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No matter your age, you may recall a childhood staple: the tin-can telephone. All you need is two tin cans and a string to connect them. You may not have understood how it worked at the time, but the vibrations of our voices travel from one can to the other along the string, providing a rudimentary and early lesson in technology: Usage dominates understanding.
That holds true today, especially in the age of generative artificial intelligence, large language models, and other AI-led transformations of the past few years imposed onto our everyday lives. Many users of ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models may not fully comprehend how they work – indeed, the engineers and developers who design them love to point out that they themselves often don’t understand why a model does what it does – but they use them anyway.
A recent consumer trend, however, suggests that some technological narratives we’ve become accustomed to may be less durable than we imagined. In place of our seemingly insatiable desire for more shiny new products and apps, we are seeing a rise in retro-style tech, and a pushback on both the attention-gobbling devices we’ve become accustomed to and the insistence from Big Tech that we have no choice but to buy in.
Young people in particular seem interested unplugging, as suggested by a YouGov poll conducted in the U.S. last year that found that more than two-thirds of people aged 18 to 29 would like to reduce their screen time. Retro-style tech, which offers old-school designs and basic functionality, is one place people are turning.
Tin Can, for instance, is a startup that makes “new-school landlines,” of which they’ve sold hundreds of thousands in just a year of business in the U.S. and Canada. The product makes free calls to other Tin Cans (and to parent-approved outside numbers), and are designed to hit nostalgic eighties and nineties aesthetic triggers for Gen X and millennials. What’s impressive and a bit surprising is how appealing the product is with Generations Z and Alpha.
The younger generations, who have no built-in nostalgia for that era, are also largely responsible for the surging popularity of “dumbphones,” which exist now in opposition to our screen-frenzied present (screen-free disposable cameras, too, are making a comeback). Basic flip-phone sales have been on the rise with Gen Z since the pandemic; one look at #dumbphone or #flipphone on TikTok will yield millions of results. There are countless articles in the mainstream press about digital detoxes and young people, more than any other generation, are expressing their concern about technology’s hold on our attention. As one report from last year found, “about six in 10 teens express doubt that tech companies will prioritize their mental health and well-being over profits.”
Silicon Valley has, for decades, successfully spread the belief that the innovations that emerge from the cluster of companies located there are not only here to improve our lives but that they are inevitable improvements. This ideology of inevitability has sat comfortably alongside an utterly deregulatory response from governments, beginning with the United States under both political parties.
This industry-led campaign was so persuasive for a long time precisely because what society got seemed – more or less – to achieve what was promised. The internet undeniably changed everything, the iPhone was a genuinely revolutionary piece of personal tech, and even one-day shipping seemed magical. We know what happened next, however: Progress stagnated (has the iPhone meaningfully changed in the last decade?), useful tools got less useful (Google Search is now overrun by AI and ads), and being online just got worse. We all feel it, we all know it.
Finally, in the past five years, we have watched as the tech industry has tried to force a number of “innovations” on us, only for them to fizzle: the metaverse that no one asked for, the short-lived NFT economy, Apple’s failed Vision Pro glasses. A sort of “techlash” began to take cohesive shape.
Generative AI, then, seemed like a saving grace for the Valley. This was a distinct shift, on technical, economic, and cultural terms, and the consumer-facing applications quickly became massively popular.
A Tin Can kids home phone.Supplied
Suddenly, almost every job was potentially vulnerable, or at the very least AI was going to be introduced into every imaginable industry in some capacity. We are told to jump in, or we’ll be left behind. You, the reader, most likely have strong opinions about how it is being used, one way or another, in your own job. Now, of course, we’re building numerous data centres to facilitate this new age, which, we’re told, will soon be a multiple-trillion-dollar industry.
However, as it turns out, the world’s workers are not so passively accepting of their own displacement, data centres are facing pushback in almost every community being eyed for their construction, and many analysts anticipate that we are in some kind of an AI bubble.
Amid all this, then, many are realizing that what Silicon Valley leaders say is rarely in our interest. They are used to making society-altering decisions, and only being challenged by the lightest regulatory touch many, many years too late.
It’s about time that tech leaders understand that their go-to narrative of inevitability has its limitations, and perhaps the success of Tin Can, dumbphones, and other retro-style gadgets suggests that the economy currently being utterly transformed in the shape of AI may not be sustainable, considering poll after poll also shows most people, across generations, have concerns about AI encroaching further into their lives.
Opinion: No, I don’t want my kids using your stupid AI
Silicon Valley is now confronting a public and an economy that are rejecting – even if only in fits and starts – the force of that perceived inevitability in favour of what actually works and enriches their lives.
This doesn’t mean that people are stubbornly sticking their heads in the sand, ignorantly disregarding technology that could make a positive difference. It is obvious that AI has many applications for which it is ideally suited, from coding assistance to limited research use cases and other efficiencies in fields such as medicine and science. No one is seriously debating that.
Instead, what this turn to retro-style technology represents, at least in the abstract, is an acknowledgement of a time when the promise of innovation seemed to more closely match what we actually got.
There were trade-offs and negative consequences, to be sure, but as digital technology became myopically focused on growth, the goalposts moved, allowing these companies to ignore what their consumers actually wanted, as long as shareholders were rewarded. This move has not gone unnoticed. As the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s recent polling found, “71% of Canadians stated that they had ‘not much’ or ‘no’ trust that ‘Big Tech’ companies would protect the personal information shared with them, while 86% said the same of social media companies.” These are stark numbers for Silicon Valley to sit with.
As the industry’s modus operandi became inextricable from growth at all costs, “innovation” itself lost its meaning, and the public has wised up: There’s nothing inevitable about new technology. We can actually make collective and individual decisions about the kind of future we want. Silicon Valley leaders have gotten too used to the idea that they alone have the vision to build that future, but as scrutiny increases, so does the widespread realization that we don’t have to sit back and take it.
Whether the AI bubble actually pops or merely exacerbates existing inequalities, public sentiment toward Big Tech is in a far different place than five or even two years ago.
The mood is retro.