that limit what it can be used for. It’s not cordless—if you unplug the charging cord, it stops working. This forces the user to stay put—importantly with kids, feasibly in a place that can be monitored by parents. The phone works with regular phone numbers (for an additional monthly fee), but you can screen out incoming calls that aren’t on a pre-approved list. Grandma can reach you, but telemarketers can’t. This means you can feel safe having your young one be the one to pick up the phone when it rings.
The biggest selling point for our household was being able to call 911, filling an obvious gap in today’s technological landscape. When I was five years old, my mother dropped a window air conditioner on her foot. No one else was home. She told me to go pick up the phone and dial 911 and tell them what happened. If that were to happen today, I would have to remember where I’d left my cell phone and hope it was in a place my daughter could reach, and that there wouldn’t be some pop up notification on the screen she can’t read blocking her from dialing a number.
I’m not getting paid by anyone to share these thoughts. We haven’t even gotten our Tin Can yet—the product started on Kickstarter, and its suddenly popularity has meant long wait times for delivery. We may get limited use out of it, or it may turn out to be a fad that passes. But it’s undeniable that parents are feeling significant concern about how to keep our kids safe, and there’s a real market right now for anyone offering some level of protection. In the worst case, we may just end up with a simple gadget on our wall that makes it easier to call Grandma, which most families would have taken completely for granted for most of the 20th century.