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The Interface
Will algorithms increase your grocery bill?
00:37:42
Walmart’s digital price tags; astronauts with Outlook issues; Friction Maxxing
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- [00:00]
BBC Announcer
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- [01:10]
Karen Howe
I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. I. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like, I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial@shopify.com
- [01:42]
Thomas Germain
they have enough information. They can figure out exactly how much you would be willing to pay before you walk away.
- [01:50]
Karen Howe
Welcome to the Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Karen Howe. And I'm back.
- [01:58]
Thomas Germain
And we missed you so much, Karen. I'm Thomas Germain.
- [02:00]
Nicky Wolfe
And I'm Nicky Wolfe.
- [02:02]
Thomas Germain
Today on the Interface, we'll be talking about whether algorithms are going to jack up the price of your grocery bills
- [02:08]
Nicky Wolfe
and how if even astronauts have problems with Microsoft Outlook, why is it still so popular?
- [02:12]
Karen Howe
And is the new tech trend less tech?
- [02:20]
Thomas Germain
Okay, so let's jump in here. I want to talk to you guys about Walmart. Walmart, one of the biggest retailers in the world. If you've never been to one, it's. It's paradise. You can get anything.
- [02:30]
Nicky Wolfe
You can get anything you want.
- [02:32]
Thomas Germain
Yeah, yeah. You can buy new family members at Walmart. It's a huge store. Whatever you need. We're starting with a little bit of old News, but the implications are fresh. So in March, Walmart announced that it was rolling out digital price tags to all of its stores. They're already in 2,300 Walmart stores. Instead of like a little sticker instead of piece of paper, this is how much something costs. They have a screen that can be adjusted. This is coming to all Walmarts in the near future. And what Walmart says and what, you know, the National Retail Federation says is this is great, great because it's going to cut down on work for Walmart employees and they won't have to run around the store and change all these little pieces of paper that get thrown away. It's better to the environment. Sounds great, right? The concern here is something that maybe you've heard about, which is called dynamic pricing or personalized pricing or sometimes even surveillance pricing. And the idea is when you can just change the price on a little screen in a physical store or online, that we can charge different people different prices for the exact same thing based on your data and the data that companies are collecting about every single consumer. And it'll create a big power imbalance between you and the companies where they can squeeze a little bit more money out of you down to the last penny because they have enough information, they can figure out exactly how, how much you would be willing to pay before you walk away. We know it's already happening in a lot of different places across the economy and it's only getting worse. And the only question is how far this is going to go.
- [04:14]
Nicky Wolfe
We should talk about the times in which you will have already experienced dynamic pricing. So I think we talked about before about how when you book a flight, if you are looking for flights, then you'd go back and maybe the price of the flight is slightly different now. It's one of those things that's really hard to prove. And you kind of, sometimes when it happens to me or when I think it's happening to me, it's sort of like being gaslit, right? It's like, no, this is the price. And you're like, would it have been the price if I hadn't already checked it? If the company wasn't aware that I wanted this thing, would I be getting a different price for it? Am I being manipulated here?
- [04:50]
Karen Howe
100%. I have tried multiple times to buy flights on VPN in different locations and I've, I've tried that to see if they're using geolocation to price my flights higher. But to your point, Nikki, I, I can never quite figure it out. Because, yeah, the patterns are not obvious.
- [05:09]
Nicky Wolfe
I tend to VPN myself into Iceland and buy flights. I don't. I don't know why.
- [05:13]
Karen Howe
It's.
- [05:13]
Nicky Wolfe
It's almost become a superstition for me. Like, you do the. You must appease the gods of the dynamic pricing in order to get the best. And there's no. There's no evidence that anything like that works. Or at least I've never proved it to myself.
- [05:26]
Thomas Germain
There are all these techniques that people use to try and get around this. Because you've. You've heard this before, right? That the airlines, they have all these special, you know, ways that they're figuring out how to get a little bit more money out of you. People will, like, open a browser, like in a private window and. Or for a while, there was something. I was like, oh, you gotta buy your flights on Tuesdays. The flights are cheapest on Tuesdays. There's no evidence that any of this stuff works. I wouldn't rely on it. Like, that's not advice that we're giving you.
- [05:53]
Nicky Wolfe
The point is that this is coming to your weekly grocery shop. This is coming to when you need to buy milk, when you need to buy cabbages.
- [06:00]
Karen Howe
Cabbages.
- [06:02]
Nicky Wolfe
What is it? What's in your weekly stuff?
- [06:05]
Thomas Germain
People buy cabbages. That's good.
- [06:06]
Nicky Wolfe
Cabbages? Yeah, just milk and cabbage every week.
- [06:09]
Thomas Germain
That's milk and cabbage. You know, the traditional English breakfast. This is when it's not just flights. Right. This grocery example is real. So there was a study done by Consumer Reports with a couple of other groups. I used to work at Consumer Reports years ago at the beginning of my career, looking at a grocery delivery service called Instacart, where they had a bunch of shoppers volunteer the data they were getting, and they found that people were paying as much as 23% different prices for the exact same groceries. But there's all kinds of other examples. We can look at Uber for, for example, right? Every time you look at surge pricing at Uber. Yeah, surge pricing, right. Know when you. Everyone's leaving the concert at the same time, or your flight lands at the airport and everyone's going. And the. The. The price spikes. Years ago, there was a story that Uber was charging people more money when the battery on their phone was lower. Right. It was like, oh, you're a little more desperate. We can charge you a little more, is the theory.
- [07:10]
Nicky Wolfe
Oh, that's horrible.
- [07:12]
Thomas Germain
They got in a lot of trouble, apparently. This practice is over. The thing that gets me about this is, like, I spent years and years writing about privacy and it's like really the, the harms are kind of, you know, obscure and it like, might hurt you in the future in some particular way. And people, it's always go, well, I got nothing to hide. Who cares about this? Here's an example of why your privacy matters. This is all about informational imbalance. The companies know more about you than you know about the transaction. And it's not just you. They know more about all of us. And it gives them a huge power imbalance. The humble price tag that the New York Times did a story about, this was actually a very powerful tool for consumers and shoppers.
- [07:56]
Nicky Wolfe
Right.
- [07:56]
Thomas Germain
Because we knew what something cost. The idea here, the ultimate goal is that that's going to go away. And as you careen around the Internet, your data is going with you. They can compare you to lots of other people and they can set a special price that's just for you. So because we in the United States, there are basically no laws about privacy, not at the federal level, at least, this kind of thing is allowed. They can collect almost whatever kind of information they want about you.
- [08:23]
Karen Howe
Yeah, I think one of the things that people don't necessarily understand when they realize that dynamic pricing is happening is they think that it's people who can pay more that are charged more. And that is also the general line that I think a lot of companies use where they're like, oh, we're actually lowering the price for consumers that might not be able to pay as much. But actually study after study has shown that sometimes the opposite happen. So you were talking, Tom, about the Uber case. There was this really famous study in 2020 where researchers at the, at Washington University were looking at over a hundred million rides in Chicago and they found that Uber, Lyft, other ride hailing algorithms were actually charging higher prices for trips going to more neighborhoods with younger residents and also poorer neighborhoods and larger non white populations. So this is like algorithmic discrimination at its finest.
- [09:24]
Thomas Germain
Now the defense of this, because there's, you know, there's, there's another side of this argument. And like Karen said, part of the argument is like, oh, we're going to be able to charge people who can afford to pay more, like they will pay a higher price and that'll subsidize people who can only afford to pay less. There's another argument that you hear that like, no, what this is really about is coupons that we will lower the price. That was the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC in the United States, which regulates commerce, did a big investigation of this and ultimately came up a little dry because most of this is about coupons, at least the way that it's laid out now, where some people will get a discount and others will be charged the maximum price. So you can frame this in a way that sounds good, you know, rich people paying more, some people getting coupons. But what this is really about and why else would they be doing it, is to figure out the most that each individual person is willing to pay and charge them that amount.
- [10:28]
Karen Howe
Right. And, and we're sort of talking, we've been talking through a lot of examples where purchases are being digitally mediated, right? Like online shopping, Uber Instacart. But the reason why the Walmart announcement is such a big deal is because it also indicates that it could be coming in stores, right, Tom?
- [10:48]
Thomas Germain
Yeah, that's exactly right. So it's easy to do on the Internet because I'm looking at my phone, you're looking at your phone. They can show us two different things. How do you do this in stores? Well, not that hard if instead of a price tag, you have a little screen that tells you what everything costs. Now, the most extreme version of this, the technology exists. We know about it. If you go to, like, retail conferences, there's tech companies there that are advertising, this is so cool, we'll let you do it. They can do things, for example, like use facial recognition cameras. Cameras to be like, oh, that guy was here last week and we have this chart, like, tied to his loyalty card. We identified him with his face. We know he'll pay 20 cents more for bananas, so let's jack up the price as he approaches the banana stand. That's the most extreme version. Right. The slightly less extreme version is it doesn't have to be necessarily a different price for you specifically, but when it's super easy to change the prices dynamically, they go, oh, well, for whatever reason, more people are buying cookie dough today. And we anticipate, based on our mountain of data, that even more people will be buying it in the next two hours. So jack up the. The cookie dough prices. So that's the concern about Walmart, but we should give Walmart a chance to defend itself here. We reached out to them. Here's the quote that they gave us. They said, it's interesting to hear those concerns. It is interesting, I agree. It's kind of a nice compliment, right? But if you talk to people who shop in our stores every week, we think they will have a different view. Those labels are just a modern tool to help our associates do their jobs better. But the price you see is the same for everyone in any given store. They see the work we do every day to keep things affordable. They also sent us a link to some blogs that you can go find from the National Retail Federation. There's all kinds of people all over the Internet, especially those who work for industry trade groups who will tell you why this is so great, that essentially ultimately this will lower the prices for most people. But I have to ask, why would you do this if you were Walmart, if this is going to make prices lower for your customers? That's not. I mean, like we're running a business here.
- [12:55]
Nicky Wolfe
Right.
- [12:55]
Thomas Germain
Of course you're going to try and make the most money as possible. The hope is that this will make the economy more efficient and then everything will be great. But if I was a giant corporation, that isn't what I would want to do. So I guess it comes down to where you're going to put your trust.
- [13:13]
Karen Howe
The concerns that we're bringing up are not pure speculation. Right. The Consumer Reports investigation that you were referencing earlier, Tom, it also found that for Instacart, Instacart had actually filed patents that would have enabled constant in store price testing, price changes, the exact type of system that we're actually talking about, and it was predicated on these digital price tags. So it's not something that, you know, we're just sort of speculating here could happen simply because the capabilities exist. It is something that companies have actively discussed to the point of even filing a patent for it.
- [13:56]
Nicky Wolfe
Yeah. And we're living in the middle of a almost unprecedented cost of living crisis as well. It's, it's the top political issue right now. People are struggling.
- [14:06]
Karen Howe
You know, we're talking about these corporations using personal data to crank up things that are essential to basic quality of life. Like with that consumer Report study, they found that families buying exactly the same price of basket of goods, you know, shopping for exactly the same items, it could still cost them $1200 more in a year to purchase those groceries that another family over that the algorithm priced a lot of money differently. That, yeah, that's a huge amount of money.
- [14:39]
Thomas Germain
If consumers don't like this, there's pretty widespread agreement about this issue. What are we going to do about it? Well, legislators are trying, there's some proposals. In New York State, there is a bill that would ban algorithmically determined prices and it would force companies to disclose if they're doing any automated price adjustments based on consumer data. I think the way that this bill is phrased is so broad that it would be hard to get it through because like you ban all algorithms that are used to set prices. You know, algorithms in general are not evil. So I think it might need to be phrased a little differently, a little more specifically in order to address this
- [15:19]
Karen Howe
problem and before the bill passes, because bills do take a little bit of time to pass. It's worth noting that the Consumer Reports investigation actually led Instacart to suspend all of their AI driven price adjustments. So consumer outrage also works.
- [15:40]
Nicky Wolfe
So here's, here's something that you can do for us, which is I'm calling the Great Interface Banana Pricing Study. If you are in a, if you, if you go to a store and it has dynamic pricing, has like an electronic tag, take a little picture of the tag, tell us where this store is, which store it is, and send it to the interfacebc.com and hopefully we can gather enough data to figure out something shady is going on.
- [16:05]
Thomas Germain
We're going to take down Big Banana once and for all. Big Banana is a real thing. You know, the fruit company. I don't know if that's a tech story, but really scary. Yeah, yeah.
- [16:20]
BBC Announcer
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- [16:53]
Nicky Wolfe
All right, so I saw something this week that I just had to talk to you guys about. We're going from Walmart into outer space. America is going back to the moon. And as part of this mission they launched the Artemis space probe, which has four astronauts on board. They're going to do a long pass around the moon. And at some point there was a call. Houston, we have a problem. And it's a problem that I think probably a lot of our listeners will have come across. So you are like an astronaut in this. If you have ever had a problem that has led you to go, God damn it, Microsoft Outlook is broken again. That happened on board the Artemis space probe. Microsoft Outlook broke. They had these Microsoft Surface tablets, which is the personal computing devices. So this is not to be clear, this is not endangering the mission.
- [17:45]
Thomas Germain
That mission critical email.
- [17:47]
Nicky Wolfe
It's not mission critical email, but they had to call mission control and have somebody have an IT guy remote take remote control of the thing to fix their Outlook.
- [17:58]
Thomas Germain
You know, using Outlook does feel like being an astronaut. You're in this strange alien world. Nothing makes sense.
- [18:04]
Nicky Wolfe
You know, it's interesting to me that Microsoft, especially Outlook is such a widespread. But of a lot of jokes, right. The reaction online when it turned out that these astronauts were having like some outlet problems, let's just say that people weren't surprised. The reaction was, oh, this is a near universal experience that we have all had.
- [18:27]
Thomas Germain
It is of all the tech companies, the one that I hear like the most consistent criticism about like, not like the company's business practices, but about the experience, experience of using the products. I know so many people that hate Microsoft.
- [18:43]
Nicky Wolfe
Do you guys use Microsoft Outlook?
- [18:45]
Thomas Germain
Is that I have to use my. The BBC runs on the Microsoft Office suite. We have Outlook accounts. I use it every single day.
- [18:52]
Nicky Wolfe
That will be the distinction with a lot of people listening. I think is if you work for a big corporation, it is likely that you will have Microsoft Outlook. And I think it's worth diving into why Microsoft products have so cornered the market in big corporate contracts for being used for work when generally speaking, they are much less popular when people are choosing for their own individual use.
- [19:20]
Thomas Germain
And the reason so many companies are using it, it isn't necessarily because the products function better. There are a lot of very practical reasons. For one, security, right. Microsoft's whole thing is working with other businesses who need large contracts. And there's all these like compliance issues that Microsoft is set up to follow. They're in a position to just make it really smooth for IT departments. And certain things like, you know, Excel are just the industry standard.
- [19:48]
Karen Howe
But there's another aspect of it here which is that they are using algorithms and other ways of just extracting more value out of the consumer. And they know that you're locked in. So they don't really have a huge incentive anymore to make a really great experience.
- [20:07]
Nicky Wolfe
And the problem is if, if your company that you work for has negotiated a contract with Microsoft for the entire workplace, where is your consumer choice? You, you don't really have a decision on whether you can use Outlook because they, they have these massive B2B contracts.
- [20:28]
Thomas Germain
Yeah, these companies in a lot of ways don't really compete with each other. They'll be like little corners of the market where tech companies compete. Like if we look at like cloud computing, Amazon Web Services is number one. Google has cloud computing software or services. Microsoft has Azure. But if we look at like broadly, Amazon is a retail company for the most part. That isn't Competing with Microsoft. Microsoft is an enterprise software company. Google competes with them a little, but it's like not even close. Apple makes, you know, phones and hardware. Every company is like in a different corner of the market and people are using them, I think not necessarily because they love them. Like, do you use Google Search because you love it the most? Like, have you done comparison shopping and looked at the others and decided Google is the best or is it just, you know, is it a monopoly? It is. I'll give you the answer. It is a monopoly. The courts have ruled that Google uses illegal business practices to make its competitors worse and shot shut out the competition. It's an interesting, you know, there are other industries where there's competition and people use the one that they like. The, I mean, we look at AI. Like people who are into AI use the tool that they prefer. There's been a lot of like switch over to Claude, which is made by a company called anthropic away from ChatGPT. Because there's real competition in the market. There's products that are fundamentally almost identical and there's like this little variation where they have to make it a little bit better. Microsoft doesn't really have to do that, at least in terms of the user experience. They need to be better at making like enterprise customers happy. But in terms of like whether, you know, schmucks like me who are stuck using Outlook every day have to enjoy it, that's not necessarily. It just has to be good enough that I won't start a riot. But I, I gotta tell you, we're already starting. We're pretty close. If it crashes one more time, I
- [22:26]
Karen Howe
have to say, I mean, I am not a big defender of Microsoft as a corporation, but I will say, I will say Microsoft Word.
- [22:36]
Nicky Wolfe
You use Microsoft Word, right? Really?
- [22:38]
Karen Howe
I. No, no, no. So, so originally I.
- [22:41]
Thomas Germain
Someone turn Karen's camera off. I can't, I can't hear this.
- [22:47]
Karen Howe
I usually use Google Docs to write, if I'm writing short form. And I used Scrivener to write my book, which is like this software that helps you organize things that are very long form. But at some point you have to export out of Scrivener to start, you know, moving things around more easily. Microsoft Word had this incredible feature that saved my life, which was the ability to look, to take two documents and compare them and show the difference in track changes. That was actually life changing. So I just, you know, I just wanted to put in a little love letter for that specific feature on Microsoft Word.
- [23:30]
Nicky Wolfe
I mean, it's a very strange situation where this company that started out and Microsoft Word for the longest time absolutely was the corner of the market, was the only game in town.
- [23:41]
Thomas Germain
They blew all their competition out of the water.
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Nicky Wolfe
It was the Google of word processing for a unbelievably long time in the
- [23:48]
Thomas Germain
very recent past, Microsoft was the most valuable company on earth like within the past couple years. They're always like in the number one, two or three spot. This is a big company. I mean it's still a huge consumer company. There are millions and millions and millions of people who are using, probably using a Microsoft product as they listen to this, right? But when we look at like why are regular people buying Microsoft products or buying computers that use Microsoft? I think there's two reasons, right? One is if you're a gamer, gamers love Microsoft or they love, they love Windows because a lot of games will not work on other operating systems. It's just like a compatibility issue, particularly Mac.
- [24:28]
Nicky Wolfe
There's a whole load of games that just simply aren't, will not work.
- [24:32]
Thomas Germain
The other reason that a lot of people use Windows and Microsoft products is because the computers can be cheaper. You can get a much cheaper Microsoft laptop than an Apple laptop. Until last month when Apple rolled out its new laptop. It's called the MacBook Neo and it costs $599. And this is a major change in the history of computing for a number of reasons. People have always wanted a cheap MacBook. Apple has always refused to make one. Now from all you know, we don't review products but from the people who do, the, the, the sentiment seems to be everyone thinks these things are great, especially for the money. It's like a no brainer that this is the best cheap laptop on the market. I think this is going to cause a sea change where over the next five to 10 years people who have less money that would have been on a PC who are making a purely price driven decision are going to switch over to Mac. And this will be in large part the end of an era for Microsoft. Unless you know, the Lenovo's and HPS and ACers of the world step up their game significantly. But that is hard to imagine given Apple's success at making devices that people fall in love with. So this could be the beginning of the end because of the way, you know that the PC manufacturers in Microsoft have played their hand here. And I think that Microsoft could lose this part of the market altogether and still be incredibly successful because they make all their money from other businesses.
- [26:16]
Nicky Wolfe
Right? Google tried to wage this war against Microsoft with the Chromebook. And Microsoft managed to hold them off as, and maintain their position as kind of if you buy any laptop that isn't a Chromebook and isn't an Apple, we'll be running Windows will come with Windows.
- [26:33]
Thomas Germain
Yeah.
- [26:33]
Nicky Wolfe
But we've reached out to Microsoft for some comment and they haven't got back to us at this point at time of recording, but we will put their response in the show notes.
- [26:42]
Karen Howe
So I feel like the first two stories that we talked about today really relate to what I wanted to talk with you guys about, which is how to disentangle yourself from digital tech and try to find the sweet spot where you're not just completely consumed by the algorithm, completely consumed by the vortex of online information, but in fact, you figure out exactly for yourself where you want to draw the line for how much digital technology you really want in your life. And this is the rise of Neo Luddism. There you know many names for it. There's this name, Neutro, which is the portmanteau of new and retro people reverting back to older 80s, 90s technologies. There's also this term friction maxing, which came out from a column in the Cut earlier this year. This idea that maybe we shouldn't just be going for maximum convenience and we should be introducing little ways of withholding that dopamine hit from doom scrolling or from ordering a meal online so seamlessly. And I really love this topic because it is kind of the best way that average consumers can start to reclaim more agency in their lives. Like there is this march of technological progress that a lot of people feel FOMO about and they feel like they have to just adopt every single tech trend that comes into their lives. Especially now with AI everywhere, the number one thing that I hear from people is, oh, if I don't use the next latest, greatest AI tool, I am totally going to be left behind. But that's not actually true. There are lots of ways that you could just decide not to use these technologies, decide to revert back to older technologies that simply worked for you really well. And this is one of the ways that you can exercise more control and develop a healthier relationship with your technology.
- [28:42]
Thomas Germain
And this is something, Karen, you, you just had a little taste of this, right? You went on vacation and you had a, a sort of break from your phone. It was like a different phone experience.
- [28:53]
Karen Howe
Yes. So I just went on vacation. I went to mainland China and every time I go into mainland China, I actually switch to a, a separate phone because China has a totally different ecosystem of applications. And so I have two phones, one that's my outside of China ph, all of my regular apps. And then I have a China phone that has WeChat, that has Alipay and all the things that I need for life within China. And it basically, I set this phone up so that it doesn't really have that much interesting stuff on it. It's just like purely functional applications. And I couldn't access any of my social media, I couldn't doom scroll, and my screen time just dramatically dropped. I probably went from using my screen like an unhealthy amount of 12 hours a day, including my phone and my laptop, to maybe an hour, two hours a day.
- [29:49]
Nicky Wolfe
12 hours a day, you're on a screen. I mean, that's extreme.
- [29:55]
Karen Howe
I mean, wait a minute. Are you not like, if you think about how often, like, I'm working, maybe 10 to 12 hours a day? Yeah.
- [30:02]
Thomas Germain
It's not just social media, right? You're like, yeah, yeah. You do your work on a screen.
- [30:06]
Nicky Wolfe
Well, that you should.
- [30:08]
Thomas Germain
What's your. You use again? You have a BlackBerry. I've got a semi dumpster from the 1970s, I think. I think it is. So you probably don't have a screen time feature. You can check.
- [30:18]
Nicky Wolfe
Give it. Give it a little spray up there.
- [30:21]
Thomas Germain
Oh, look at that. So, Nikki, this isn't friction maxing. You're just stubborn. You've been doing this since before it was cool, right? Like, you've been through so many different eras with your smartphone that now you're on the cutting edge. Let's take a step back for a second though. Like this, this friction maxing idea that came from this article earlier this year. This is really fun. Let's go into this a little bit. Like, what are we talking about? Friction maxing?
- [30:45]
Karen Howe
Yeah, I feel like I just need to read a little bit from this column because when this column came out, it was. It was such a huge light bulb moment for me. So the way that it frames it, tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself, itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single tap commands. Reading is boring. Talking is awkward. Moving is tiring. Leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn't worth it. Speaking at all overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate easily. And we do. But this is a sick joke that is being played on all of us. It's infantilizing adults, and we don't even have a word yet for what it's doing to kids. This is why I've resolved to commit to make 2026 a year of friction maxing. So the concept is basically like, we've really allowed companies to, under the guise of being more convenient, more seamless, more integrated into our lives, allowed them to dictate so many aspects of our behaviors, our relationships, how we literally get food, what we pay for something as basic as groceries now. And Freestyle actually is kind of this idea that maybe we should just not let them do that by refusing to adopt certain types of technologies, refusing to give them certain types of data, and reclaim that sense of control in our own lives.
- [32:23]
Thomas Germain
There's been a lot of writing and talking and bloviating on this subject from people like, you know, the three of us, like tech journalists about the. This, this new trend. Luddites are coming back. Everybody's going back to old tech. Everyone's using dumb phones. I think it is worth maybe injecting like, a note of skepticism. There are some people doing this. It is a real thing. Some people are switching to dumb phones. This isn't a thing that's happening on a massive scale. Right? Like, most people are using modern smartphones. Most people are not choosing to reject Instagram and, you know, food delivery and, like, you know, algorithmic music recommendations.
- [33:11]
Karen Howe
Tom's just trying to defend himself.
- [33:13]
Thomas Germain
Well, there's something going on. I don't know if it rises to the level of the movement, but it has risen to the level that I personally have started collecting cassettes, which I think makes me sound like a crazy person. But this is my boombox that I. I bought this on ebay and I actually stoked. This thing is really great. It's also very old and kind of beat up and only works, like half the time.
- [33:35]
Nicky Wolfe
That's what you want it to be, babe.
- [33:37]
Thomas Germain
But it's kind of nice, you know, you put it on, it's a little. There's a little more friction involved, right? You listen to something on Spotify, you're kind of letting the algorithm make all the decisions for you. With a cassette or a record, you put it on, you're going to listen to the whole thing, or at least, you know, one side of one side of the album before you flip the tape. There's something more intentional about it. It's kind of. It's kind of comforting.
- [33:58]
Nicky Wolfe
Especially with music, there's a feeling of ownership. When you're streaming music on Spotify, you're Streaming it from a centralized thing. Spotify goes down, you lose your playlists, right? You have a record collection and you have it forever. You can go through it, you can rediscover your old favorites. And I think also with DVDs, people are getting annoyed at the streaming services. You rent a movie, it kind of disappears into the ether. People have a collection of DVDs and they're the media that they own and they can go back and watch it anytime.
- [34:29]
Thomas Germain
I guess the question for me is like, are we looking at trends where like there's a little moment of pushback or is this like a broader shift?
- [34:38]
Nicky Wolfe
This friction maxing thing is part of a lot of different wider movements. The dumb funds, the friction maxing. But I think it's all representative of people's growing both resentment and lack of trust that these ginormous tech companies that it's possible to have your entire life within like an ecosystem. People are starting to go, hold on a minute, let's, you know, we can go outside. We don't have to do everything via tech.
- [35:08]
Thomas Germain
If you step back for a minute, my friend Yousef is always talking about this grand theory that he has. Like 10, 15, 20 years ago, cable was the biggest thing in the world. It was like impossible to imagine that we would move away from cable. But it turned out that that was a generational trend, that it's not the mainstream media platform anymore. Even music streaming. You know, I think we could look at the, the way people are spending their time. Social media is probably number one. But that could be a cultural trend too. Like we've all shifted towards short form video. If that just stops being cool and interesting, we could end up with something completely different. Now is that thing going to be better? I don't know. Like so far the trends haven't like shifted towards like, oh well, this is a much more like human and peaceful and, and nice technology. But the system that we're in now, there's no reason to think that we're going to be having the same experience of tech, you know, even in five years that we're having now. If you're unhappy about it, like you could just start buying cassettes.
- [36:08]
Karen Howe
I think the thing that does distinguish this moment is that people are actually reverting back to the previous generation's technology. And I do have some stats. I wasn't able to find a ton. But for example, with the smartphone to dumb phone trend hmd, which brought back the Nokia flip phone, they saw sales double by April of 2023 for their dumb phones. And social media also peaked in 2022, with the fastest decline among young, the youngest users between 16 and 24. So there's like something for sure in the air of people wanting to revert back to these older, less algorithmically driven, less sticky technologies. And I think this was captured really well by one of the people that the New York Times magazine article interviewed, this guy named Tony. He's 28 years old, and he said it's annoying to be a functional member of society without a smartphone. So that kind of gets to your point, Tom, that there are a lot of people who actually are not opting to do this. But he says there were just times I spent the entire day scrolling and felt disgust. It's like eating 20 White Castle burgers. There's other stuff I want to do. And I think that's. That is, in a nutshell, exactly what we're talking about here, which is like, people are kind of just tired and sick and they realize that the tech, their relationship, the technology is really not working for them. And. And this is their way of sticking it to the man, sticking it to the machine.
- [37:47]
Nicky Wolfe
I was speaking to a friend yesterday who has an app on her iPhone that switches it to black and white. And even that small change, she says has changed her screen time by a couple of hours every day because it's just not flicking the same buttons in the brain.
- [38:07]
Karen Howe
This is what my iPhone.
- [38:08]
Thomas Germain
What the hell is that? Oh, you have like. It's like a launcher. Is that what they call it?
- [38:13]
Karen Howe
Yeah, yeah, it's like an app that makes your smartphone into a dumb phone.
- [38:16]
Thomas Germain
I have a shock collar that I
- [38:18]
Karen Howe
put on everyone listening at home. Think about something that you might do this week that could add to your friction. Maxing. One of my favorite pieces of advice that I got from journalist Jamie Bartlett was to actually think about ways that you could just minimize your phone use simply by buying other single use technologies. Like half the time we're looking at our phone just to set an alarm. Why don't you just buy an alarm clock? Or when, if you're using it to listen to music, maybe actually go buy an MP3 player or go back to cassettes and boomboxes like Tom. So, yeah, just try. Give yourself that challenge and let us know in the comments what you did. And Tom and Nikki, that includes you. I want to hear what you friction maxed with in our next episode.
- [39:09]
Thomas Germain
I feel called out. Karen is better about this stuff than we are.
- [39:14]
Nicky Wolfe
I really. I might just get a boombox like Tom. I think that looks really cool.
- [39:18]
Thomas Germain
I have a racetick. I gotta be honest.
- [39:20]
Nicky Wolfe
It's awesome. That's dope. I like that a lot.
- [39:22]
Thomas Germain
Yeah.
- [39:26]
Nicky Wolfe
Join us next week. If you're in the uk, you can listen on BBC Sounds and if you're outside the uk you can listen wherever you get your podcasts or search for the Interface podcast on YouTube. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us@theinterfacebc.com you can also WhatsApp us on 3332072472 or you can find us all on social media. Links are in the Show Notes.
- [39:59]
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