The slow technology revolution has come to eliminate your phone addiction and save your attention span

When Tony Fadel entered the 28th Street subway station in New York City, he did not expect to come face to face with… advertisement For a product he designed over twenty years ago. But there it was: a five-by-four-foot poster promoting the iPod Shuffle, luring passersby with the promise of “zero screen time.”

“The first thing was, I think, ‘Wait a minute, did someone change the ad?'” Fadel, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For someone like me who knows this thing intimately, it’s like seeing a picture of your child.”

As Fadel stood at the train station, he was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones to stream music on their phones and easily access music libraries containing more than 100 million songs. This technology we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ early iPod logo – “A thousand songs in your pocket” -The sound is old.

The postage stamp-sized iPod Shuffle, which relied heavily on shuffle playback and offered little control compared to today’s streaming apps, shouldn’t appeal to a modern audience. But we have become so entrenched in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms mediate all of our experiences, from grocery shopping to dating. We’ve built smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created constant connectivity that’s become more exhausting than enriching.

“People are so saturated and overstimulated, they really want to have a more conscious approach to what they do with their technology,” said Joey Howard, director of marketing at Back marketan online marketplace for refurbished technology, told TechCrunch. “There is this exhaustion we feel because of the need to improve every aspect of our lives.”

Howard and her team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle ad that Fadel was so shocked to encounter. But Howard says demand is growing for this supposedly outdated technology — if these devices weren’t driving sales, the company wouldn’t have paid for a premium ad spot in a crowded New York City subway station.

For younger generations who have never known a world without social media and smartphones, there is a certain magic to wired headphones, old game consoles, CDs and digital point-and-shoot cameras. They crave experiences that don’t try to monopolize their attention. Old school cameras can’t upload photos to your Instagram Story, old games don’t spam you with gambling ads, and iPods can’t automatically play music you’re meant to enjoy algorithmically. That’s the whole point of this movement, which Howard calls “slow technique.”

“Fast technology up until now has been about eliminating friction… (Now), people see friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves,” Howard said. “It’s amazing to me that people now want to bring friction back into their lives, and see it as an advantage, not a disadvantage.”

Around the same time that Fadel first showed Steve Jobs the iPod, Austin Murray Jemdat Foundations, one of The first mobile game companieswhich quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million.

“When we were promoting our company in 2000 and 2001, people would make fun of us, saying, ‘Why would anyone play games on their cell phone?’” Murray told TechCrunch.

Now, investors don’t quite believe it when he hypes them up Screen time reduction appMOQA, which he is building to confront the same phenomenon he helped create.

“Watching what happened to my kids and the people around me is what hurts my soul the most,” Murray said. “When everyone is doing the same thing — that is, everyone’s average screen time is probably five hours on the phone every day — it’s not a willpower problem. It’s a product design problem.”

This desire to cut down on the time we spend on our phones, computers and TVs is now ubiquitous – about 53% of American adults say they want to reduce the time they spend in front of screens.

“At a certain point, I realized that my willpower wasn’t enough to not waste time on my phone,” the writer said. Calvin Kasulkiwhose novel Multiple People Write imagines workers trapped inside a Slack workspace. And now he’s paying for it opal and freedomtwo apps designed to limit screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time on iMessage — these are people I really know! But I definitely don’t want to waste my time scrolling.”

“I want to be very clear… I’m not proud of this,” Kasulki said. “It’s embarrassing to have two different apps to limit how I use this.” “I don’t think screens are inherently bad. I just think the way I used to use (my phone) was worse and stupid, and now it’s a little less stupid.”

Others have ditched their iPhones altogether, opting instead for foldable phones. E-ink devices Which runs Android software, or simple touch devices such as Light phone.

“Our customers for the past 10 years have been telling us how free they feel after switching to Light Phone,” Kaiwei Tang, Light co-founder, told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more interest, especially among young people. We have a very large community using Light Phone in the 20-35 age group, which surprised us.”

However, Murray is not optimistic about the future of “dumb phones.”

“There’s definitely a movement of people who are just kind of anti-technology and want to get it out of our lives,” he said. “But it’s really hard, because then you realize you can’t do the things you now assume you have a smartphone, like banking, going to a hotel, or (using) credit cards.”

Kasulke said that if Apple made an iPhone with e-ink, he would “donate the plasma to be able to buy it.” But that’s unlikely, so he’s not particularly interested in downgrading his phone.

“I’m not the type of person who says, ‘I wish I could flush this thing down the toilet and live in the woods,'” Kasulki said. “My phone has some benefits for my personal and professional life, but it also lives in your pocket, is very, very handy, and, in fact, is designed in a way that makes it addictive and unintentionally time-wasting.”

Screen time isn’t universally bad. We accumulate screen time when we video chat with our family, text our friends, read news articles, maintain our Duolingo streaks, or play Wordle. But as much as technology brings us closer together, it also takes us out of the present moment.

“It’s clear that people want the convenience of digital technology, but they don’t want the hassle of always being connected,” Fadel said. “I’ve always said, ‘We need fewer screens, not more.’ So, to have an Apple Watch with everything, it’s like, no, no, no — I don’t want more, I want less.

It’s no surprise that Fadel’s preferences are market leaders—he’s a veteran product designer, after all. US spending on fitness trackers grew by 88% On a year-over-year basis, according to market research firm Circana, which credits screen-less wearables like the Oura ring and Whoop wristband as key drivers of sales. Although these devices don’t have screens, you have to use your smartphone to see your data, which will make it difficult for Oura and Whoop users to try something like the Light Phone.

But most consumers aren’t looking to make such a radical change as switching to a foldable phone — instead, some are adopting more advanced devices that build on their smartphones, but reduce their overall screen time.

Mark, a $159 AI-powered bookmark, advertises itself as a tool to help users stop pulling out their phones to take notes while reading. While some readers may find the idea of ​​AI bookmarking to be a symptom of the same problem driving people toward a digital detox, Mark’s founder, Eason Tang, sees it differently.

“The way we try to categorize it now is this kind of analog tool, very culturally integrated with design, film, books, and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch.

There’s something undoubtedly silly about using an AI-powered bookmark to mediate your relationship with your phone, but there’s a grain of truth to Tang’s tone — when you stop reading to take notes or take a photo of a key passage on your phone, you’re bound to encounter some other distracting notification interrupting your reading.

Although AI developments are almost synonymous with “fast tech” culture, there is a clear appeal to the promise that AI agents can simplify our lives and give us more time away from screens.

“I think the idea that people want tools to serve them and not to control them is very profound,” Howard said. “I think what the ‘slow tech’ movement is about is that people are resistant to constant digital fatigue, distraction, and burnout, so if you can use AI to do that, to kind of protect yourself… that’s what people want: more control.”

The ubiquity of AI is turning some consumers away from the latest products, but that’s not their only complaint about big tech. People are also disappointed with these companies because they continue to make perfectly good devices just to make us buy the latest model. The back market, for example, is rehab Discontinued laptops And resell them with USB keys that can install ChromeOS Flex, which turns supposedly obsolete devices into functional Chromebooks.

“One of our developers started finding a way to hack things that had their operating system shut down to give them new life. So one of the first things he hacked was a rice cooker,” Howard said. “His rice cooker doesn’t have support anymore! This is actually a really cool use of AI – like programming your own app to keep your appliances running longer.”

While slow tech adherents may not all agree on the use of AI, the discussion is secondary to the larger issue: We have created an ecosystem in which we rely so heavily on smartphones and our various apps that the whims of the tech industry can control how rice is cooked. In this reality, it’s not surprising that people are so eager to disconnect that they want to downgrade their iPod Shuffle.

“People really want to take back control of their time, their lives, and their attention,” Howard said. “They’re turned off from anything that helps them do that.”