The Flip-Phone Cleanse

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 the aughts. It’s a relic from the aughts that has been kitted out with a custom operating system designed by a former Washington Post software engineer named Jack Nugent. You can pair a dumb.co flip phone with your smartphone through an app called Dumb Down, such that your normal calls and text messages are forwarded to your dumb.co number. (Many of the numbers in my cohort had the Atlanta area code 404, as a joke about going offline.) Nugent’s system also comes with scaled-down versions of Uber, WhatsApp, Google Maps, and Microsoft Authenticator. “Before this device, a lot of people would say something like, I wish I could use a dumbphone, but I need X,Y,Z,” he told me. So he started adding X and Y and Z. The next version of the flip phone will allow for music streaming and include the retro phone game Snake. Nugent said he drew a hard line at email, though—the dumb.co flip phone will never have email.

For several weeks I took my dumbphone everywhere I went, and for several weeks strangers asked about it. Even people who did not seem like they would hang out in semi-industrial Bushwick were intrigued. One evening in lower Manhattan, a polished-looking man who had just been talking with someone else about his job in finance turned and saw my flip phone sitting on the bar. His face lit up. He wanted to know where I’d gotten it, and said that he’d been thinking about getting one too. A spirit of dumbphone curiosity seemed to be all around me.

Clearly, one of the flip phone’s thrills is that it flips. It flips, and the feeling of its flipping is neat and familiar. For people of my cohort’s age (and mine), it’s a reminder of our first phones, which were amazing devices that conferred agency, independence, and the possibility of receiving secret messages from a crush. It’s nice to have a flip phone again.

Month Offline leans into this feeling of nostalgia. At my second weekly meeting, my fellow travelers and I had the thrill of our lives decorating our new flip phones with stickers, just as we might have done in 2007. I added one baseball sticker to the front of my phone and one to the back, but some others created intricate patterns with rhinestones. The get-togethers were heavy on crafts; we often expressed ourselves through crayon. At the end of each meeting, we received a gift to help us get through the next week in an ever more analog fashion—a disposable camera, a book of crossword puzzles, a compass on a carabiner.

A key concept, discussed every week, was that of “friction”—or the specific discomfort we were feeling whenever we ran up against our reliance on our boxed-up smartphones. One week, we used the crayons to draw a “moment of friction,” and most people drew themselves getting lost. The flip phone’s tiny version of Google Maps is hard to use, and some people were trying not to use it all, preferring to navigate the city as their parents and grandparents once did, going only by their memory and directions from strangers.

I embraced the frictions of my month offline, except for when they made me extremely annoyed. Once, I settled down at a coffee shop to do some work and realized I was locked out of my computer; I had to call my fiancé and ask him to bring my iPhone to me so that I could two-factor in. (My job requires a specific authenticator app that is not available for dumbphones.) I stewed while I waited. A couple of days before, I’d missed a text from my sister telling our family that she’d gotten into a medical residency. (Group chats sometimes glitched on my flip phone; other people in my cohort also reported having scattered problems with text-forwarding.) And because I had not received that text, or any of my family’s responses to the biggest news of my sibling’s life, my contribution to the chat was to blithely inform everyone a few minutes later that Seiya Suzuki would not be a good draft pick for our family’s fantasy-baseball league, because he’d injured his knee in the World Baseball Classic.

At times like these, I felt as though this experiment in freeing myself was doing just the opposite.  After all, I was paying for a second phone plan on top of the one I had for my iPhone—dumb.co service costs $25 a month for Month Offline participants—and then all this other annoying stuff was happening to me too. But the Month Offline program has a protocol for such moments of weakness: Between meetings, we were encouraged to text or call a couple of assigned “Flipmates,” who were similar to Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors, and also to leave voicemails in a centralized mailbox for the group called the “Dumbphone Diary.” The diary entries, which we sometimes listened to together at meetings, were brief, palpably sincere stories of the teller’s struggles without a smartphone, or else their pride at having reconnected with art, nature, their friends, and their own mind.

Our group had three facilitators who would lead each week’s activities and offer guidance. One of them, Lydia Peabody, explained that she had left her job as a therapist while participating in a previous Month Offline. The experiment had been a revelation, she told me. A few days into using the flip phone, she’d noticed that her mood was worsening. “I was like, Holy shit, why do I feel so awful?” Eventually, she deduced that her mindless smartphone scrolling had been a way to distract herself from her unhappiness. Without that option, she was forced to face reality. So she quit, and shortly after that she went to a Grateful Dead–cover-band show with the CEO of dumb.co, who hired her to run Month Offline because of her experience leading group therapy.

Her expertise has certainly been germane. Though the meetups weren’t set up to be group therapy, people seemed to want to talk (and talk, and talk) about the ways their lives had changed without smartphones, and the discussions sometimes took on a therapeutic tone. I found this all a bit grating and repetitive, but as the month went on, I began to see the same results as everyone else. I read more, talked with strangers more, worried less, and forgot about Instagram almost entirely. I felt worse, and then I felt better.

At the final meetup for my month offline, we participated in a graduation ceremony, complete with Vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)” playing on a portable speaker. Cards on which we had written our average daily smartphone screen time at the beginning of the month were redistributed, and we wrote down our new totals. Mine went from nearly 4 hours to 19 minutes.

Peabody asked if there was anyone in the room who had not touched their smartphones at all, for the whole month, and two people raised their hands. The rest of us ooh-ed and clapped. I left with a feeling of genuine camaraderie. I also left having turned over my credit-card information to sign up for another month of dumb.co’s dumbphone-service plan. My experiment was over, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my little flip (which I’d started calling “my little flip”).

The following week, our cohort came back together for a show of the creative projects we’d made with all of our offline free time. Those without artistic talents were encouraged to interpret the prompt liberally, and so one Month Offliner presented cookies she’d made from a favorite recipe, and another just sat at a table with a simple crossword puzzle she’d made.

At least 100 people came out for the event. Some were friends of Month Offliners who were there solely out of the goodness of their heart. When I asked one such woman what her level of interest was in participating in a Month Offline herself, she said it was “medium to mild.” Other attendees were part of the city’s broader, burgeoning subculture of “attention activism.” I ran into Dan Fox, who works for the minimalist phone company Light, as well as Nick Plante, a community organizer who is one of the scene’s best-known voices.

In his writing, Plante can come off as a zealot. He recently described social-media platforms as “prisons of the mind” and speculated that we may one day “see these companies burn and smolder.” But when I spoke with him by phone after the Offline art show, he presented his stance in less fiery terms. Phone-free parties and club nights are already taking off, he said, and he guessed that New York will soon have an assortment of phone-free bars, restaurants, and co-working spaces. A culture shift away from smartphones is already under way, he said. “They’re perceived as being so central to our society right now,” he said. But what if they weren’t?

My cohort mate Alana Kupke, a 30-year-old freelance stylist, had been thinking along the same lines. She’d signed up for the group because she works in the fashion industry and has felt obligated to be online all the time, just to keep her finger on the pulse. She’d been wondering whether she could do the same just by observing her physical surroundings and talking with people. At first, when friends saw her on the flip phone, they would freak out, she said. They would say “Oh my God” and swear that they could never get through the day with such a thing. “It kind of is a problem if people are scared to not have iPhones,” Krupke told me. By the end of the month, though, she’d persuaded her roommate, several of her friends, and four people she’d met during gigs to make the switch to flip phones.

Jenine Marquez, 26, another member of my cohort, told me that ever since our month offline she keeps her iPhone in a zippered pocket in her bag, where she can still reach it for emergencies and to answer video calls from her dad. Also, she can feel it buzzing if she gets a bunch of Microsoft Teams messages. Otherwise she doesn’t touch it. Krupke said she’s been switching out her iPhone for the dumbphone whenever she goes out with friends, so she can be more present. As for me, after signing up for another month of service, I haven’t picked up my little flip even once.

A few days after the art show, when I met Peabody for tea, she acknowledged that not everyone who goes to Month Offline continues with the flip phones. Some treat the month like a detox. Others want to stay offline but struggle to stay on the wagon. “When you stop going to something each week that holds you accountable, it becomes harder for anybody to face this alone,” Peabody said. She encourages people not to think about it as all-or-nothing. Her iPhone usually stays at her desk in her apartment, plugged in like a computer, she said. But she’ll take it out to use it for something specific. “I don’t make my life a living hell trying to use only this,” she said, holding up her flip phone. “I use it most of the time because I feel better.”

Only a few hundred people have participated in Month Offline so far, and participation may be limited to those whose lifestyles allow for voluntary inconvenience. But Peabody said she thinks the early flip-phone readopters will create a snowball effect. Each one will normalize the dumbphone’s use a little more, even if it’s just within their social circle or in the bars and coffee shops through which they pass. “Most people can do this, or a lot of people can do it,” she said. “If you and I meet in a year, we’ll be having different conversations.”