Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. In our shift to a digital future, we need alternatives to Big Tech. Homepage: techtonic.fm

Also available as an MP3 podcast. More info at our Podcast Central page.

October 28, 2024: Members of the Luddite Club

Listen to this show: MP3 - 128K |  Pop-up player!

Today: Members of the Luddite Club

Joining Mark for a live in-studio interview are members of the Luddite Club, a group of Brooklyn teenagers who avoid social media – and use flip phones instead of smartphones. Without distractions from screens, the teenage Luddites enjoy analog pursuits like reading print books and talking to friends.

• ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes, by Alex Vadukul in the NYT (gift link, Dec 15, 2022). The founder, Logan Lane, describes what happened after she got tired of endless social media anxiety and “put her phone in a box”:

For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight. Once, as she later wrote in a text titled the “Luddite Manifesto,” she fantasized about tossing her iPhone into the Gowanus Canal.

Lane says her parents are “so addicted” to Twitter, while she’s OK walking around with a flip phone.

• I Was Addicted to My Smartphone, So I Switched to a Flip Phone for a Month (gift link to article by Kashmir Hill about her “flip phone detox,” NYT, Jan 6, 2024):

[Logan Lane] first got an iPhone when she was 11, but came to hate how it made her feel so she switched to a flip phone. In 2021, when she was in high school in Brooklyn, she founded the Luddite Club for fellow students who wanted to distance themselves from technology and social media. Now a freshman at Oberlin College in Ohio, she is still a proud owner of a TCL FLIP. She told me that she hoped to remain smartphone-free for the rest of her life and to one day be a “mom with a flip phone.”

• The Last Kid in Ninth Grade Without an iPhone (by Liz Krieger, NYMag, May 30, 2024):

All of the kids I spoke with — those with long-delayed phones, those still waiting — seemed to have developed a dual mentality. They longed for phones and envied friends who had them. At the same time, they saw that their peers had become addicted and casually policed them in the style of exasperated parents and teachers.

“Whenever someone is bored or uncomfortable, they pull out their phone,” Greta says. “If we’re all out and everyone is on their phone sometimes, I will say ‘Get off your phone’ and get groans from my friends,” adds her sister, Molly.

• Media Use by Tweens and Teens (PDF, Common Sense, 2021): “Among tweens, nearly half (47%) use more than four hours of screen media a day, including 20% who use more than eight hours. Among teens, three out of four (75%) use more than four hours of screen media per day, including 41% who use more than eight hours of screen media.” Also, over 90% of teens in the US own a smartphone (age 14+).

• Daniel Light writes in the WSJ The Incredible Lightness of Being Without a Smartphone (gift link, Oct 24, 2024):

It took a week, a long week, thinking about the time I’d wasted. I wondered what I might have achieved if I’d been doing something worthwhile.

I started to feel angry, angry as hell—with myself, with the app that had soaked up a decade of my life and the device that had made it possible. My smartphone. God I hated my smartphone. But could I really chuck it away? What about Google Maps? Well, I got lost even with Google Maps.

Finally, I could see the path. I didn’t need Google Maps for that. The smartphone went, physically dismantled. Rest in pieces. Free of this pocket-size millstone, I learned never to leave home without three books—one to read, one to write in and one filled with maps of London, where I live.

Light then quotes early environmentalist John Muir and concludes:

Muir foresaw what so many now know—that technology, with its promise to bring us closer, often weakens our connections with each other and the world.

Sign up to get Mark’s weekly email newsletter.

Follow Mark on Bluesky or Mastodon.

PAST EPISODES: techtonic.fm lists recent Techtonic shows.

PODCAST: If you use an open podcast player reader, here’s an RSS feed. If you have to use a Big Tech podcast app, here’s Techtonic on iTunes.