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

“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 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 devices that run Android software, or minimalist touch-screen hardware like the Light Phone.

“Our customers for the last ten 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 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 trackers grew 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.

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, rehabs discontinued laptops and 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 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.”