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

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 designed over 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 second, did somebody not change the ad?’” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For somebody like me who knows that thing intimately, it’s like seeing your kid’s picture.” As Fadell stood in the train station, he was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones to stream music on their phones, effortlessly accessing music libraries with over 100 million songs. This technology that we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ early iPod tagline – “one thousand songs in your pocket” – sound antiquated. A Back Market ad in the New York City Subway. Image Credits: Tony Fadell (opens in a new window) 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 a modern audience. But we have become so entrenched in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms mediate our every experience, from grocery shopping to dating. We’ve built smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created a constant connectedness that has become more exhausting than enriching. …