The ways we'll claw back our lives from Big Tech in 2025 , part 2

The return of physical bookstores, the Great Rebuttoning, a boom in phone-free spaces and events, and more

Earlier this month, I peered into the tea leaves of 2025 and posted the first of two newsletters making some informed bets about what the coming year holds regarding our collective exhaustion with digital maximalism. The upshot: I believe this year will be a turning point in the war for attention for a whole host of reasons. I’ve identified 10 trends and signs that I’m confident will accelerate in 2025.

The first five trends I spotlighted in Part 1 were:

1. The beginning of the end of the phone-based childhood

2. “Content” begins a slow spiral into stigmatization

3. Print is punk again

4. The backlash against algorithmic curation and control goes mainstream

5. Dating apps increasingly move offline

Since I published Part 1 on January 9, I also had the pleasure of being interviewed by kindred spirit

Caoilainn

at Brave Enough for her series on 2025 Tech Resolutions. In that interview, I did a deep dive on my intent to think carefully about where in my life algorithms are determining and manipulating my choices and decisions, and to withdraw from or reconsider them where I can. I suspect I’ll have more to say about that topic in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I offer you Part 2 of my peek into what 2025 holds for our lives inside and outside of The Matrix.

6. Screens and digital displays will increasingly be viewed as low-rent

The introduction of the iPhone and its groundbreaking touchscreen display in 2007 was a watershed moment for screens; when the iPad came out in 2010, the dam broke. Within a decade, iPad-style touchscreens were everywhere: our cars, our supermarket checkouts, our appliances, our doors, our hotel rooms. Virtually every place we once pushed a button or twiddled a dial, we now had a touchscreen.

And they have been driving us crazy. A screen isn’t always the best way to interact with something. It requires you to look directly at it, for one thing. It rarely provides tactile feedback. Public screens wear out with use and, infuriatingly, stop working at all.

As a designer myself, therefore, it’s been a relief to witness, finally, what may be the beginning of The Great Rebuttoning. I’m betting 2025 will see tactile controls come back into fashion for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s already happening. Apple added two new buttons to the iPhone 16. We’re seeing home appliances like stoves and washing machines bringing knobs back, and several car manufacturers are reintroducing buttons and dials to dashboards and infotainment controls.

Tactile controls never went out of fashion with DJs. Expect twirlable buttons and knobs to make a big return in 2025 for the rest of us, too.

Last year, Walgreens replaced 10,000 refrigerator doors with giant digital displays that occluded shoppers’ view of the actual contents. To few people’s surprise, the screens were a usability disaster; they also glitched out and often went dark, making purchases impossible. (When Walgreens tried to end the contract, the vendor bricked the computer doors for a week.)

But I think there’s more to it than just usability. As touchscreens proliferated, what once seemed stylish, sleek and futuristic has come to be viewed as commonplace and low-rent. To paraphrase an old axiom, ubiquity breeds contempt; the real glamour is in scarcity.

As we collectively struggle with digital overwhelm and even the most broke-ass of us flash state-of-the-art smartphones, digital displays will continue to lose their sheen in 2025. (Side bet: my money’s also on “human made” as the new form of luxury in 2025).

7. Physical bookstores stage a comeback

Remember the death of the brick-and-mortar bookstore? Yeah, that memo may have been slightly premature. Last year the nation’s biggest and onliest remaining big bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble, rose up, shook its fist at the fates, spat in the doomsayers’ general direction, and delivered a mighty fuck you to Amazon by opening 58 new stores across the U.S. This year the retail giant is set to open another 60, even reclaiming the Washington, D.C. flagship store it vacated in 2013. Indie bookstores, too, have been staging a quiet, quirky comeback (along with their cats), with an estimated 300 new stores opening across the U.S. The American Booksellers Association, a group representing independent shops, reported an 11% year-over-year increase in membership in early 2024.

It’s tempting to think this is merely a natural market response to the post-pandemic availability of high-traffic retail space. But the anecdotal evidence points to something else altogether: After years of being told by Big Tech that our future is ever more online, we are desperate for physical interactions with the world and our neighbors again.

This is not (or not exclusively) a market response but a human one. We are begging for what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third spaces.” One of the most gratifying aspects of the Barnes and Noble comeback is that it’s largely down to an inspired decision by their new CEO: allow the manager of each store to operate the location as if it were an independent local bookstore rather than forcing them into a straitjacket of corporate homogeneity. The result? Stores that reflect their neighborhoods and residents instead of a giant chain playbook.

We want to once again touch and smell and experience the world, and see our neighbors, and remember what it feels like to be human. Bookstores, more than any other place outside of home and work, bars, and centers of worship (the irony, right?), will again make that possible.

8. No laptops, no phones at this table. Or that one.

There are few things sadder than walking into a coffee shop and seeing legions of keyboard warriors hunched over their screens, fingers tapping away at their laptops, walled off entirely from their neighbors just feet away by earbuds and over-ear headphones.

More and more I’m seeing signs on tables discouraging or even prohibiting laptop use and encouraging people to talk instead of tap and scroll.

This year, expect to see more retail spaces begin limiting laptop use and asking visitors to put their phones away or give them up. We’ll also see a surge in explicitly analog events where participants are encouraged or required to stow their smartphones out of sight and mind.

Again, this is a trend already in the making. Book clubs, for example, are booming, especially among Millennials and Gen Z readers looking for new ways to socialize. Many of these new takes on an old format are pairing book discussions with cocktails or meals; others simply hold space for attendees to silently read anything they wish, rather than discussing a single book. Here on Substack, Analog Social is on a mission to revive the lost tradition of the salon by “creating tech-free spaces for curious minds to gather, share ideas, and forge meaningful bonds through curated events, including salons, supper clubs, and cultural experiences.”

Explicitly phone-free events will surge in 2025

It’s likely we’ll also see a great new variety of third places appearing in 2025, stepping in just as bookstores have for decades to provide a new locus for community, talk-oriented events, gaming, intimate gatherings, and dates for singles that don’t rely exclusively on alcohol.

But unlike the vibe Starbucks pioneered in the 90s and made a central plank of its retail mojo — use our cafes as an ersatz remote office and meeting space — many of these new spaces will discourage laptop use in favor of human interaction, even with strangers.

9. A shift in the way we talk about the digital divide.

Since its emergence in the 1990s. the “digital divide” has been used to describe the gap created by unequal access to modern communications technology among different demographic groups and regions, particularly with regards to internet and smartphone access. Those differences were widely understood to reinforce social inequalities and to cause a significant and debilitating information and knowledge gap.

In 2025, the digital divide will take on an altogether new meaning. It’s no longer about whether or not a population has access to technology, but whether or not a group has the ability — the privilege — to step away from Big Tech’s regime of control and exploitation.

To quote Jon Haidt again:

“We used to think the digital divide was that all the rich kids had computers and the poor kids didn’t. Now the digital divide is that kids in wealthy families have two parents trying to put controls on all this stuff... Whereas kids with single parent families, poor families and marginalized families, they have higher rates of [problematic] use. Because it’s hard for those families to put controls on it.”

This year I believe we’ll see an emerging awareness of this divide and the beginnings of conversations about how to mitigate its worst effects.

10. Big Tech will look more and more like Big Tobacco

We go into 2025 with four federal antitrust lawsuits bearing down on Google, Meta, and Amazon like a nightmare confluence of runaway freight trains. TikTok lost its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to save it from a nationwide ban this month. Scores of state attorneys general have sued Meta for knowingly addicting kids to their platforms. Dozens more have said they support a federal effort to add a Surgeon General’s warning to social media platforms for risks to youth mental health.

Regardless of the eventual legal outcomes of these efforts, it’s plain that the cultural moment is shifting away from Big Tech, its rapacious business model, and its shameless exploitation of us.

For a while there, we all fell for the shtick about making the world more open and connected, and yeah, we’re terrible suckers for convenience. But “connection” seems less and less the point, and the price we and our children are paying for all this convenience has begun to come into stark and terrifying focus. The gift they offer us has begun to seem more and more like a curse.

The legal technicalities at play matter far less than the vibe these platforms are giving off. And the vibe, quite frankly, is rank and getting ranker by the day.

Case in point: a February 2024 post from Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker about the effects of technology on modern culture was his most-read ever newsletter. The below graphic reached a million people.

“I clearly tapped into a growing anxiety among the general public,” Gioa wrote. “They fear new tech in a way they never have before.”

As I said at the end of December, once your brand takes on the taint of an epithet like Brain Rot, your days are numbered. Let’s see how the next 345 or so play out for them.

11. BONUS BET: The flowering of attention activism and personalized attention coaching

Recent years gave us a proliferation of a host of facilitated workshops that promised to teach the art of “reclaiming” our attention. Guided in-person and remote sessions promised to help participants “reclaim your attention and align it with your values,” and to “adjust the flow of energy and time through your life, particularly in reclaiming your attention from screens.” Even the storied Esalen Institute in Big Sur offers a “digital liberation workshop” aimed at “reclaiming the lost self from technology.”

I’m confident the coming year will see the further commodification and productization of efforts to reclaim our attention, notably in the form of personalized attention coaches and the maturation of “attention activism.”

It’s already relatively easy to find coaches right here on Substack who will work with individuals to craft a personalized “escape plan” from social media or your smartphone. Given the rate at which Millennials and Gen Z graduates are eschewing the traditional nine-to-five corporate pathway for autonomous gig work they find more meaningful and fulfilling, it’s a good bet we’ll be seeing many more attention coaches in our feeds, ads, and inboxes this year. We might even be engaging one. That’s not necessarily my jam with Hard Refresh, but I’m paying careful attention.