When Tony Fadell entered New York City’s 28th Street subway station, he did not expect to come face to face with an advertisement for a product he had designed twenty years earlier. 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 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 that thing deeply, it’s like looking at a picture of your child.”
As 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 with over 100 million songs. This technology we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’s early iPod tagline – “a thousand songs in your pocket” – archaic.
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 have become so entrenched in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms mediate every experience we have, from grocery shopping to dating. We’ve created smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created a constant connectivity that has become more draining rather than enriching.
“People are oversaturated and overstimulated, and they really want to have a more conscious approach to what they’re doing with their technology,” Joey Howard, CMO of Back Market, an online marketplace for refurbished technology, told TechCrunch. “It’s the fatigue that comes from needing to adapt to every single aspect of our lives.”
Howard and his team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle commercial that Fadel was so surprised by. But Howard says demand for this supposedly obsolete technology is growing – if these devices weren’t driving sales, the company wouldn’t be spending the money for premium ad placement in a busy New York City subway station.
For the younger generation who have never seen a world without social media and smartphones, there is a certain magic in 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 the music it’s algorithmically decided for you to enjoy. That’s the whole point of this movement Howard calls “Slowtech.”
“‘Fast technology’ so far has been about eliminating friction… [Now]Howard said, “People are looking at friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves. It’s 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 companies, which quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million.
“When we were pitching our company in 2000, 2001, people were laughing at us, saying, ‘Why would anyone play games on their cell phone?'” Murray told TechCrunch.
Now, investors become just as incredulous when he introduces them to his screen time reduction app, MOQA, which he is building to counter the very phenomenon he helped create.
“It hurts my soul the most to see what happened to my children and the people around me,” Murray said. “When everyone is doing the same thing – meaning everyone, the average screen time is probably equal to five hours on the phone every day – it’s not a problem of willpower. It’s a product design problem.”
The desire to reduce the time we spend using our phones, computers and TV 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 author Kelvin Kasulke, whose novel “Several People Are Typing” imagines workers trapped inside 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 – these are people I actually know! But I definitely don’t want to waste my time.”
“I want to be very clear… I don’t feel complacent about this. It’s embarrassing to have two different apps limiting how I use it,” Kasulke said. “I don’t think screens are inherently bad. I just think the way I was used to [my phone] It was worse and stupider than that, and now it’s a little less stupid.”
Others have abandoned their iPhones altogether, opting instead for flip phones, e-ink devices that run Android software, or minimalist touch-screen hardware like light phones.
“For the last ten years our customers have been telling us how they feel more free after switching to a Lite phone,” Kaiwei Tang, Lite co-founder, told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more attention, especially among young people. 20 to 35-year-olds in our community are using Lite phones, which surprised us.”
However Murray is not so optimistic about the future of the “dumb phone”.
“There’s definitely a movement of people who are kind of anti-technology and ‘get it out of our lives,'” he said. “It’s really hard though, because then you realize you can’t do things that you take for granted now that you have a smartphone, like banking, or going to a hotel, or [using] Credit card.”
Kasulke said that if Apple ever made an e-ink iPhone, he would “donate plasma to be able to afford it.” But that’s not likely, so he’s not particularly interested in downgrading his phone.
“I’m not like, ‘I wish I could throw this thing in the toilet and go live in the woods,'” Kasulke said. “My phone has some utility to my personal and professional life, but it also lives in your pocket, and it’s very, very easy, and in fact, in some ways designed to make me addicted to it and to mindlessly waste time on it.”
Screen time isn’t universally bad. When we video chat with our family, send messages to our friends, read news articles, maintain our Duolingo streak, or play Wordle we’re accumulating screen time. 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 digital convenience, but they don’t want the hassle of always being connected,” Fadell 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 not surprising that Fadell’s priorities are an alarm bell for the market – he is an experienced product designer, after all. US spending on fitness trackers has increased 88% year-over-year, according to market research firm Circana, which credits screenless wearables like the Oura Ring and Whoop wristbands as key sales drivers. Even though these devices don’t have screens, you’ll still have to use your smartphone to view your data, making it even more difficult for Oura and Whoop users to try something like a Lite phone.
But most consumers don’t want to make any extreme changes like turning to flip phones — instead, some are adopting even more sophisticated hardware that relies on their smartphone, but reduces their overall screen time.
Mark, a $159 AI bookmark, advertises itself as a tool that helps users stop taking out their phones to take notes while reading. While some readers may find the idea of AI bookmarks a symptom of the same problem that pushes people toward 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 that’s culturally integrated with design, film, books and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch.
There’s undoubtedly something absurd in using an AI bookmark to mediate your relationship with your phone, yet there’s a grain of truth in Tang’s pitch — when you stop reading to take notes or snap a photo of a major thoroughfare on your phone, you’re bound to encounter some other distracting notification that interrupts your reading.
Although AI development is almost synonymous with “fast tech” culture, there is an obvious allure in 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, not dominate them, is very profound,” Howard said. “I think the ‘slowtech’ movement is about people pushing back against the constant digital fatigue, distraction, burden, so if you can use AI to do that, to protect themselves… that’s what people want: more control.”
The ubiquity of AI turns some consumers away from the latest products, but that’s not their only complaint with big tech. People have also become disillusioned with these companies as they continue to provide us with good hardware to buy the latest models. The back market, for example, restores discontinued laptops and resells them with USB keys that can install ChromeOS Flex, allegedly turning obsolete hardware into functioning Chromebooks.
Howard said, “One of our developers started looking for a way to hack things that had a dead OS, to bring them back to life. And so one of the first things he hacked was a rice cooker.” “Their rice cookers no longer had support! This is actually a pretty cool use of AI – like, vibe coding your own app to make your hardware live longer.”
While not all SlowTech followers may agree about the use of AI, the debate is secondary to the larger problem at hand: We’ve created an ecosystem where we’re 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 people are so eager to disconnect that they want to downgrade the iPod Shuffle.
“People really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention,” Howard said. “Whatever help they can get to do that, they’re willing to do it.”
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