Narrow is the way: Andrew Trousdale on friction, storytelling, and the importance of living in your own time
Often people talk about technology as if the woes of humanity began when the first computer was released or the first iPhone was announced. Older folk, if you will, stereotypically criticize younger generations for indulging in excessive screen times, long shifts of gaming, and internet slang (among other perceived flaws of the internet-raised youth). Younger people also look back at a time of clunky analog – Walkmans, Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems, VHS, and cathode ray tube televisions – and they see a rose-tinted world.
Nothing is particularly wrong about how they feel – and we are progressively seeing generations tackle the problem. What is the problem exactly? Is it tech-fatigue? Is it that technology is no longer a convenience to us? I tried to find out the answer with Andrew Trousdale, co-founder of Apossible, a non-profit that brings psychologists, technologists, artists, and creatives together to “work on a new ethos for technology.”
“I’m bricking my phone,” says Andrew. He’s tried putting time limits on his screen time, but he confesses that he blows through them every time. “I love it. So far it does exactly what you want it to do. It gives you all the utility that you want. I think the key thing is just that it offers a pause.” Apossible challenge our fast culture – fast news, fast food, fast tech. What Apossible do is slow down and reflect on what we really want from our technologies.
Andrew spends a lot of his time working on projects that bridge positive psychology and human-computer interactions, so when he bricks his phone, he’s not trying to escape his phone. He’s creating a necessary friction. Andrew said “for me, there’s something pretentious about being unwilling to just live in your own time and deal with the challenges that may come with it. I wouldn’t want to live any time in the past.” He talked about Mills’ higher and lower selves - the higher self is aspirational and brings our best qualities to bear, the lower self is impulsive, and wants stimulation and instant gratification. He acknowledged that modern user interfaces have catered to the lower self and made willpower an increasingly difficult strategy for protecting our higher priorities. But he also thinks we need to look inward: “I think Neil Postman got this right in Amusing Ourselves to Death: these kinds of technologies accommodate a growing demand, people who capitulate by readily embracing the cheap amusement and stimulation.”
Robert Nozick’s thought experiment The Experience Machine delved into this issue back in 1974. The Experience Machine imagines a simulation machine that can give the user any experience they desire – be it winning the SuperBowl, completing a great novel, reaching the top of Mount Everest. Andrew explained that: “In devising this thought experiment, Nozick was getting at the fact that while people may like to use this machine, living in it ultimately seems incomplete and unfulfilling. We don’t want to be spoon fed feelings and experiences. We want to feel as though our feelings and experiences are brought about by our own efforts and actions. This highlights a problem with technology designed to eliminate friction, challenges, and struggle. It implicitly eliminates opportunities for us to exercise action and effort, and to therefore feel entitled to and fulfilled by our experiences.” Nowadays, that might all be changing, with the advent of increasingly stimulating virtual realities which become a real Experience Machine, and a professor of philosophy even noted that their students were starting to choose the option of living inside the simulation machine.
I’m reminded of Tools Of Conviviality during our talk, a book written by Ivan Illich in 1973 – the book outlines a proposal for a world where a society has the power to shape their own lives through the tools they have, rather than being controlled by the tools. Although the mobile phone wasn’t around then, the book was prophesying a world where once helpful tools are co-opted by larger corporations, become monopolized, then becomes a system where the user is now the tool that is being used. No longer are we using mobile phones for its incredible data storage, artificial intelligence, and ability to high-speed message – the mobile phones are using us for our invaluable behavioural information. In Illich’s view, the useful car is fated to become a car park that flattens communal spaces – a library becomes a giant data center.
A lot of what Andrew and I talked about was “regaining agency” versus “becoming victims of the technology around us”. Perhaps the light/brick/dumb phone is an Illichian concept – a piece of low-energy technology that has necessary limits imposed on, thus giving power back to the individual. “I think we’ve come to expect too much from our tools and not enough from ourselves,” says Andrew. “I would argue that while technology can undermine agency, it can’t give it to us. It’s just a tool. Any definition of agency that can be put into a person by a technology is a poor definition of agency.” Agency has to be self-originated. While we see a lot of people focusing on technology as the source of the problems, Andrew is more focused on the culture surrounding the technology, and how better culture might offer a way out.
“We need to produce a culture that supports people and presents people with better things to do with their time, and provides a fundamental understanding of what makes those things valuable,” says Andrew. “I wish we had a culture that appreciated that fewer and slower options is often a better recipe for more practical agency.”
Andrew also said he “takes comfort in the fact that our difficulty resisting compulsive technologies, our struggle to use our time and energy meaningfully and productively instead of wastefully, is not a new problem. Virgil, 2000 years ago, said ‘the gates of Hell are open night and day, smooth the descent, and easy is the way,’ which is about as true a description of the problem of frictionless, seductive technology as you can find. So the temptations take new forms and are amplified by technology, but the basic struggle is a human one.”
I’ve thought a lot about the notion of market determinism or market efficiency – where if there exists a demand, there will be a product that serves the demand. Does that really exist anymore? CW&T are a Brooklyn-based design duo run by Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy, specializing in product design that puts intentionality and longevity at the forefront. Andrew and I admire them, they go beyond the idea of cool gear, they address the erosion of technical literacy – their products are designed to last lifetimes. They’re convivial. Most importantly, their design sits on a small, human scale. As a two-person team, they set a precedent for sustainable entrepreneurship whilst creating products that challenge people – and not just people’s ideas of technology, but of deeper human quandaries too.
People need to be persuaded why they should choose a technology with less features rather than more. What’s great about companies like CW&T, Teenage Engineering, or Light Phone is that they create beautiful storytelling to support their products. Andrew argues that “it’s the combination of new technologies and new stories, with an underlying argument, ethos or aesthetic for the rightful place of technology in life, that actually moves the needle by showing us a path forward.”
The poetry of technology is slowly returning. People are learning to become users rather than consumers. They yearn for the tactility of technology to return and for the overly dramatic multi-functionality of our most used tools to become convivial once again. The term “future-proof”, used to describe the Light Phone III, says it all. We don’t want the future as it is right now because the future doesn’t involve us the way we want to exist.
“I don’t think you can avoid Brave New World by outlawing it. That’s a practical claim and an ethical one. I think the best you can do is cultivate richer cultures with better priorities, communities, traditions and norms,” says Andrew. “I think all of these devices that we’re talking about now that have friction, conscious constraints in their design, ethos, aesthetics. These products lead culture in a better direction by depicting a story about what life should consist of. And it’s about being outside with your friends. It’s about reading or making things. It’s about having worthy goals and using your time well to pursue them. The challenge is not just taking time and energy back from phones, it’s figuring out what our time and energy should be used for. If you figure out the latter, the former gets a lot easier.”