The slowtech revolution is here to kill your phone addiction and redeem your attention span

When Tony Fadell walked into New York City’s 28th Street Subway Station, he didn’t expect to come face-to-face with an ad for a product he designed 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 thought, ‘Wait a minute, has anyone changed the ad?'” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For someone like me who knows that stuff well, it’s like seeing a picture of your child.”

When Fadell stood at the train station, he was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones to stream music to their phones, easily accessing music libraries of more than 100 million songs. This technology we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ early iPod tagline – “a 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 modern audiences. But we’ve become so immersed in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms connect everything we do, from grocery shopping to dating. We’ve built smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created endless connections that are more exhausting than enriching.

“People are oversaturated and overzealous, and they really want to have a meaningful way of what they do with their technology,” Joy Howard, CMO of Back Market, an online marketplace for refurbished technology, told TechCrunch. “There is this fatigue we have with the need to expand all aspects of our lives.”

Howard and his team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle ad that Fadell was shocked to find. But Howard says demand is growing for this so-called useless technology — if the devices weren’t selling, the company wouldn’t be able to land a high-profile ad on a busy New York City station.

For younger generations who have never known a world without social media and smartphones, there is a certain magic in wired headphones, retro console games, CDs, and point-and-shoot digital cameras. They crave experiences that don’t try to distract them. 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 programmed to enjoy. That’s the point of this movement, which Howard calls “slowtech.”

“Fast technology” until now has been about eliminating conflict… [Now]people see conflict as a way to create boundaries for themselves,” said Howard.

Around the same time that Fadell pitched the iPod to Steve Jobs, Austin Murray founded JAMDAT, one of the first portable gaming companies, which quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million.

“When we started our company in 2000, 2001, people were laughing at us, saying, ‘Why does anyone play games on a cell phone?'” Murray told TechCrunch.

Now, investors are skeptical if he includes them in his screen-time-reducing app, MOQA, which he’s building to counter the very situation he helped create.

“Watching what happened to my children and the people around me hurts my soul,” said Murray. “When everybody’s doing the same thing — meaning everybody, the average screen time is like five hours on the phone every day — it’s not an energy problem. It’s a product design problem.”

This desire to reduce the amount of time we spend using our phones, computers, and TVs is ubiquitous – nearly 53% of American adults say they want to reduce their screen time.

“At some point, I realized that the energy wasn’t enough for me to not spend time on my phone,” says author Calvin Kasulke, whose novel “Several People Typing” imagines workers trapped in a Slack workspace. He now pays for Opal and Freedom, two apps designed to limit his screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time on iMessage – people I really know! But I definitely don’t want to waste my time scrolling.”

“I want to be clear … I don’t feel secretive about this. It’s a shame 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’ve been using them [my phone] it was very bad and dumb, and now it’s a little less.”

Some have ditched their iPhones altogether, opting instead for flip phones, ink devices running Android software, or minimalist touch-screen hardware like the Light Phone.

“Our customers over the past decade tell us they feel more comfortable after switching to the Light Phone,” Light founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more attention especially among young people. We have a lot of people who use Light Phone like people aged 20 to 35 years old, which surprised us.”

Murray isn’t so optimistic about the future of “dumb phones,” however.

“There’s definitely a movement of people who are just kind of anti-tech and ‘get it out of our lives,'” he said. “That’s really hard, because you realize you can’t do things now that you think you have a smartphone, like banking, or going to a hotel, or. [using] credit cards.”

Kasulke said that if Apple ever made an e-ink iPhone, “it would donate plasma to pay for it.” But that’s not happening, so he’s not particularly interested in putting down his phone.

“I’m not like, ‘I wish I could flush this thing down the toilet and go live in the woods’ kind of guy,” Kasulke said. “My phone is useful in my personal and professional life, but it also stays in your pocket, and it’s very easy, and in fact, it’s designed in some ways to get addicted and waste time with it senselessly.”

Screen time isn’t too bad. We accumulate screen time when we video chat with our family, text our friends, read news articles, keep track of Duolingo, or play Wordle. But as technology brings us closer to each other, it also pulls us out of the present.

“It’s clear that people want digital convenience, but they don’t want the hassle of staying connected,” Fadell said. “I kept saying, ‘We need smaller screens, not more of them.’ So having an Apple Watch and everything, like, no, no, no – I don’t want more, I want less. “

It’s no surprise that Fadell’s favorites are the market’s bellwether — he’s a seasoned product designer, after all. US spending on fitness trackers has grown 88% year over year, according to market research firm Circana, citing screenless wearables such as the Oura ring and Whoop wristband as key selling points. Even though these devices don’t have screens, you have to use your smartphone to see your data, which could make it even more difficult for Oura and Whoop users to try something like the Light Phone.

But many consumers aren’t looking to make a drastic change like switching to a flip phone — instead, some are embracing more sophisticated hardware that relies on their smartphone, but reducing 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 reading. While some readers may find the idea of ​​an AI bookmarklet a symptom of the same problem pushing people into a digital detox, Mark’s founder Eason Tang sees it differently.

“The way we’re trying to brand it now is this kind of analog tool, which is very traditionally associated with design, film, books, and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch.