In March, I put my iPhone into a yellow cardboard box with MO stamped on top—the M looked like a riff on the Motorola logo; the O looked like a flower. Over the next several weeks, I left my phone there for roughly 23.5 hours out of every day.I did so as a participant in “Month Offline,” which started last year in Washington, D.C., as a kind of Dry January challenge, but for smartphones. Now it is a fledgling business with a footprint in New York City. Members of each monthlong “cohort” pay $75 for the experience, during which they swap their iPhones for a lower-tech device and participate in weekly meetups. I joined the cohort that began on March 2 and received an email just before the first meeting: “Excited 2 see u soon,” it said.My month offline began with the MO pledge—a document with curious capitalization that declared us all “Free and Independent Human Beings” who were “Absolved from all dependence on big tech and their attention-grabbing algorithms.” By signing at the bottom, I agreed to “forego” the use of my smartphone for 30 days and thereby “trade dopamine for daylight, doomscrolls for detours, pixels for paper maps.”The other members of my cohort, who would meet on Monday nights in a still-semi-industrial corner of Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood (near a soup factory), were mostly women, mostly in their late 20s or early 30s. They had heard about Month Offline from a friend, or they had seen a wheat-paste flyer (Flip Off!) on the street, or, in at least one case, they had come across a post about MO on the party-planning app Partiful, which is where this person did their scrolling after having deleted all other forms of social media from their phone. Several people in our group had full-time jobs in technology, and nobody I spoke with considered themselves to be “anti-tech.” But they all felt like smartphone use was costing them hours of free time every day, access to stores of creativity, and opportunities for adventure and friendship in the great city of New York.One salve for these anxieties could be a different kind of phone. Month Offline has spun off a tiny start-up, dumb.co, that sells the sort of flip phones that you might want to use when your iPhone has been hidden in a cardboard box. Their design is more than just a relic from… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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