\u201cThey aren\u2019t as dumb as they look,\u201d our facilitator said, referring to the dark gray flip phone in his hand. He just as easily could have been talking about us, the 28 New York residents before him who had signed up to use the device for the entire month of March. He explained that the relic was loaded with WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Maps, Uber, Microsoft 2FA \u2013 nothing like my seventh-grade flip phone.<\/p>\n
We each had paid $75 to participate in Month Offline, or MO, a program that challenged us to swear off our smartphones entirely. Another $25 went to dumb.co, the company behind MO, for the so-called dumbphones we would use as we navigated daily life.<\/p>\n
In its early days, MO had given out flip phones so dumb \u2013 no maps, no ride-sharing, iffy texting \u2013 that participants struggled to use them during and after the month-long experiment. So my MO cohort was the first to test dumb.co\u2019s souped-up version, a discontinued TCL Flip 2 bolstered with the messaging and mapping functions many of us are dependent upon.<\/p>\n
A retrofitted TCL Flip 2 at the dumb.co launch party dinner in New York City on 1 May. Photograph: Jacques Morel\/Courtesy of dumb.co<\/p>\n
I was skeptical. Most of us came to MO sick of being glued to the supercomputers in our palms, angling hours of our attention downwards each day. Disaffected with tech companies and their devices, we were eager to dabble in the growing analog movement and compelled by MO\u2019s mission to restore \u201cour social, psychological, and spiritual freedom\u201d, as per the offline pledge we signed on day one.<\/p>\n
But if \u201cless is MO,\u201d why was the dumbphone being enabled to do more?<\/p>\n
Was dumb.co authentic in its offline aspirations, or was it really a tech startup trying to ride the anti-tech zeitgeist?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all have iPhones,\u201d Danny Hogenkamp, CEO and co-founder of dumb.co, told me of his nine-person team. Their office in Washington DC was soon to be flush with summer interns. \u201cThey just don\u2019t leave the office.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hogenkamp, 31, founded his first company, a DC data and technology firm called Grassroots Analytics specializing in fundraising for progressive causes, when he was just 22 years old. It became ground zero for his \u201cdumbing down\u201d. After instituting device-free meetings when his team returned to the office after Covid-19 lockdowns, Hogenkamp observed an increase in creativity and productivity \u2013 from his staff and himself.<\/p>\n
Hogenkamp\u2019s experimentation with de-digitizing escalated to the point when, in 2023, his roommate gave him a flip phone as a joke. The phone, Hognekamp said, \u201cbarely worked\u201d \u2013 which is to say, it really worked. In addition to gaining back what would have otherwise been screen time, Hogenkamp noticed he simply felt better. (Indeed, research papers<\/a> have indicated that low levels of screen time are linked to better quality of life<\/a> in children and adults.)<\/p>\n Danny Hogenkamp, dumb.co\u2019s CEO, at the New York event. Photograph: Jacques Morel\/Courtesy of dumb.co<\/p>\n And so Hogenkamp decided that the future is dumb. With the money he made from his first company, he tried seven different \u201cdumb ideas\u201d, including investing in an app that let users bet against each other\u2019s screen time, a phone-free bar in DC<\/a>, and various charity and political efforts. He also bought 150 Yondr pouches, fabric bags that phones are magnetically locked into, and started hosting his own phone-free parties in DC just for fun. \u201cI was the pouch guy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n double quotation markWe\u2019re probably going into this dystopian hellscape, where everyone is a slave to their device \u2026 But what if there was a different future?Grant Besner<\/p>\n In 2024, Hogenkamp and his pouches were summoned to enable a phone-free Shabbat dinner. Grant Besner, 29, who had recently moved to DC after stints on a regenerative farm in Virginia and as a natural building apprentice in upstate New York, showed up too. When Hogenkamp tried to check his phone in at the door, Besner held up a low-tech phone of his own \u2013 a habit he picked up after struggling to write his master\u2019s thesis with his smartphone lurking nearby.<\/p>\n Hogenkamp and Besner were both gobsmacked; it was rare to meet a fellow traveler. They became friends and started brainstorming, eventually coming up with the idea for MO in early 2025. \u201cWe\u2019re probably going into this dystopian hellscape, where everyone is a slave to their device,\u201d Besner said of their thought process. \u201cBut what if there was a different future where we branched off and everyone started getting flip phones? Might as well try that.\u201d<\/p>\n Hogenkamp, who was funding the project, bought flip phones for MO participants to borrow and enrolled in the first two cohorts in DC. While happily participating (and realizing his \u201clifelong dream to hang out with other people with flip phones\u201d), Hogenkamp noticed that people were having \u201cdeeply spiritual experiences\u201d, with many wanting to keep their flip phones at the end of the month. \u201cHow do we make that happen for them? I guess that\u2019s just what a phone company is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Before starting dumb.co, Hogenkamp hosted phone-free parties in DC using Yondr pouches, fabric bags that phones are magnetically locked into. Photograph: Jacques Morel\/Courtesy of dumb.co<\/p>\n This sense of shared awakening underpins many of the other neo-luddite communities sprouting up offline, with analog advocacy groups such as the Luddite Club<\/a> hosting regular chapter meetings across the country, and the New York-based Strother School of Radical Attention<\/a> facilitating workshops to \u201cbuild sanctuaries of attention\u201d and protest \u201ccoercive digital technologies\u201d. MO participants in my own cohort shared that \u201cflipping off\u201d their smartphones felt like waking up. We got lost, talked to strangers, and had the disturbing and unending experience of being the only person looking up in a subway car. A sense of enlightenment seemed to emerge simply from being more mindful (a conclusion I imagine will prompt Buddhists to think: well, duh).<\/p>\n By summer 2025, participants were given the option to keep their TCL Flip 2s after MO ended. In December, Hogenkamp retired from Grassroots to focus on dumb.co \u2013 a tech startup, lifestyle brand, and yes, phone company \u2013 building a team of loosely anti-tech gen Zers, many plucked from MO, and courting investors. Meanwhile, his team began smartening up the dumbphones.<\/p>\n Danielle Hirshberg, an early investor and chair of dumb.co\u2019s board, is a firm believer that the dumbphone \u201cstill needs some basics\u201d. As a woman she wouldn\u2019t feel comfortable in a city without the ability to call an Uber or see where she is on Google Maps. (The new Maps feature is clunky, anyway \u2013 I didn\u2019t use it once. But she\u2019s right, I did feel better knowing it was there.) Women make up about three-quarters of dumbphone users, most residing in DC and New York, with an average age of 24.<\/p>\n What\u2019s motivating to Hirschberg, a relative dumb elder at 33, is that \u201cthese gen Zers have grown up in a world where we\u2019re expected to carry a supercomputer in our pockets. And they\u2019re saying it\u2019s not an inevitability.\u201d She stressed that dumb.co was trying to give people their lives back, not stick them with another phone plan. \u201cIn an ideal world, we would give away these phones for free. We haven\u2019t figured out a way to do that,\u201d she said. As it is, dumb.co operates MO at a loss.<\/p>\n More than 1,000 people are active dumbphone users, paying $20 for the device and as low as $15 a month for a text, call and data plan, while 300 people have signed up for MO in the past year. Lydia Peabody, the company\u2019s chief dumb organizer (\u201cwhich you may know as chief marketing officer\u201d, she said), is in the process of open-sourcing MO\u2019s materials so that people can become dumb evangelists and spread the gospel through their own communities, recruiting dumbphone customers in the process.<\/p>\n Tali deGroot (right), Hogenkamp\u2019s partner, among the participants holding up their TCL Flip 2. Photograph: Jacques Morel \/Courtesy of dumb.co<\/p>\n Peabody\u2019s outreach is crucial given that a red line for dumb.co is advertising on social media. Nevertheless, spikes in dumbphone users tend to come after bouts of virality; a recent CNN segment turned TikTok brought in 300 dumbphone sales in five days.<\/p>\n Email is another red line; I wasn\u2019t yet able to check mine on the dumbphone and dumb.co insisted I never would. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to be checking your email in the bathroom when you\u2019re taking a shit,\u201d Besner said. (He left dumb.co in April.)<\/p>\n To Peabody, MO is all about what you cultivate and create with the hours gained, the nifty flip phone almost beside the point. \u201cThis was never supposed to be a business model,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just fun.\u201d<\/p>\n And it was fun. Our MO meetups had the energy of supervised group playdates, in which we recreated our experiences living sans smartphones in crayon, drawing vignettes of friction points related to that week\u2019s theme: communication, memory, navigation or boredom. I doodled my first morning waking up to an alarm clock instead of my iPhone, when I had to run back to my apartment to grab my wallet after realizing I didn\u2019t have Apple Pay to get me through the subway turnstiles. These Crayola creations made up a \u201cdumb scroll\u201d at an end-of-MO event where we displayed what we had done in lieu of screen time.<\/p>\n double quotation markI sincerely believe everyone knows deep down that this is not the way to spend their one human consciousnessDanny Hogenkamp<\/p>\n