However, some of us had bigger dreams for our offspring than talking to microwaves, which meant that this era seriously dented the reputation of being “smart”. Chen, for example, has watched antipathy towards him grow over the years. “I think you’re seeing a lot of people start to get kicked out of the ‘smart’ category because of all the ramifications that come with that,” he says — subscription fees, companies folding and ceasing to maintain software, features and content you paid for suddenly disappearing. (Not to mention privacy and security concerns like the FBI eavesdropping on your voice-activated massager while hackers use your toaster for DDoS attacks.)
Chen mentioned the MyQ garage door opener, which outraged users by introducing a subscription: “People are just realizing that I can’t even open a garage for free anymore. own already?” That feeling fueled a growing love of dumbness — “because it’s like, OK, actually me he bought this coffee maker. Not connected to Wi-Fi or the Internet. I won’t need software updates. It will work forever if I clean it every now and then.’
Smartphones are too deeply embedded in modern life for many people to officially ditch them — but according to some polls, nearly half of Americans want to. he could. What’s remarkable is that the people most likely to try it—and sometimes the people most interested in “dumb screens” or dumb products in general—are neither tech-averse nor behind the times. Rather, they are early adopters who put a lot of effort and technical knowledge into creating the experience they want. This is a strange moment we’ve arrived at: Even among young futurists, it’s often the promise of “advanced” digital features that makes people groan.
There is also a funny language trick here. Both “clever” and “stupid” seem to have arrived at their usual meaning through metaphor. “Stupid” meant for most of its life in English muteunresponsive — stunned, potentially but mostly just silent. That’s why a previous technological innovation was called the “dumb waiter”: It would pull something up without a word. The change to imply stupidity is only a few hundred years old—recent enough that most of us have no problem understanding the word as “fool.” As for “smart,” the original meaning is that which involves sharp pain. But we use a lot of blade-like metaphors to describe intelligence—sharp, sharp, cutting, piercing, sharp, piercing—and sometime around the 16th century, “clever” joined sharp mind.
Which means that on some weird level we may have circled the origin of these words. Smart things hurt us. The stupid ones are blessedly quiet – which may seem like the more intelligent option at this point.
