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Can Slow Tech Fix Your Attention Span?
Slow it down // Illustration by Kate Walker
Gen Z and millennials are increasingly gravitating toward tech that adds friction and encourages them to spend less time looking at screens.
Why It Hits: After two decades of devices built to optimize our lives, many people feel their days now revolve around constantly looking at one screen or another. A growing movement to reduce that dependence could reshape the digital economy and reconfigure the hardware devices that become successful.
Between The Lines: Joy Howard, CMO of Back Market, told TechCrunch that the movement she’s seeing among young people is known as “slow tech” — devices that eschew algorithms, ads, and other attention-sucking features.
Back Market and Kickback refurbish older tech — such as iPod Shuffles, CD players, and retro cameras — and sell them through their online marketplaces.
A growing number of devices and apps are designed to reduce screen time, including Brick, Freedom, and MOQA (which, somewhat ironically, was launched by Austin Murray, founder of mobile gaming company JAMDAT).
Several smartphone alternatives have also emerged, including the Light Phone, e-ink devices, and even flip phones.
Final Update: Howard says young people are beginning to see the friction these devices create as “a way to create boundaries for themselves.” Murray echoes that sentiment, arguing that rising screen time is “not a willpower problem” but “a product design problem.” That presents a unique opportunity: a YouGov poll found that 53% of American adults want to cut down on their screen time.
As Tony Fadell, considered the father of the iPod, puts it: “It’s clear people want the convenience of digital, but they don’t want the annoyance of being always connected.” In other words, it may be time for a more balanced digital diet.
The Future: It’s possible that the autonomy of AI agents could reduce our need to look at screens — after all, the AI will likely handle many of those tasks for us.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.