I was on a mission, biking around to post fliers for my latest tech downgrading event. “Want to ditch your smartphone?” they asked in bold capitals. “Want to leave social media? Spend less time on screens?”
I had brought a friend along to hold the tape dispenser and look out for cops. “Are you going to mention the TikTok ban at the event?” he asked as I affixed a flier to, appropriately, a defunct phone booth.
“What TikTok ban?” I asked. Clearly, I had missed something major.
I am a 29-year-old anti-tech activist. I received my first smartphone for Christmas at 15 and spent the ensuing decade in its thrall. But I gave it up three years ago, switching to what I call a dumbphone — mine is a Nokia 2780 flip phone — that can do little more than call or text. While I do occasionally use social media on a laptop to spread my message, I generally abide by a no-scroll policy: I log on, make posts, then log off. I don’t need to waste a single additional second on these platforms to fuel the anger and conviction behind my mission: to get people off their smartphones.
“Downgrading” is the term I adopted to describe making the switch. I aim to help others do the same. They are often skeptical. “I have no sense of direction” is a common objection. Others are “I need to use FaceTime” or “I need to log my runs.”
Downgrading is the radical decision to step backward in an age of dizzying, almost compulsory forward momentum. I have watched many people attempt to reduce their screen time, an agonizing process requiring constant vigilance and self-restraint. Removing the option altogether, I’ve found, is the surest way out.
Three years ago, I was as entangled in my smartphone as anyone. As an Instagram art influencer with nearly 200,000 followers, I spent all day online and earned all my money through the app: print sales, drawing commissions and paid partnerships with art supply companies.
Social media makes no distinction between the personal and the professional. The way I saw it, Instagram had given me that rare and enviable thing: a career as an artist. I didn’t understand how much it had taken in return.
In the summer of 2022, as I was preparing for the publication of my first book, I was suddenly locked out of my account. This was a career emergency: How would I promote the book? Furthermore, how would I sell my art? It was months before I regained access — Meta is not known for responsive customer service — and in the meantime, I was financially insecure and socially isolated. Online I was a public figure; offline I was anonymous, adrift.
When TikTok was briefly shut down last month, the app’s more than 150 million American users had the same sudden realization. The platform’s centrality to human connection was made explicit and intolerable. Billions of social ties were erased by forces unseen and beyond our control. We had built this online world only to find that it did not belong to us.
What’s more, nothing on social media belongs to us. Our art, our ideas and our relationships are reduced to data to be mined and exploited by tech corporations, sometimes even used to train A.I. models. We have no backups, either: Few people still keep address books or mailing lists, much less diaries or photo albums. When we lose access to social media, we lose touch with not only much of our circle but also our history and in a certain sense our identities. And these services are well aware of their power. They have won it through investing unfathomable amounts of money and intelligence, human and otherwise, in the exploitation of our attention.
But is it really possible to overcome it — to downgrade — without greatly inconveniencing ourselves and everyone we know?
My answer: What could possibly be more inconvenient than our current situation? Studies report that Americans spend an average of three to five hours per day on their smartphones. That figure is much higher for teenagers. We don’t need statistics to tell us how easy it is to slip into scrolling, and how hard it is to resist. My encounters with aspiring downgraders illustrate not only the scale of the problem but also the scale of our discontent. Not a day goes by that I don’t receive a desperate email from someone seeking help in overcoming their tech dependency. Recently, though, I’ve begun hearing from people who have broken the cycle. A cultural shift is underway.
It will be slow and awkward. Just as many of us can no longer navigate our cities intuitively, we can no longer navigate our days without the internet. In moments of boredom, stress, procrastination, we reach for our devices.
The younger generations have done this all their lives. Parents desperate for a moment of quiet drop their phones into the stroller. Even parents who restrict screen time cannot control what their children are exposed to at school or friends’ houses. It should come as no surprise that teenagers raised like this panicked at the idea of losing TikTok — the equivalent of teenagers in the 1970s losing, in one fell swoop, their access to records, books, magazines, telephones and the Postal Service.
The loss affects not only teenagers, for whom social media is primarily a platform for entertainment and conversation, but also artists, authors, public figures, business owners — people like me whose professional networks, whose very livelihoods, are bound up in these platforms.
It’s not that I avoid the internet entirely. I occasionally post on Instagram and X, and I write a newsletter on Substack, but since I don’t carry these platforms in my pocket all day, they don’t overwhelm me. I no longer feel subject to their constraints and demands.
Social media meets essential human needs: entertainment, inspiration, solace, knowledge of the world and connection to others. We have always had these needs, and we have always managed to meet them in some form; people obviously dated long before the introduction of dating apps.
The apps have only worsened, if not outright created, the problem they propose to solve. We’ve become so used to selecting partners on a sterile, simulated interface that we’ve lost the ability to make spontaneous, messy connections in real life. To quietly think. To be bored. By relying on these digital tools, we’ve allowed their precedents to recede into the past, neglected to the point of obsolescence. Only by downgrading can we revive them.
The post I Gave Up My Smartphone for a Dumbphone. You Can, Too. appeared first on New York Times.
