Have you ever been curious about how intelligent you are and how your intelligence compares with others around you? Have you lamented at having to deal with idiots all the time? Have you wished everyone matched your level of smartness? Well, you are not alone. Humans have been obsessed with smartness probably since the beginning of our existence. In the hunting gathering days, brawn may have mattered as much if not more. But even then, the ones who could mix smarts with brawns stood to gain more.
Albert Einstein is known to have asked to be cremated without ceremony, and for his ashes to be scattered in secret to prevent the site becoming a place of pilgrimage. His wish was fulfilled but not before his brain was stolen, apparently. To be researched. Doctors wanted to unravel the mysteries of the genius brain. This is not even the tip of how far our fascination with intelligence has taken us. We have sliced it up, quantified it, qualified it, deconstructed it and now re-constructed it. We have now reached the era where anything – human or inanimate can be given an IQ. In fact most advertising ranging from those for beauty products to consumer durables to automobiles to wearables urges us to not settle for less than that.
All good. We love it because we are in awe of intelligence, be it natural or artificial. Only trouble is, gee whiz, we are not overwhelmed by it. All this transformation to an all smart existence has been too sudden. For the first time our fascination for intelligence is being taken over by nostalgia. A yearning for going back to the way things were. Nostalgia is not new but this time it is with renewed gusto impacting consumer behavior and consumer choice.
Moreover, smart devices end up being distracting and draining. Phones for instance, have taken over our lives completely. One needs to be particularly disciplined and self-controlled to not reach out for their phone first thing in the morning or every single time you are woken up during the night. It takes a lot of work to detox from the dopamine rush our phones have got us addicted to. This has led to a Kafkaesque irony. Now people are desperately searching for ways to escape this ‘smartness’ overload. This has revived the once considered dead market for brick phones. Fondly termed dumb phones, they are being loved for their simplicity and physical sturdiness. There seems to be a certain reliability in dumb phones that smartphones made us crave.
The pursuit for simpler technologies doesn’t end with phones. For decades, vinyl had been pushed away to attics or second hand shops for a steal by faster and nuanced intelligent mediums. So convenient are these that you don’t place the spindle in the right position or even to press a play button but to simply ‘tell’ it the song you want played. And yet, today we are witnessing a revival of the Vinyls. Samanvii Digimedia Art and Solutions Pvt Ltd just opened India’s first vinyl record manufacturing plant in over four decades, confirming that analogue is desired again.
Another victim of this ditching of smart technology is dating. Dating apps revolutionised the landscape of romance but also complicated it beyond belief legitimising concepts of situationships and non-exclusivity among others. Leaving most people confused and lost while navigating the murky maze of matches. Not to mention falling prey to scamsters. Little surprise that dating apps have been losing their appeal in recent years. A startup called Pear has addressed these concerns by helping single people meet each other offline. All they need to do is wear an aqua-coloured ring, made by Pear, to show their openness to being wooed. Another company called Thursday that organises in-person events for singles, has expanded its service to roughly 30 cities, from Stockholm to Sydney.
The key takeaway for us as marketers and business owners is that people are tired of smartness. Smart technologies are plaguing us with choice overload and analysis paralysis. It is preventing us from focusing on sleeping well at night. In the future we may crave for more ‘dumb’. In the right measure, dumb in products, brands and communications may indeed be smart.
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