Anti-tech activist August Lamm discusses what it takes to build a social world beyond the screen.
You Don’t Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading Your Phone and Upgrading Your Life by August Lamm. Vintage, 2026. 224 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org
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MY FRIENDSHIP WITH August Lamm began the old-fashioned way. We were introduced at the Brooklyn dive bar Sharlene’s after a book reading by an author I’d interviewed for the Los Angeles Review of Books. We spent the rest of the evening talking. Such encounters, Lamm believes, are easier to come by when we stop searching for connection through our screens.
An artist, musician, and writer from New Haven, Connecticut, Lamm is now best-known for her anti-tech activism. After spending her adolescence and early twenties chronically online, including a period as a social media influencer, she traded her smartphone for a flip phone. Her new book, You Don’t Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading Your Phone and Upgrading Your Life, offers practical advice on everything from choosing a dumbphone to navigating without GPS. Its larger subject, however, is what becomes possible when we make ourselves less reachable and regain agency over our time.
Lamm makes her case through the particulars of her own life. Writing with the candid and self-implicating quality of her autofiction and essays, she describes how she sought validation from strangers online and now is trying to unlearn the bad habits that kept her there. Lamm is focused on how digital technology shapes the human holding the device.
In mid-September, shortly before her 31st birthday, we met at a Chelsea café for a proper interview before Lamm returned to Owego, New York, where she is creating a low-tech artist residency. We talked about the costs of opting out, the limits of phone bans, and her faith in art, friendship, and peer culture as engines of change. What follows is a condensed and edited portion of our conversation.
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HOLIDAY DMITRI: You Don’t Need a Smartphone is a guide to downgrading, but it’s also the story of your own years online and your difficulty stepping away. Why was it important to show readers that you were implicated in the problem?
AUGUST LAMM: I didn’t want to write a preachy or prescriptive book. A lot of books that I love by, say, Neil Postman or Ivan Illich, come from a place of “How can you crazy people still be using this technology and not understand how horrible it is for you?” My perspective is “I completely understand why you’re addicted, but this technology is not good for you. Here’s how to escape.” I continually emphasize that I, too, fell prey. Someone like you is someone like me, profoundly susceptible, but also with the willpower to remove themselves.
Coming of age when being unfiltered was rewarded online, did that change what felt private to you as a writer?
Yes, I came of age when it was common, even encouraged and rewarded, to share your life in an unfiltered way. On Instagram, I was talking about my breakup as it was happening. I was taking pictures of myself in the bathroom crying about the breakup as it was happening, and writing a caption that said, “He’s outside the bathroom now. We’re fighting about this.”
You moved to New York to make art. Then I read a writer describe someone’s phone as an “August Lamm flip-phone.” How did your name become shorthand for a lifestyle choice?
That question is a weirdly big ego boost. I got rid of my smartphone in the fall of 2022. For the next year and a half, people kept asking me about my dumbphone. I became known in the Downtown literary world as that person who comes to events without a smartphone. Eventually, I became bored talking about downgrading. I thought I’d write a pamphlet that answered all their questions. The pamphlet came out in 2024. Then it took off.
When you moved to New York at 18, you were trying to figure out how to meet people. The first time we hung out, we somehow got from anti-tech philosophy to your theory that it’s easy to meet people—
And to pick up boys at shows?
[Laughs.] That too. But you didn’t always think you could just show up alone, did you?
I spent a lot of effort trying to find people to go to events with. I joined meetup groups, for instance, that were specifically for going to a concert. But these were like dating apps: the interaction felt very forced. I didn’t realize you could enter a space alone. When I was struggling with dating, older people would say, “Just go to a bar. Meet people.” And I’d think, “They don’t understand. That doesn’t exist anymore.” I was completely wrong. I met my partner in real life.
Your book makes downgrading feel doable, yet you also write about how it’s getting harder to resist digital technology because infrastructures like banking and travel assume everyone has a smartphone. Have you ever found yourself unable to get something done because you didn’t have a smartphone?
I had to use another person’s phone when I tried to get a UK visa, which required a smartphone. At that time, I think I could have called the visa office, made a case, and really fought for it in person. But I didn’t feel like doing that. I wanted to do it quickly.
You could have fought the visa requirement but opted for convenience. I get it. As a mother and writer, I rely on my phone to manage school communications, appointments, and groceries so that I then have time to write. How do you make time for the work of opting out without sacrificing time for creative work?
It’s a question of the benefits and drawbacks. Sometimes you’re gaining one thing from the smartphone, like a restaurant recommendation, while losing another, like discovering a place on your own. Or you’re gaining expedient communication with your kid’s teacher while losing out on eye-to-eye contact with that teacher. Overall, if we consider the damage of the device to relationships and to society in general, the expediency is not worth it. Parents have historically been able to function and raise families without smartphones, and arguably they were relationally and emotionally better off.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to start out as a parent without the device than to get rid of it when you’re already in the thick of parenthood. The tough part is obviously the adjustment, and not hitting the panic button when there’s a crisis, which there will be.
You and your partner are both artists who work from home and can set your own hours. How much does going low-tech depend on having the privilege of that kind of freedom?
Privilege is a complicated word, because neither my partner nor I have any financial security. We have no boss. We don’t work eight-hour days. But we’ve made great sacrifices to have this freedom.
Australia, Brazil, and France have taken different approaches to restricting young people’s access to social media. What, if anything, do you think rules imposed from above can accomplish?
It’s misspent effort. It’s extremely naive and misguided to think that you can pass a policy to fix an entrenched social problem. It’s like Prohibition, which didn’t stop people from drinking. If the money that it took to pass those bills had been spent on trying to shift our culture from within, then we might find ourselves in a different situation. People don’t want to face the fact that we can’t change our culture in a top-down way.
This argument came up in the summer of 2025 when you were part of the conversations about New York’s phone-free schools with Hillary Clinton and Jonathan Haidt, which took place at the Clinton Policy Institute in Manhattan. What was it like being the only person in the room without a smartphone?
Nothing fruitful came from meeting with these leaders. The meetings were about the smartphone. I was the only person in the room who did not have a smartphone. Nobody was as radical as I was. If my platform were like Jonathan Haidt’s—that smartphones are bad for children—I’d be golden. Everybody would agree with me. But when I say smartphones are bad for your kids, and they’re bad for you—and that therefore you should take smartphones away from your kids and yourself—then people really get stuck.
Stop treating young people as the problem while leaving adult behavior untouched?
Everything starts with the parent. But both [Clinton and Haidt] are more frightened by, and for, the younger generation. It’s very strange to isolate age groups in a culture and say, “This is a problem there.” We’re one culture interacting across generations. Who’s running the schools these kids are attending? Who’s parenting them? Who’s creating the devices? Older people. We’re all connected. We need to target the whole society. I said repeatedly that if the mandate comes from above, these kids are going to find ways around it. But if it comes from their peers, if it’s their choice, they will stick to it. Nobody listened to me.
You suggested bringing in younger activists like Logan Lane of the Luddite Club and her Gen Z peers. Why didn’t that happen?
They weren’t invited. I specifically told them about Logan Lane. I felt like it was a good opportunity to bring grassroots activists into the conversation. Lane has gotten press coverage, but a lot of these people don’t have big profiles. Instead, the forum just had adults. I felt very frustrated. I offered to get on a call and talk more about this, but then I got cut out of the meetings because they switched the meetings to Zoom and I couldn’t use Zoom.
Kirkus Reviews described your book as “unlikely to convert skeptics.” Whom would you say you’re writing it for?
What I’m doing is preaching to the people who are already 99 percent convinced that the smartphone is bad for them and just need a push over the edge. They need a tool kit. But my goal is for everyone to know one person with a dumbphone. If we create a chain in society where we each know someone [with no smartphone], then we will eventually have a network of people we can draw on with different experiences. I want the dumbphone experience to be a more common experience.
You recently bought a house upstate that you’re turning into an offline artist residency. Is building an art community an extension of your activism?
Anti-tech activism lets us have a positive and lively arts culture. [The residency] lets me live outside of a city, away from the source of this technology, but with other people—not just people in the town who might not share my interests but also artists and writers and thinkers. Somebody will call about a logistical issue concerning the residency, and we’ll talk for two hours because we care so much about that issue. If I do that with a few people, then that’s my whole day gone. But I don’t think it’s possible to waste time when you’re off the internet. If you’re present in your life, you can’t waste time.
You’re making room for conversations but quitting email the day your book comes out. Why make the launch your deadline?
I’ve always known that was the final frontier for me. I’ve wanted to do it, but I didn’t know when or how. Saying it publicly will motivate me to go through with it. It feels kind of like a stunt that uses the book, but in a good way.
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August Lamm is an artist, writer, and musician whose writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Guardian, and she has appeared on NBC and NPR to speak about low-tech living. She runs an offline residency in Upstate New York, and her new book is You Don’t Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading Your Phone and Upgrading Your Life (2026).
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Featured image: Photo of August Lamm by Magdalene Kennedy.
LARB Contributor
Holiday Dmitri holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers with additional degrees from Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the New School. She lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a technology-themed novel.
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