The 21st-century tech industry has accomplished a lot of cool things, but among the most remarkable may be a trick of language: It managed to make the word “smart” feel repulsive and the word “dumb” sound appealing.
How else to explain the news that more than a quarter of younger Americans are curious about switching to a “dumbphone?” (That’s a cellular handset with only basic features — perhaps an old-school flip phone with push-button T9 texting, or perhaps a purpose-built minimalist device like the Light Phone.) Sure, that fact alone might have more to do with our deep ambivalence about the effect of smartphones on our attention and our society. But how about all the people searching the internet for the right “dumb TV” — i.e., one that just displays the signal you feed it, instead of running some proprietary operating system? How about all the people stumping for dumb watches or recommending dumb coffee makers?
The “dumb” attached to these products is creating retronyms — those labels, like “landline” or “snail mail” or “silent film,” that are only necessary in hindsight, after we’ve invented phones that roam and movies that talk. It wasn’t until a million gadgets started billing themselves as “smart” that we had any reason to distinguish their predecessors as less so. “Smart” arrived earlier than you might think: Ericsson called its GS88 a “smart-phone” in 1997, a decade before Apple entered the market. It was after internet-connected touchscreens were in everybody’s pockets, though, that we experienced the great push to make everything smart. “There was this whole renaissance of the ‘smart home,’” says Brian X. Chen, The Times’s lead consumer technology writer — a Jetsons-style dream of refrigerators that order milk before you run out and dryers that ping your phone when a load is finished. Almost every product that could be connected was connected, whether consumers asked for it or not: doorbells, baby monitors, toothbrushes, belts.
Think back to the 2010s: If you’re anything like me, you will remember the most pointless and infuriating varieties of smartness. There were ovens that refused to convection-roast without a Wi-Fi connection. Kettles that demanded app-based recalibration before agreeing to boil water. There was Smalt (a smart saltshaker that could interface with Amazon devices and dispense salt in an “interactive way”); Amazon’s own Echo Look (an internet-connected camera you could put in your bedroom to comment on your outfits); even the ClickStick smart deodorant applicator, complete with an app that would, according to its successful Kickstarter campaign, help you use the exact right amount of deodorant. Computer scientists like Andrew Ng were saying things like “I hope to someday have grandchildren who are mystified at how, back in 2016, if you were to say ‘Hi’ to your microwave oven, it would rudely sit there and ignore you.”
Some of us had bigger dreams for our descendants than talking to microwaves, though, which meant this era severely dented the reputation of “smart.” Chen, for instance, has watched antipathy toward it grow over the years. “I think you’re seeing a lot of people start to get turned off by the ‘smart’ category because of all the implications that are tied to it,” he says — subscription fees, companies that fold and stop maintaining software, features and content you paid for suddenly vanishing. (Not to mention privacy and security worries, like the F.B.I. eavesdropping via your voice-activated massager while hackers use your toaster for DDoS attacks.)
Chen mentioned the garage-door opener MyQ, which infuriated users by introducing subscriptions: “It’s just people realizing, like, I can’t even open my garage for free anymore. What do I own anymore?” That feeling has fed the growing love of dumbness — “because it’s like, OK, I actually bought this coffee maker. It’s not connected to Wi-Fi or the internet. I’m not going to need software updates. It’s going to work indefinitely, so long as I clean it up every now and then.”
Smartphones are too deeply integrated into modern life for many people to officially forsake them — but according to some polls, nearly half of Americans wish they could. What’s remarkable is that the people most likely to try — and, sometimes, the people most interested in “dumb screens” or dumb products in general — aren’t tech-averse or lagging behind the times. They’re more like early adopters, applying a great deal of effort and technical savvy to creating the experience they want. This is the strange moment we’ve arrived at: Even among young futurists, it’s often the promise of “advanced” digital features that makes people groan.
Here, too, there is a funny trick of language. Both “smart” and “dumb” seem to have arrived at their usual meanings via metaphor. “Dumb,” for most of its life in English, meant mute, unresponsive — stupefied, potentially, but mostly just silent. This is why a previous tech innovation was called the “dumb waiter”: It would pulley something upstairs without a word. The change to indicating stupidity is only a few hundred years old — recent enough that most of us have no trouble understanding a word like “dumbstruck.” As for “smart,” the original meaning is the one involving a sharp pain. But we use a lot of bladelike metaphors to describe intelligence — sharp, keen, cutting, incisive, piercing, penetrating — and sometime around the 16th century, “smart” attached itself to a sharp mind.
Which means that, on some strange level, we may have circled around to the origins of these words. The smart things are paining us. The dumb ones are blessedly quiet — which, at this point, can feel like the more intelligent option.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
The post Why ‘Smart’ Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice appeared first on New York Times.
