The smartphone era created an attention crisis. Slowtech is fixing it
When Tony Fadell entered New York City’s 28th Street Subway Station, he did not expect to come face-to-face withan advertisementfor a product he designed over 20 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 thought, ‘Wait a second, did somebody not change the ad?’” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For somebody like me who knows that thing intimately, it’s like seeing your kid’s picture.” As Fadell stood in the train station, he was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones to stream music on their phones, effortlessly accessing music libraries with over 100 million songs. This technology that we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ early iPod tagline —“one thousand songs in your pocket”— sound antiquated. The postage-stamp-sized iPod Shuffle, which relied heavily on shuffle playback and offered little control compared to today’s streaming apps, should not appeal to a modern audience. But we have become so entrenched in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms mediate our every experience, from grocery shopping to dating. We’ve built smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created a constant connectedness that has become more exhausting than enriching. “People are very oversaturated and overstimulated, and they really want to have a more mindful approach to what they’re doing with their tech,” Joy Howard, CMO ofBack Market, an online marketplace for refurbished tech, told TechCrunch. “There’s this fatigue that we have with the need to optimize every single aspect of our life.” Howard and her team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle ad that Fadell was so shocked to encounter. But Howard says that demand is growing for this supposedly obsolete tech — if these devices weren’t driving sales, the company wouldn’t have shelled out for a premium ad placement in a hectic New York City subway station. For younger generations who have never known a world without social media and smartphones, there’s a certain magic to wired headphones, retro gaming consoles, CDs, and digital point-and-shoot cameras. They crave experiences that aren’t trying to monopolize their attention. Old-school cameras can’t upload photos to your Instagram story, retro games don’t spam you with gambling ads, and iPods can’t automatically play music that you’re algorithmically destined to enjoy. That’s the whole point of this movement, which Howard calls “slowtech.” “The ‘fast tech’ up until now has been all about eliminating friction… [Now], people are seeing friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves,” Howard said. “It’s so stunning to me that now people are wanting to bring friction back into their lives, and see that as a feature, rather than a flaw.” Around the same time that Fadell first pitched the iPod to Steve Jobs,Austin Murrayfounded JAMDAT, one of thefirst mobile gaming companies, which quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million. “When we were pitching our company back in 2000, 2001, people were laughing at us, saying, ‘Why would anyone play games on their cell phone?’” Murray told TechCrunch. Now, investors are just as incredulous when he pitches them on hisscreen-time reduction app, MOQA, which he is building to counteract the very phenomenon he helped create. “It’s watching what happened to my kids and the people around me that hurts my soul the most,” Murray said. “When everyone is doing the same thing — meaning everyone, the average screen time is like five hours probably on a phone every day — it’s not a willpower problem. It’s a product design problem.” This desire to cut back on the time we spend using our phones, computers, and TVs has become ubiquitous —about 53%of American adults say they want to reduce their screen time. “At a certain point, I realized that willpower was insufficient to not waste time on my phone,” said writerCalvin Kasulke, whose novel “Several People Are Typing” imagines workers trapped inside a Slack workspace. He now pays forOpalandFreedom, two apps designed to limit his screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time on iMessage — that’s people who I really know! But I certainly don’t want to be wasting my time doomscrolling.” “I want to be very clear… I don’t feel smug about 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 was using [my phone] was worse and dumb, and now it’s a little bit less dumb.” Others have given up their iPhones altogether, opting instead for flip phones,e-ink devicesthat run Android software, or minimalist touch-screen hardware like theLight Phone. “Our customers for the last 10 years are telling us how they feel more free after switching to the Light Phone,” Light co-founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more attention, especially among young people. We have quite a lot of the community using Light Phone as 20- to 35-year-olds, which surprised us.” Murray isn’t as optimistic about the future of “dumb phones,” though. “There’s certainly a movement of people who are just kind of anti-tech and ‘get it out of our lives,’” he said. “That’s really hard though, because then you realize you can’t do things that are now assuming you have a smartphone, like banking, or going into a hotel, or [using] credit cards.” Kasulke said if Apple ever made an e-ink iPhone, he would “f–ing donate plasma to be able to afford it.” But that’s unlikely, so he’s not particularly interested in downgrading his phone. “I’m not like a, ‘I wish I could throw this thing in the toilet and go live in the woods’ kind of guy,” Kasulke said. “My phone has some utility for my personal and professional life, but it also lives in your pocket, and it is very, very easy, and in fact, designed in some ways to be addictive and to mindlessly waste time on it.” Screen time isn’t universally bad. We’re accumulating screen time when we video chat with our family, text our friends, read news articles, maintain our Duolingo streaks, or play Wordle. But for as much as tech brings us closer to one another, it also yanks us out of the present moment. “It’s clear people want the convenience of digital, but they don’t want the annoyance of being always connected,” Fadell said. “I’ve always been like, ‘We need less screens, not more of them.’ So to have an Apple Watch with everything, like, no, no, no — I don’t want more, I want less.” It’s not surprising that Fadell’s preferences are a bellwether for the market — he’s a veteran product designer, after all. American spending on fitness trackersgrew 88%year-over-year, according to market research firm Circana, which credits screenless wearables like the Oura ring and Whoop wristband as key sales drivers. Even though these devices don’t have screens, you have to use your smartphone to see your data, which would make it even harder for Oura and Whoop users to try out something like the Light Phone. But most consumers aren’t looking to make such an extreme change as pivoting to a flip phone — instead, some are embracing even more sophisticated hardware that relies on their smartphone, but cuts down their overall screen time. Mark, a $159 AI bookmark, advertises itself as a tool to help users stop pulling out their phone to take notes while they’re reading. While some readers might find the idea of an AI bookmark to be symptomatic of the same problem that pushes people toward a digital detox, Mark founder Eason Tang sees it differently. “The way we try to brand it now is this sort of analog tool, very culturally integrated with design, film, books, and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch. We raised $1M dollars to reinvent how people read. Introducing Mark II – a $159 AI bookmark. Thread belowpic.twitter.com/eL0XsyRlgC There’s something undoubtedly absurd about using an AI bookmark to mediate your relationship with your phone, yet there is a bit of truth to Tang’s pitch — when you stop reading to take notes or snap a photo of a key passage on your phone, you’re bound to encounter some other distracting notification that interrupts your reading. Though AI developments are almost synonymous with “fast tech” culture, there’s a clear allure to the promise that AI agents could simplify our lives and give us more time away from screens. “I think that this idea that people want tools to serve them and not to dominate them is very profound,” Howard said. “I think what the ‘slowtech’ movement is about is people pushing back against the constant digital fatigue, distraction, overwhelm, 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 turns some consumers off from the latest products, but this isn’t their sole grievance with big tech. People are also disillusioned by these companies for continually bricking perfectly good hardware just to make us buy the latest model. Back Market, for example, rehabsdiscontinued laptopsand resells them with USB keys that can install ChromeOS Flex, which turns supposedly obsolete hardware into functioning Chromebooks. “One of our developers started finding a way to hack things that had their OS sunsetted to bring it new life. And so one of the first things he hacked was a rice cooker,” Howard said. “His rice cooker didn’t have support anymore! This is actually a really cool use of AI — like, vibe coding your own app to keep your hardware alive longer.” While slowtech adherents may not all agree about AI use, the debate is secondary to the bigger problem at play: We’ve created an ecosystem where 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 disconnect that they want to downgrade to an iPod Shuffle. “People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention,” Howard said. “They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”
