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.
