What is slow tech in the age of AI?

By any measure, the speed at which I’ve launched this publication has helped answer the question, “What is slow tech?”. I had the idea to start a new blog back in 2020, and I had imagined it as a place where I’d watch and discuss old movies and books, and perhaps some under-appreciated music from the past.

In 2021, I did some design work and started writing. I watched the Hitchcock movie, Rebecca, and wrote about it and my university film studies course. I read some Michael Connelly “Bosch” books from the 1990s, and wrote about those too. I was going to call the blog, The Rencontrés, a sort of franglais word I invented that if it existed, might mean "the ones encountered". Look, here's a mobile design I mocked up with some text:

Later that year, I installed a copy of Ghost on a DigitalOcean “droplet”, determined to host my own publication and avoid the problematic newsletter platform. And then it sat, unfinished. Ghost is kind of complicated to run by yourself. And kind of expensive for a half-baked blog that might never get finished.

I started a new job, and got busier. My attention span got sucked away by devices and social media. The world got weirder and uglier. I started feeling uneasy about my relationship with technology in all facets of life. I deleted my Ghost installation and my droplet.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes in more stark terms about the convenience loop we find ourselves in, as we embrace “distraction and compulsive avoidance”. And she writes about embracing “friction” instead — building up tolerance for inconvenience, and small hardships, and accepting risk and even outcomes that aren’t perfect.

Each of these acts may be insignificant, but an orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape.

In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing

In the face of technologies that sell us escapism at every turn, we need to build up tolerance for “inconvenience.”

I started thinking about what we mean when we talk about “tech” and technology, and how relative it all is. The idea of having access to all the music in all the world on my devices seemed thrilling fifteen years ago. During a big move, I got rid of most of my CDs and embraced MP3s, and then eventually Rdio, and then Spotify. These days I am more suspicious about it. I don’t remember music I like as easily, and it seems clear that few musicians are making any money from me streaming their music. And so I bought a record player. Vinyl records are technology, but nobody would call them high tech. They’re big, cumbersome, and delicate. It takes some effort to put on a record. It requires some intention, and even some practice.

I thought about the Slow Food movemen t. It exists now as a foundation, but was originally started in the 1980s in Italy as a protest against a fast food restaurant opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome. I thought maybe there was something to learn in this, and we might start to think about technology the same way. Cheeseburgers are delicious, but consuming them every day isn’t healthy, and neither is consuming social media, even though scrolling feeds and receiving likes generates good feelings sometimes.

The launch of ChatGPT near the end of 2022 felt like a watershed moment in how the world sees technology. As in, we lifted the floodgates, and flooded the landscape with generative text liquified from large language models and images computed from “stable diffusion”. My own relationship with AI is complicated. I use it at work, and work on software that uses it. I think its impact is not to be underestimated, but I try to think about it as “ normal technology ”, albeit one capable of vastly increasing our technological caloric input and output.

In 2025, I registered the domain slowtech.space, spurred on by a real-life conversation about all this. I might use a paper and pen sometimes, and like many I feel like throwing my phone in the ocean on occasion, but really what I'm interested in is having a healthier relationship with technology. Writing more than 280 characters even on a keyboard and publishing it online feels like slow technology now.

So this publication will be the start of that. I still want it to be a place where I can review old books and movies — old technology if you like — but I also want to think about and reason with the new technology too.

I hope you’ll join me for the journey.