Slow Tech in a Fast World
Why pace, control and ownership matter more than novelty—and why choosing slower technology is not the same as going backwards.
Bought a game in Early Access.
Waited two years for 1.0.
Played ten minutes. Uninstalled.
Back then, you just plugged it in and got to buckin’.
Now it’s like Spaceballs — preparing for ludicrous speed just to start a game.
I keep returning to that moment because it captures a broader change in my relationship with technology. Most technology has not stopped working. In many cases it is more capable and more reliable than ever. It has simply stopped working in the way I expected it to.
Social networks are an obvious example. Their original proposition was modest and useful: connect with people you know, share a few photographs and keep in touch with somebody who now lives somewhere else. Open the same services today and much of the screen is occupied by algorithmically selected material from people you have never met.
The product still contains the original capability, but the relationship has changed. A tool for connection has gradually become a system for consumption. The important measure is no longer whether you found the person or information you wanted, but whether there is enough uncertainty to keep you moving through one more item.
We usually respond by trying to improve our own behaviour. We install screen-time trackers, configure focus modes or move distracting applications away from the home screen. These can all help, but they also place the entire responsibility on the person using the product. Sometimes the problem is not a lack of discipline. Sometimes the product is working precisely as designed, and its objectives are simply different from ours.
I find it useful to think about modern technology as three overlapping layers. The first is a remote-control layer: transferring money, ordering a taxi, unlocking a bicycle, opening a door or scheduling a delivery. These are small acts of practical magic, and they remain some of the clearest examples of technology removing genuine effort from daily life.
The second layer is the infrastructure of obligation. Email, Slack, authentication applications, calendars and notifications are now necessary for participating in work and many public services. We may change the interface, but opting out completely often means opting out of an organisation or a part of modern life.
The third layer contains the things for which speed is not always the point: reading, listening, playing, thinking and making something. These activities benefit from attention and from having a clear boundary around them. Yet they now happen on the same phone, tablet or computer that contains the other two layers.
This consolidation is convenient, but it creates an unusual kind of dependence. One object has become our office, television, newspaper, library, camera, music system and social space. It can do almost anything, which also means that almost anything can interrupt the thing we are currently doing.
This helps explain the renewed interest in records, cassettes, cartridge games and other dedicated physical objects. It is easy to describe this as nostalgia, but I do not think nostalgia is the most interesting part. Older formats are often less convenient and technically worse. Their advantage is that their limitations are visible and stable.
A record has two sides and ends when the side ends. A cartridge game starts without checking whether its publisher still operates an authentication server. A book does not change its terms of service, disappear from a shelf after a licensing negotiation or ask to install an update before opening chapter four.
The value is not inconvenience for its own sake. It is that the object works on the terms of the person who owns it. Its pace is understandable, its behaviour is predictable and the relationship does not quietly change after purchase.
Digital tools can have the same qualities. A dedicated e-reader can hold a large library, run for weeks and leave the network switched off. It still uses sophisticated technology, but that technology remains subordinate to reading rather than trying to turn reading into an entrance to something else.
I like Roon for a similar reason. It brings streaming services and a local music collection into one interface without pretending that the files I own no longer matter. The software adds convenience around the library rather than replacing the library with access that can later be withdrawn.
Some newer hardware makes this philosophy explicit. The Analogue Pocket uses contemporary engineering to play original Game Boy cartridges. The Playdate is connected and updateable, but its small seasonal games, physical crank and deliberate constraints make it feel more like a particular object than a portal to an infinite content system.
I have started to evaluate tools through three questions. Who controls the pace? How much control remains with the person using it? And what, if anything, do I actually own when the company providing it changes direction or disappears?
Pace matters because not every experience improves when it becomes continuous. Control matters because a useful default should not remove the ability to choose differently. Ownership matters because a collection, archive or tool that can vanish without consent was always a temporary arrangement, even when the interface made it feel permanent.
This is what I mean by slow tech. It is not a category of old hardware and it is not an argument for abandoning streaming, smartphones or cloud services. I use all of them. It is a preference for technology that remains legible: tools with a clear purpose, stable behaviour and enough restraint to leave room for the activity itself.
The distinction becomes more important as software becomes easier to change remotely and products become more dependent on recurring access. Convenience is valuable, but it should not automatically require surrendering pace, control and permanence in return.
Real progress should leave us with more agency, not less. The most interesting technology may not be the technology that does the most, but the technology that understands what it is for—and knows when to stop.