A small but growing movement wants you to put down your phone

NEW YORK– More than a dozen millennials gathered in a Brooklyn brownstone apartment and placed their phones in a metal colander before two hours of reading, drawing and talking — everything but staring at screens.

A similar scene unfolded a few kilometers away, in an early 20th century cardboard factory transformed into a high-end office. Nearly 20 people in their 30s looked at their cell phones for a few minutes. Then they put them down and looked at their bare palms for a moment. Then those of their neighbors.

The exercise was meant to drive home the importance of paying attention to real life, not the shiny little screens that have taken over our world.

Two decades after Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, a small, passionate movement – ​​with ramifications in several countries – is rebelling against the omnipresent screen.

“The products have become more insidious and more extractive,” said Dan Fox, 38, who hosted the home meeting. Members of the nascent movement “want to start a revolution,” he said.

But can a “attention activism” movement of millennials and Gen Z break free from the world’s largest corporations? The raw numbers say no. But cultural changes begin small, and rebellion grows against what many call “fracking.”

Apple and other big tech companies say they’ve taken steps to help users reduce the time they spend on their devices, including usage tracking features and a less attractive gray mode.

Activists say it’s not enough.

“They want to eliminate Big Tech,” says Fox, a comedian who works in marketing for Brooklyn-based Light Phone, one of several “dumb phones” with only basic features.

Unlike most modern products, the company boasts about its phones’ lack of features, like “social media, clickbait news, email, an Internet browser, or any other anxiety-inducing endless stream.”

Fox was inspired to join the movement when he attended a 2015 Tame Impala concert at Radio City Music Hall. It felt like everyone in the audience was filming the concert on their phones instead of immersing themselves in the music.

“I realized that phones were literally getting in the way of the things I love,” Fox said.

Mobile Internet access has so permeated modern life that one of the few places in the world where it is not readily available is wartime Iran, where authorities shut down the Internet during mass protests in January.

D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University and one of the authors of “Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,” making him a pillar of the growing backlash against corporate capture of human attention.

Along with MS NOW host Chris Hayes’ best-selling book, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” his work is part of a growing body of literature calling on people to step away from screens and pay attention to life.

Burnett says the “attention liberation movement” is about throwing off the yoke of time-consuming apps. People “need to reorient their attention. Their attention is the fullness of their relationship to the world.”

The people in the Fox lounge started the evening by introducing themselves, as if they were part of a support group.

“I don’t feel good about my relationship with my phone. I feel like an addict,” said Riley Soloner, who teaches theatrical clowning and works as an usher at Carnegie Hall. He arrived with a backpack full of books, the paper kind.

Across the Atlantic Ocean in the Netherlands, people flocked to a neo-Gothic cathedral late last month for an Offline Club meeting.

“We create our events and gatherings on different themes. One of them is connecting with yourself through creative activities, reading, writing or puzzles,” said co-founder Ilya Kneppelhout. “Really something that makes you slow down and think, go inward.”

There are several dozen “attention activism” groups in the United States and Canada, and the movement has also appeared in Spain, Italy, Croatia, France, and England. Burnett said he expects it to spread further.

Members of Oberlin College’s Harkness Housing and Dining Co-op decided to run their organization without emails or spreadsheets in January, going so far as to ban technology from shared spaces in the 1950s brick building.

“People expressed a sense of relief that they didn’t need to check their emails or texts or the news. It allowed us to spend a lot of time talking to each other,” said Ozzie Frazier, 21.

During the month-long cooperative project, Frazier said, people began checking out the library’s CDs and enjoying arts and crafts nights, live music and the Bananagrams board game.

“A lot of people felt very connected to each other. Not having devices gave them a kind of mental space,” Frazier said.

Wilhelm Tupy read “Attensity” after discovering it by chance in a Vienna bookstore and visited the School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood during a trip last month.

He felt he had found something that united his sporting career as a judo champion – with his need for focused “flow” – and his post-retirement work as a business consultant.

“Discipline is not enough these days,” he said. “It becomes more and more difficult to maintain attention and stay focused on goals and everything you want to accomplish and do.”