When Tony Fadell entered New York City’s 28th Street subway station, he didn’t expect to encounter an ad for a product he designed more than 20 years ago. But there was a 5-by-4-foot poster promoting the iPod Shuffle, luring passersby with the promise of “zero screen time.”
“My first thought was, ‘Wait a minute, why didn’t someone change the ads?'” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For someone like me who knows that, it’s like looking at a picture of your child.”
As Fadel stood at the station, he was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones and streaming music on their phones, giving them easy access to a music library of more than 100 million songs. This technology we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ early iPod tagline, “1,000 songs in your pocket,” sound outdated.
The postage stamp-sized iPod Shuffle relies heavily on shuffle playback, offers little control compared to today’s streaming apps, and is bound to be unappealing to modern audiences. But we are so entrenched in technology that a variety of 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 constant connectivity, which has become more exhausting than enriching.
“People are so saturated and overstimulated that they want a more measured approach to what they’re doing with technology,” Joy Howard, CMO of Back Market, an online marketplace for refurbished technology, told TechCrunch. “We feel exhausted because we need to optimize every aspect of our lives.”
Howard and her team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle ad, which Fadell came across and was very shocked by. But Howard says there is growing demand for this perhaps outdated technology. If these devices hadn’t boosted sales, the company wouldn’t be spending so much money to place expensive ads in crowded New York City subway stations.
For a younger generation that doesn’t know a world without social media or smartphones, there’s a certain magic to wired headphones, retro game consoles, CDs, and digital point-and-shoot cameras. They crave experiences that don’t try to monopolize their attention. An old-school camera won’t let you upload photos to Instagram Stories, a retro game won’t flood you with gambling ads, and an iPod won’t automatically play the music its algorithms tell you to enjoy. That’s the crux of the movement, which Howard calls “slowtech.”
“In the past, ‘fast technology’ was all about eliminating friction…1781723627people see friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves,” Howard said. “It’s so amazing to me that people are now bringing friction back into their lives and seeing it as a feature rather than a flaw.”
Around the same time that Fadel first pitched 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 the company in 2000 or 2001, people were laughing at us, saying, ‘Why would anyone play games on their phones?'” Murray told TechCrunch.
Now, investors are equally incredulous when he pitches MOQA, the screen time reduction app he’s building to combat the very phenomenon he helped create.
“The thing that hurts my soul the most is seeing what happened to my children and the people around me,” Murray said. “When everyone’s doing the same thing, and everyone’s average time on their phone is probably about five hours a day, it’s not a question of will. It’s a question of product design.”
The desire to reduce the amount of time spent on mobile phones, computers, and television is ubiquitous. About 53% of American adults say they want to spend less time looking at screens.
“At some point, I realized I didn’t have enough willpower to not waste time on my cell phone,” said Calvin Kasulke, the author who imagined workers trapped in Slack workspaces in his novel “Several People Are Typing.” He currently pays for Opal and Freedom, two apps designed to limit screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time using iMessage, that’s people I really know. But I certainly don’t want to waste my time doomscrolling.”
“Let me be clear…I’m not smug about this. It’s embarrassing to have two different apps to restrict how this can be used,” Kasulke said. “I don’t think screens are inherently bad. I just think the way I used[my phone]was worse and stupider. I’m a little less stupid now.”
Others are giving up on their iPhones altogether, opting instead for flip phones, e-ink devices running Android software, or minimal touchscreen hardware like the Light Phone.
“Our customers over the past 10 years have told us they feel more free after switching to Light Phone,” Light co-founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “It’s becoming more and more popular, especially among young people. We were surprised to see so many people in the 20 to 35-year-old community using Light Phone.”
But Murray is less optimistic about the future of dumb phones.
“There certainly is a movement of people who are sort of anti-technology and want to ‘eliminate technology from their lives,'” he says. “But it’s really difficult because you realize you can’t do the things you used to assume you had a smartphone, like banking, staying in a hotel, or using a credit card.”
Kasulke said that if Apple were to make an e-ink iPhone, “we would donate the plasma if we could afford it.” However, I’m not particularly interested in downgrading my phone as that is unlikely.
“I’m not one of those guys who says, ‘I wish I could just throw this down the toilet and live in the woods,'” Kasulke said. “My phone is useful to some extent in my personal and professional life, but I also keep it in my pocket. It’s very easy to use, and in fact, it’s addictive in some ways, designed to mindlessly waste time.”
Screen time in general isn’t a bad thing. We accumulate screen time by video chatting with family, texting friends, reading news articles, keeping a Duolingo streak, and playing Wordle. But while technology brings us closer to each other, it also pulls us away from the present moment.
“It’s clear that people want the convenience of digital, but they don’t want the hassle of always being connected,” Fadel said. “I always thought, ‘I need less screen, not more.’ So to get an Apple Watch that has it all, no, no, I don’t want more, I want less.”
It’s no surprise that Fadel’s preferences are market leaders. After all, he’s a veteran product designer. Spending on fitness trackers in the U.S. is up 88% year-over-year, with screenless wearables like the Oura ring and Whoop wristbands being a major sales driver, according to market research firm Circana. These devices don’t have screens, but require the use of a smartphone to see the data, making it more difficult for Oura and Whoop users to try something like the Light Phone.
However, most consumers do not want to make drastic changes such as switching to a flip phone. Instead, some consumers are adopting more sophisticated hardware that relies on their smartphones but reduces overall screen time.
Mark is a $159 AI bookmark that is touted as a tool to help users stop pulling out their phones to take notes while reading. While some readers may think the idea of AI bookmarking is a symptom of the same issues driving people to digital detox, Mark founder Eason Tang sees it differently.
“The way we’re trying to brand it now is this kind of analog tool that’s very culturally integrated with design, film, books, literature,” Tan told TechCrunch.
There’s definitely something ridiculous about using AI bookmarks to mediate your relationship with your phone, but Tang has a point. When you stop reading to take notes on your phone or take pictures of important passages, you’re bound to encounter another distracting notification that interrupts your reading.
Although the development of AI is almost synonymous with a “fast technology” culture, the promise that AI agents can simplify our lives and give us more time away from screens has obvious appeal.
“I think the idea that people want tools that serve them, not control them, is very profound,” Howard said. “I think the essence of the ‘slow tech’ movement is people resisting constant digital fatigue, distraction, and overwhelm. So if we can do that with AI, we can kind of protect ourselves…That’s what people want: more control.”
The rise of AI will make some consumers less interested in the latest products, but this isn’t the only complaint against big tech. People are also becoming disillusioned with these companies that continually destroy perfectly good hardware just to get us to buy the latest models. For example, Back Market rehabilitates discontinued laptops and resells them with a USB key that lets you install ChromeOS Flex. This turns potentially outdated hardware into a functioning Chromebook.
“One of our developers started looking for ways to hack things that had finished operating systems and give them new life, and 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. It’s like vibe-coding your own app to keep the hardware working longer.”
While not all slowtech proponents may agree on the use of AI, this debate is secondary to the larger issues at hand. The problem is that we’ve become so reliant on smartphones and apps that we’ve created an ecosystem where the whims of the tech industry control how we cook our meals. In this reality, it’s no wonder people are eager to disconnect and downgrade to iPod Shuffle.
“People just want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention,” Howard said. “They want anything that will help them do that.”
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