I
For 3 months I used a flip phone. I bought it because I was trying to get rid of this feeling of exhaustion I had. I noticed I always felt tired and couldn't really figure out the root cause of it. I came to the conclusion that it was because of my attention span and that if I reduced my screentime the problem would be solved.
Anyone who has had the same thought knows where this is going ... I could not reduce my screentime (at least consistently). I weighed my options and decided I'll just delete social media apps because they had the highest usage. After doing this still nothing changed and my top apps just got replaced with other things like scrolling my photo albums looking for videos to watch (shameless I know). I spoke to my friend about the problem I was having and he handed me a flip phone from the console of his car. This, I believed, was the solution to all my problems.
The logic was simple: there were too many things to do on my smartphone so if I picked up a flip phone then the problem would be solved. For the most part it worked and it was a drastic improvement to my quality of life. My grades were better, my sleep was improving, and I was exercising more. The only drawback was that my flip phone had a terrible map and did not work consistently so I'd leave my iPad (which had LTE) in my car in case I needed directions somewhere. It seemed like a unique situation at first but every day I'd come across some missing function in my life. I couldn't carry around an iPad all day so eventually I just picked my iPhone back up.
For the first time ever I began to contemplate on the utility and functions of the products I use.
II
In '96 the company RIM, which would later become BlackBerry, released their interactive pager. It had two clear functions: send and receive short messages. BlackBerry's main customers were productive professionals and the functions they'd later implement would reflect this.
1996–1998: Send and receive messages (two way pager)
1999: Email (BB 850)
2000–2001: Bigger screen + calendar and contacts synced to corporate servers (BB 957)
2002: First model with phone capabilities (BB 5810)
2005: BBM launches (which is kind of just iMessage for BlackBerry)
2006: First camera and media player (BB Pearl 8100)
Pretty satisfying evolution, I can imagine the smile on white collar Americans' faces whenever they heard a new BlackBerry phone was about to be released. BlackBerry understood their market but they also knew how to scale without neglecting task ecologies. A task ecology, according to Ruby Thelot[1], describes the full context of a task. Thelot's essay also introduced two more relevant terms: functional adjacency and transitional convergence.
Functional adjacency is when a device absorbs a second function that's complementary or inverse to its main one. Transitional convergence is when you combine an old format and a new format on one device during the overlap period when both are still in use. For functional adjacency think how an MP3 player can also play the radio, and for transitional convergence think a VHS/DVD combo player.
Year after year BlackBerry was making these increasingly functionally adjacent products for their productive customers. Each additional function was added with their tasks in mind. They were such a hit that banks, law firms, consultancies, and even government agencies were buying them in bulk before handing them out to their employees. In 2009, President Obama fought to keep his BlackBerry and the NSA had to concede by creating a hardened version for him. At this point carrying a BlackBerry was the status quo for any serious professional.
Enter Steve Jobs. The year is 2007 and Apple has just announced their brand new iPhone. This presentation still gets praised today for its masterclass in storytelling and visual presentation. But that's not what we're going to talk about. In the speech he makes it clear that the iPhone is a combination of three devices: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.
“…are you getting it yet?”[2]
Calling, texting, email and web browsing all fall in the same communication task ecology but music had no place in it, yet it felt natural on the iPhone. This is because people used to carry both phones and iPods which made the combination seamless. Apple had achieved an unrivaled level of functional adjacency.
The smartphone went from being a corporate tool to being everyone's. Apple created an App Store that would let people publish their own functions, sending Apple to the top of the smartphone industry seemingly overnight. Now anyone could propose a function and you had virtually an unlimited amount of options. BlackBerry put up a decent fight but by 2010 a survey found 40% of BlackBerry users planned to transition to an iPhone.
Normally the designer would have designed the phone with a fixed number of functions in mind. For the first time ever this responsibility was handed to the market of users.
This quickly revealed a problem that Apple failed to consider: the aggregate of all of these functions. Functional divergence is the combination of unrelated functions on a single device which causes confusion by preventing users from completing the tasks they set out to do (basically functional adjacency's annoying cousin). A bank might create a bank app, a game studio builds a game, a news org builds a news app, etc. all these apps are reasonable on their own but no one is responsible for aggregation so unrelated tasks pile onto one device. This leads to concept bleed, which Thelot says is the leaking of one activity's logic onto another, impeding the user from achieving the goal they intended.
Suddenly you open your phone and you're caught swiping in and out of Instagram, TikTok, and X completely forgetting to send that text message you originally intended to.
III
In 2008 Apple released their iPod Touch with a built-in App Store. The first generation with no memory of computing before concept bleeding had been born and they now had access to a store with virtually unlimited amounts of potential utility. This creates a type of person who both distrusts technology and is its largest adopter, making it extremely hard to categorize them. The tech industry and policymakers have a stake in Gen Z's AI usage and adoption, making them the type of group that is forced to lean on misconceptions like laggards and luddites.
Gen Z are known for being nostalgic about past trends. They look back to the technology of the 2000s and long for it. Often you find younger people using older iPhones, iPods, flip phones, wired headphones, etc. They're also known for their skeptical attitude towards technology. They're seen as anti-AI, the first generation to practice detoxing from phone usage, and have a general deep distrust towards big tech companies.
Almost two decades of chronic context switching, colliding logics and massive conceptual bleeding can leave anyone exhausted. Gen Z has spotted this nagging feeling but cannot identify it completely. They partly owe the fatigue to things like social media algorithms and infinite scroll platforms. But this self-diagnosis is missing the vocabulary Gen Z needs to demand the functional products they want.
I don't believe Gen Z are some backwards trend hopping hippies. Their retro purchases are perfectly rational (maybe inarticulate) responses to chronic exhaustion from never being able to use devices with a closed set of functions. It may seem like they are stubborn regressives who are stuck in the past but you must realize that they've never lived in the past they're trying to emulate. They are not luddites either. In fact, they are one of AI's strongest adopters, so regardless of whether or not members of Gen Z have strong feelings about AI and its implementations, they have an extremely high usage rate. They consider AI part of their everyday lives and many have integrated it as an important part of their daily workflows. Many have even replaced their former traditional search engines with AI.
Trillions of dollars have gone into the AI industry yet founders and builders are struggling to create products for everyday casual AI users. What makes it ironic is that a lot of these founders come from the same generation. It's unfortunate these young founders are falling into the same trap as older industry leaders and policymakers. They're building these agents and are hyperfocused on maxing out their potential utility without realizing this is driving people further and further away from AI tools.
We don't have to start shrinking the capability of our products, it just needs to be hidden behind something closed and legible. Before the iPod Touch, Apple sold a regular clickwheel iPod which was a fully general computer hiding behind a couple of buttons with one purpose. Founders should focus on products that can be built almost as if they were crafts. Crafts are refined through tradition and accumulated solutions. Your product should be a trusted tool I can grab off my shelf and probably use for the next hundred years.
[1] A lot of the terms and definitions used here are from Ruby Justice Thelot's essay 'Why Are iPods So Popular?'. Go read his work. Now.
[2] This is a reference to Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone announcement presentation.