When Tony Fadell walked into the 28th Street subway station in New York City, he didn’t expect to come face to face with an advertisement for a product he designed more than 20 years ago. But there it was: a five-by-four-foot billboard promoting the iPod Shuffle, luring passersby with the promise of “zero screen time.”
“The first thing I thought was, ‘Wait a second, didn’t someone change the ad?'” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For someone like me, who knows this intimately, it’s like looking at a picture of your child.”
While Fadell was at the train station, he was surrounded by people using wireless Bluetooth headphones to stream music on their phones and effortlessly access music libraries with more than 100 million songs. This technology we take for granted makes the initial slogan of Steve Jobs’ iPod: “a thousand songs in your pocket” – sounds old-fashioned.
The postage-stamp-sized iPod Shuffle, which relied heavily on shuffle play and offered little control compared to today’s streaming apps, shouldn’t appeal to a modern audience. But we are so entrenched in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms mediate all of our experiences, from shopping to dating. We’ve built smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created a constant connection that has become more draining than enriching.
“People are very saturated and overstimulated, and they really want to have a more conscious approach to what they do with their technology,” Joy Howard, CMO of Back marketan online marketplace for refurbished technology told TechCrunch. “There’s this fatigue we have from needing to optimize every aspect of our lives.”
Howard and his team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle advertisement that Fadell was surprised to find. But Howard says demand for this supposedly outdated technology is growing: If these devices weren’t driving sales, the company wouldn’t have shelled out money to place a premium ad in a busy New York City subway station.
For younger generations who have never known a world without social media and smartphones, there is a certain magic in wired headphones, retro game consoles, CDs, and point-and-shoot digital cameras. They crave experiences that don’t try to monopolize their attention. Old-school cameras can’t upload photos to your Instagram Story, retro games can’t spam you with gambling ads, and iPods can’t automatically play music you’re algorithmically meant to enjoy. That’s the goal of this movement, which Howard calls “slowtech.”
“’Fast tech’ has so far focused on eliminating friction… [Now]”People see friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves,” Howard said. “It’s so amazing to me that people now want to bring friction back into their lives and see it as a feature, rather than a flaw.”
Around the same time that Fadell first introduced the iPod to Steve Jobs, Austin Murray founded JAMDAT, one of the first mobile gaming companieswhich quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million.
“When we were launching our company in 2000, 2001, people laughed at us and said, ‘Why would anyone play games on their cell phone?'” Murray told TechCrunch.
Now, investors are just as incredulous when he presents his app to reduce screen timeMOQA, which he is building to counter the phenomenon he helped create.
“What hurts my soul the most is seeing what happened to my children and the people around me,” Murray said. “When everyone does the same thing (that is, everyone, the average screen time is probably five hours on a phone every day), it’s not a willpower problem. It’s a product design problem.”
This desire to reduce the time we spend using our phones, computers and televisions has become ubiquitous: about 53% of American adults say they want to reduce their screen time.
“At a certain point, I realized that my willpower was insufficient to not waste time on the phone,” the writer said. Calvin Kasulkewhose novel “Several People Are Writing” imagines workers trapped inside a Slack workspace. Now pay for Opal and Freedomtwo apps designed to limit your screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time on iMessage – these are people I actually know! But I certainly don’t want to waste time navigating the destination.”
“I want to be very clear… I’m not happy with this. It’s embarrassing to have two different apps to limit how I use this,” Kasulke said. “I don’t think screens are inherently bad. I just think the way I used them [my phone] “It was worse and dumber, and now it’s a little less dumb.”
Others have abandoned their iPhones entirely and opted for foldable phones. electronic ink devices running Android software or minimalist touchscreen hardware like the Light phone.
“Our customers over the past 10 years tell us how they feel freer after switching to the Light Phone,” Light co-founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more attention, especially among young people. There is a large part of the community using Light Phone between 20 and 35 years old, which surprised us.”
However, Murray is not so optimistic about the future of “dumb phones.”
“There is certainly a movement of people who are simply anti-technology and ‘get it out of our lives,'” he said. “That’s very difficult, though, because then you realize that you can’t do things that now require you to have a smartphone, like go to a bank, go to a hotel or [using] credit cards.”
Kasulke said that if Apple ever made an iPhone with e-ink, he would “donate plasma to be able to afford it.” But that’s unlikely, so you’re not particularly interested in downgrading your phone.
“I’m not the type to say, ‘I wish I could flush this down the toilet and go live in the woods,’” Kasulke said. “My phone has some utility for my personal and professional life, but it’s also in your pocket, and it’s very, very easy, and in fact, it’s designed in some ways to be addictive and waste your time without thinking about it.”
Screen time is not universally bad. We’re racking up screen time when we video chat with our family, text our friends, read news articles, keep up our Duolingo streaks, or play Wordle. But as much as technology brings us closer to each other, it also takes us out of the present moment.
“It’s clear that people want the convenience of digital, but they don’t want the hassle of always being connected,” Fadell said. “I’ve always thought, ‘We need fewer screens, not more.’ So having an Apple Watch with everything, no, no, no, I don’t want more, I want less.”
It is not surprising that Fadell’s preferences are a benchmark for the market; after all, he is a veteran product designer. US spending on fitness trackers grew 88% year after year, according to market research firm Circana, which credits screenless wearables like the Oura ring and Whoop bracelet as key sales drivers. Although these devices don’t have screens, you have to use your smartphone to view your data, which would make it even harder for Oura and Whoop users to try something like the Light Phone.
But most consumers aren’t looking to make a change as extreme as switching to a foldable phone; Instead, some are adopting even more sophisticated hardware that relies on their smartphone but reduces overall screen time.
Mark, a $159 AI highlighter, is advertised as a tool to help users stop pulling out their phone to take notes while reading. While some readers may find the idea of an AI marker symptomatic of the same problem that pushes people toward a digital detox, Mark founder Eason Tang sees it differently.
“The way we try to call it now is this kind of analog tool, very culturally integrated with design, film, books and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch.
There’s certainly something absurd about using an AI bookmark to mediate your relationship with your phone, but there’s a grain of truth in Tang’s talk: When you stop reading to take notes or take a photo of a key passage on your phone, you’re bound to find some other distracting notification that interrupts your reading.
Although AI developments are almost synonymous with “fast tech” culture, there is clear appeal in the promise that AI agents could simplify our lives and give us more time away from screens.
“I think this idea that people want tools that serve them and not dominate them is very profound,” Howard said. “I think what the slowtech movement is about is people struggling with constant digital fatigue, distraction and overwhelm, so if you can use AI to do that, to protect yourself… That’s what people want: more control.”
The ubiquity of AI deters some consumers from the latest products, but this is not their only problem with Big Tech. People are also disappointed in these companies for continually blocking perfectly good hardware just to make us buy the latest model. Back Market, for example, rehabilitations discontinued laptops and resells them with USB keys that can install ChromeOS Flex, which turns supposedly obsolete hardware into functional Chromebooks.
“One of our developers started finding a way to hack things whose operating system was disabled to give them new life. So one of the first things he hacked was a rice cooker,” Howard said. “Your rice cooker was no longer supported! This is actually a really cool use of AI, like coding your own app to keep your hardware alive longer.”
While not all slow-tech advocates may agree on the use of AI, the debate is secondary to the larger issue at play: We have created an ecosystem in which we are so dependent on smartphones and our various apps that the whims of the tech industry can control how we cook rice. In this reality, it’s no wonder that people are so eager to unplug that they want to upgrade to an iPod Shuffle.
“People really want to take back control of their time, their lives and their attention,” Howard said. “They’re willing to do anything to help them achieve that.”
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