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AI and the iPod Test
Why are so many people reaching for "obsolete" tech?
Posted July 27, 2026
Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
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Key points
The iPod may represent a test of whether your own mind still comes first.
This relates to AI taking small daily acts of thinking off your hands.
Nobody defends this loss the way labor once fought automation. It just goes unnoticed.
Source: Image by Mike Foster from Pixabay.
Maybe you shouldn't throw away that old iPod.
A recent Harvard Gazette article on the "tech-lash" caught my attention. It was built around an interview with the analyst Sara Watson where she talked about people digging up vintage iPods and going back to flip phones, part of a broader turn toward what she called "grandma hobbies" like knitting.
Watson also used an emerging term, "friction-maxxing," where steps are deliberately reintroduced into a task to counteract technology designed to be frictionless. Further, she pointed to resistance to surveillance capitalism, to the inevitability framing tech companies keep selling us and to the sense that our devices were changed without our consent. She also ties it to the body and the tactile pleasure of a mechanical engagement.
All good points, and I don't think she's wrong. Watson's perspective explains why people are irritated. But it doesn't explain what they are trying to preserve. And that might be even more important.
What the iPod Doesn't Do
An iPod doesn't choose the next song based on what keeps you listening longest. It doesn't know you. It has no opinion about your taste and basically nothing to optimize. You loaded it once, and after that it just played what you told it to play.
That's not nostalgia. It's a description of a device with no theory of you.
Compare that to a device that finishes your sentences and suggests what comes next, from routes to tunes. Each of those is a convenience and none of them, on their own, costs you anything you'd notice. Now here's the critical difference. Convenience arrives in increments too small to argue with, and at some point the increments add up to a changed relationship with your own mind.
Watson calls this a market response, a form of consumer resistance. Maybe. But I keep thinking about something more specific than resistance: the difference between a mind that is still practicing and one that has stopped without announcing it.
Activities of Daily Thinking
A few months ago I proposed a conceptual framework called Activities of Daily Thinking (ADTs) that was borrowed directly from the clinical language of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). These are the basic tasks like dressing or preparing food that clinicians use as a proxy for independence. My suggestion was that thinking has its own version of that checklist that included reading, writing, deciding, disagreement, and contemplation. Small, everyday acts. No single one is missed the day it stops and that's exactly the problem.
The iPod trend looks to me like ADT showing up as behavior, not just market adoption.
Taken individually, each act on that list seems almost trivial. Choosing your own playlist doesn't really make you a sharper thinker. But no single act was ever the point. The real question is what happens to a mind that keeps outsourcing them.
I use AI every day and I'm not making an argument against artificial intelligence. It's an argument for recognizing that effort sometimes has value independent of efficiency.
Thinking for Yourself
Here's where I think the Gazette piece stops short. Watson's four levers—law, norms, market, architecture, borrowed from Lawrence Lessig—are all external. They describe forces acting on a person. None of them describe what happens inside the person who keeps handing off the small daily acts of thinking and deciding.
The Luddites weren't fighting looms, they were fighting the loss of work and the social structure, and Watson is right to make that distinction. But there's no equivalent labor movement forming around the loss of your own mind on your own problems. Simply put, there's no picket line for a habit no one notices you losing.
I don't know if the iPod people would put it this way. Maybe it really is mostly about ad-free listening and owning your files outright. But I'd bet at least some of them, if pressed, would land somewhere close to wanting one part of the day where nothing was trying to think for them.
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