In 2015, August Lamm dropped out of Wesleyan University and moved to Berlin to learn how to draw and give her dream of being a freelance artist a serious go. She’d never been to art school, had no gallery connections, but she had two secret weapons: 1) verve and 2) complete digital fluency.
Since she unwrapped her first iPhone on Christmas Day five years earlier, Lamm, then a sensitive, artsy 14-year-old, had lived her life fully immersed in the endlessly enticing glow of the phone. A loner in school, she found connection as she swiped, tapped and clicked her way through every fascinating corner of the internet.
Now in a foreign country and 19 years old, she instinctively turned to her phone for company and began posting her daily sketches on Instagram — pine cones, coffee cups, fire hydrants. Initially, likes were few and far between, but after aggressively posting fawning praise on hundreds of other artists’ accounts, her following began to steadily grow. After a year, she had 10,000 followers and started making money selling custom artworks and prints directly to her audience.
But keeping up with the comments and customer service turned into a full-time job as anything less than “high engagement” resulted in lost sales and followers. Moreover, the trends on the platform were constantly changing, requiring Lamm to adapt her personality and posts to whatever hashtag was taking off that week. The algorithmic beast was ravenous, and it demanded constant feeding.
She noticed the one consistent path to clicks was emotional vulnerability. In 2018, she shared a small drawing of a shark with the caption “Crying nonstop & blowing my nose on my shirt. Thank you all for being my internet family, I truly need that in my life.” Sales spiked after posting pity-traps like these, and naturally, Lamm kept tapping the lucrative content mine of personal pain. By 2020, Lamm had 170,000 Instagram followers and was making a modest but sustainable income selling art, enough to consider herself a “professional” artist.
Though, she considered herself an art influencer. She secured paid partnerships with art supply companies for sponsored content. She spent hours carefully creating, captioning and promoting her posts. But all of that time was time spent alone and lacked any inherent pleasure. She was popular online and completely isolated in real life. “I could appreciate reality only as a source of content — a pleasing image, a compelling story — to share with others,” Lamm wrote, recounting her experience in The Free Press. She had to be online all day to make a living, and her work, life and social media had become so entangled that separating them became unthinkable.
In the summer of 2022, Lamm was getting ready to publish her first book (a how-to guide for crosshatch drawing) and suddenly found herself inexplicably locked out of her Instagram account. Customer service was unable to resolve the issue, and promoting the book and selling art the only way she knew how became impossible. It was months before Lamm regained access. But the abrupt halt to her illusion of connection forced Lamm to face the depth of her dependency, misery and isolation, and the fact that she was compulsively addicted to her phone. She suffered from anorexia and her health was deteriorating. In her crisis, she turned to her phone one last time to post a YouTube video of her speaking into the camera for half an hour, describing how social media had destroyed her life. That same day, she deactivated her Instagram account.
But disconnecting was easier said than done. Even without an Instagram logo to tap, she still couldn’t stop herself from constant phone usage. She tried other techniques to loosen the hold her device had on her — turning the screen to gray-scale, deleting the most addicting apps and installing screen time limits. But the itch remained. She’d be on a date or at a yoga class and she’d find herself pining for the glow of her screen. And she always found ways around her self-imposed limits.
Eventually, she realized there was only one lasting solution: ditch the smartphone and get a dumb phone. In her case, a used Nokia flip phone — a device that could do little more than call or text. Which was exactly the point.
A growing movement
Lamm isn’t alone in her experience. Most people recognize that their relationship with their smartphones and social media is unhealthy. Americans spend an average of about five hours a day on their phones, with Gen Z rates even higher. Yet few people are prepared to follow Lamm’s example of abandoning their devices cold turkey. That’s why several companies have come up with middle-ground solutions: devices like the Light Phone, a minimalist alternative built for calls and texts but stripped of social media, email and other attention traps.
And the demand for phones like these is part of a broader recognition of the harms of our screen-mediated culture. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s crusade to remove phones from schools is spreading. Currently, 36 states and Washington, D.C., have policies aimed to reduce cellphone use at school. Online, the subreddit
r/digitalminimalism is hugely popular, with more than 119,000 weekly visitors.
And young people are in many ways leading the effort to take back control from the screens. Last year, Harvard graduate students launched the delightfully named “Appstinence” movement to persuade Gen Z to ditch their phones and “restore the fiber of the human experience.” A youth-led group called #HalfTheStory runs Social Media U, a program that teaches teens “emotional resilience, algorithmic awareness, and healthy digital habit development.” More mischievously, several months ago, an anti-tech rally took place at New York City’s High Line park, where protesters dressed like gnomes smashed iPads. Efforts like these appear to be working. The Financial Times reported that worldwide, social media use peaked in 2022 and is in decline.
Luddites were not opposed to all new technology, just those they believed produced faulty or inferior goods.
Other movements with an environmental bent are taking root. Eco-villages like Earthaven near Asheville, North Carolina, are an increasingly popular option for people looking to live with greater intentionality with the Earth and their neighbors. There are even new educational institutions, such as the Strother School of Radical Attention, that aim to build a “movement to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies.” My personal favorite example of technology resistance is the anti-automation protesters Safe Street Rebel in San Francisco who placed orange traffic cones on Waymo driverless cars to immobilize them.
None of this should be surprising. Humans have always pushed back against what they see as the overreach of technology.
I’ve noticed that when someone wants to sound sensible while expressing even a mild critique of some technology, their remark is almost always prefaced by “Now, I’m no Luddite, but …” Given how frequently they are disavowed, I assumed Luddites were idiotic anti-progress fanatics. But it turns out the actual Luddites were not unthinking technophobes but well-organized guerrilla activists who keenly understood the threat mechanization posed to the meaning of their lives and the quality of their craft.
The Luddite movement began in England during the Napoleonic Wars, which had caused economic stress and widespread unemployment. Food was scarce and expensive. On March 11, 1811, in the textile manufacturing center of Nottingham, a crowd of textile artisans gathered to protest the rise of cheap factory-produced goods that threatened their source of income and their dignity. British troops were deployed to violently disperse the crowd. That night, these angry workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. Attacks on machinery spread to more cities, and these vigilantes began claiming that their leader was “General” Ned Ludd, an apocryphal textile apprentice who smashed a stocking frame with a hammer after criticism from a superior. But contrary to popular perception, Luddites were not opposed to all new technology, just those they believed produced faulty or inferior goods.
The British government did not appreciate the subtlety of this distinction. Fearing a mass uprising and further economic disruption, thousands of troops were dispatched to defend vulnerable factories. In 1812, Parliament passed a law making machine-breaking punishable by death. The following year, dozens of men were executed and scores more sentenced to prison in Australia. Over time, the term “Luddite” became a rhetorical weapon to dismiss any and all critiques of technological power as irrational windmill-tilting.
Today, some — including Lamm — are reclaiming the name and legacy of the Luddites. In 2022, a group of teenagers in New York City made national news when they decided to put away their phones and just live. They met each week at a park, screen-free. “Some drew in sketchbooks. Others painted with a watercolor kit,” The New York Times reported. “One of them closed their eyes to listen to the wind.” Calling themselves The Luddite Club, they have since started a snail-mail newsletter, been the subject of a documentary and formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with chapters in more than 25 cities worldwide from London to Santa Barbara, California. Their motto: “Unplug.”
Life after logging off
For nearly 10 years, Lamm’s entire life had centered on an object that was now locked in a drawer and out of sight. “I felt purposeless, adrift, with nothing to reach for in moments of boredom or distress except my own thoughts, which were dull and shapeless from neglect,” she wrote.
The money from print sales and commissions dried up. She returned to the U.S. to live with her mom in Connecticut. What did she do? “I started to learn piano. I went on long walks around the suburbs. I bought a film camera and took photos of the snow. I was not happy — in fact, I was isolated and lost — but I was present,” she wrote. “There was now no alternative to reality, no escape hatch to flip open in moments of boredom. I had to accept things as they were, and things weren’t great.”
But things got better. She became more comfortable being alone with her thoughts. She stopped feeling a constant need for stimulation and found that she could wander, investigate weird natural phenomena, or just sit there — but a sitting that felt like living. As she described on the “Wisdom of Crowds” podcast, “Every day I am like, ‘Is this day gonna keep going?’ Like, it’s nonstop because the hours never slip by.”
You have to get rid of (your phone) completely. You have to stop using it and just switch to a dumb phone.
Last year, Lamm published “You Don’t Need a Smartphone,” a how-to pamphlet for those seeking a serious digital detox. Chapters range from the philosophical (“The Moderation Lie,” or “What Will You Do with Your Time”) to the minutely practical (“Dual Factor Authentication”). Lamm says navigation, photos and music are the primary concerns with downgrading for most people. Many jobs also require the security and productivity functions of smartphones. But a bigger problem is that there are an increasing number of important public functions that require a smartphone, such as travel documentation and banking. And many events distribute tickets with special smartphone bar code technology to prevent fraud.
Lamm says the inconveniences of unplugging don’t bother her. “But I do think that it is distancing me from society, even from my friends, in a way that’s not sustainable, especially as this tech increases in its power and scope,” she says. “So I think the hardest thing for me now is feeling this looming deadline. I don’t know what it’ll look like. I just imagine in the next five years … society will degrade to the point that I can no longer function in it as someone who doesn’t use this technology.”
A mistake Lamm often sees is people trying to gradually reduce their smartphone usage through willpower alone. A common technique is to keep the phone in a drawer when you leave the house. Ultimately, Lamm believes, these half-measures can’t address the real problem. “Long term, there isn’t really a moderate solution that’s going to give you that real sense of integration into reality, because when you have it in your back pocket, literally or figuratively, you’re going to be thinking in a way that is dependent on this technology instead of using your own mental resources, which have really atrophied over time for all of us,” she told WNYC radio host Brian Leher. If you want your mind back, “you have to get rid of (your phone) completely. You have to stop using it and just switch to a dumb phone.”
Lamm wants people to explore a fundamental question about their technology use: Why do they want these technologies to begin with? “The answer is usually to do things more quickly, more efficiently, with less effort. But why? I mean that seriously. Why do we need to do things more quickly? Was it not fast enough before?” she said on the “Wisdom of Crowds” podcast, rhetorically setting up a dire critique. “Because what happens with speed is that when one thing speeds up, the other thing needs to speed up. The competitor needs to speed up. All the people need to speed up. Every activity needs to speed up. And then we just are in this world where everything’s moving a lot more quickly and it doesn’t feel good.”
She warned that compulsive social media use has become so universal that it can lead to a pathological addiction. “I saw it in myself that when I was out with people, I could be having the time of my life and I’d still be thinking, ‘I cannot wait to go to the bathroom and check my phone.’ That was always the priority for me.”
Beyond willpower
The problem is too big to solve by leaving it to individual choice. But the more people who reject smartphones, the easier it becomes for others. As Jonathan Haidt recommends in his book “The Anxious Generation”: “No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). … Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a fire hose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.”
For Lamm, her quest to back away from her phone has taken on a religious dimension, where she equates our relationship to our phones to idol worship. “I think attention is prayer and what you spend your time on Earth doing should benefit creation and should have an aim and an intention,” she tells me. “And to spend your time aimlessly and unthinkingly and to be harming yourself and harming the world through your time and attention is a sin.
“I can’t tell you the amount of pain that has been caused by me even the last 24 hours by spending time with friends and having them look at their phone while I’m talking to them and telling them an important story to me,” she laments. “I just saw a friend and he looked at his phone, looked at messages while I was telling him about something that was really important to me. And that hurts. That’s like a stab into your soul.”
I think attention is prayer and what you spend your time on Earth doing should benefit creation and should have an aim and an intention.
But Lamm expressed on the “Wisdom of Crowds” podcast that change is possible, if we could decide on that change together. “If everybody logged off of Instagram tomorrow, Instagram wouldn’t be a problem. We have more power than we realize.”
What both old and new Luddites resisted is not so much technology itself, but the myths we tend to believe about technology. Some of these myths that they seek to counter are that social media is about connection. That information can replace wisdom. But the biggest myth of all is that more technology always equals more progress.
The truth is that technology always introduces tradeoffs. Inventing writing allowed us to create much better records and invent literary forms like the novel, but it also meant the loss of oral storytelling skills and culture. The introduction of cars allowed for powerful new personal modes of travel, but it also has caused very real losses in environmental damage and urban vibrancy.
We might very well accept these tradeoffs, but we need to be aware of them because sometimes the tradeoffs aren’t worth it. And when it comes to our societywide phone addiction, what the neo-Luddites urge us to do is face the hard truth that what we’ve lost in our capacities for attention, presence and cognition are not worth the gains. So log off, unplug, downgrade, and if you’re really feeling rebellious, smash the machines!
This story appears in the January/February 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.