No Phone, No Social Safety Net: Welcome to the ‘Offline Club’

At the right time, the the room fell silent. A man sitting to my left at a long wooden table began to scratch a piece of paper with a colored pencil. To my right, another guy picked up a book. On the other side, someone has immersed themselves in a conundrum. We were gathered to participate in an unknown ritual: to be extremely offline.

I arrived at 6:45 p.m. that Monday evening at a nondescript office building in Dalston, a recently gentrified area of ​​east London. I was greeted at the door by the event host, who was wearing a T-shirt that read “The Offline Club.” I handed them my phone, which they stored in a specially constructed cabinet, a sort of scaled-down capsule hotel.

The entrance opened into a narrow room with high, white-painted concrete walls, with enough space to accommodate about 40 people. The wooden table ran down the center of the room, bordering both a sofa area and a kitchenette stocked with herbal teas and other drinks. Two plywood staircases led to mezzanines covered with patterned fabric cushions and soft lighting. On the opposite wall, floor-to-ceiling windows were lined with ficus and other broad-leaved plants.

Attendees began streaming in, leaving their phones at the door. They were approximately 25 to 40 years old, fairly evenly split between the sexes. The collective wardrobe bore the hallmarks of British winter – knitted wools, corduroys, Chelsea boots, etc. – but with a modern touch typical of this part of the city: a tattoo here, a turtleneck there. Many people came alone and easily engaged in conversation; I met with a video producer, an insurance adjuster, and ironically a software engineer for a large social media company. Others were more reserved, perhaps more sensitive to the strangeness of the social occasion.

The group was united by a common ambition: to break away from their devices, if only for a little while. The Offline Club holds similar phone-free events across Europe, charging around $17 for entry. Since last year, hangouts in London have started to sell out regularly.

“We talk about it as a gentle rebellion,” says Laura Wilson, co-host of the London branch of the Offline Club. “Every time you’re not on your phone, you’re asking for your share. »

Soon there was only one empty chair, stool, or cushion left in the room. The host signaled that it was time to stop talking. Following the example of others, I took a colored pencil and, with an indelicate and inexperienced hand, I began to scribble.

“I feel like I’m addicted to my phone.”

The Offline Club kicked off in 2021 with an impromptu off-grid weekend in the Dutch countryside hosted by Ilya Kneppelhout, Jordy van Bennekon and Valentijn Klol. Finding the experience enlightening, the trio began organizing rare offline getaways to the Netherlands in an effort to spark the kind of informal interaction between strangers that they say is now rare in a world ruled by devices.

The three Dutch people officially founded the Offline Club in February 2024 and began organizing meetings in a café in Amsterdam. They have since exported the concept to 19 other cities, mainly in Europe, with each branch run as a franchise by part-time organizers. Events generally follow a set format: an hour of silence, during which people are free to do whatever they want (reading, doing puzzles, coloring, crafts, etc.), followed by an hour of phone-free conversation with other participants.

The format took off in London last summer, after the local branch attempted to set an unofficial world record by gathering 2,000 people to the top of Primrose Hill in central London. The goal was to watch the sunset without a sea of ​​phones blocking the view. After that, people started buying Hangouts tickets.