A small but growing movement wants you to put down your phone. Click
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[April 15, 2026]
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
NEW YORK (AP) — More than a dozen millennials gathered in a brownstone
apartment in Brooklyn and placed their phones in a metal colander before
two hours of reading, drawing and conversation — anything but staring at
screens.
A similar scene played out a few miles away, in an early 20th-century
cardboard box factory turned high-end office space. Nearly 20 people in
their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set
them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of
their neighbors.
The exercise was meant to drive home the importance of paying attention
to real life, not the gleaming little screens that have taken over our
world.
A ‘revolution’ against devices
Two decades after Steve Jobs premiered the iPhone, a small but
passionate movement — with offshoots in several countries — is rebelling
against the omnipresent screen.
“The products have become more insidious and more extractive,
exploitative,” said Dan Fox, 38, who hosted the house gathering. Members
of the nascent movement “want to start a revolution,” he said.
But can an “attention activism” movement of millennials and Generation Z
members break free of the world’s largest companies? The raw numbers say
no. But cultural changes start small, and the rebellion is growing
against what many call “human fracking.”
Apple and other Big Tech firms say they've taken steps to help users
reduce time spent on their devices, including features that track usage
and a less enticing gray mode.
‘Dumb phones’ provide a low-tech alternative
Activists say it's not enough.
“They want to take down Big Tech,” says Fox, a stand-up comedian who
works in marketing for Brooklyn-based Light Phone, one of several “dumb
phones” with only basic functionality.
Unlike most modern products, the company boasts of its phones’ lack of
features, like “social media, clickbait news, email, an internet
browser, or any other anxiety-inducing infinite feed.”
Fox was inspired to join the movement when he attended a 2015 Tame
Impala concert at Radio City Music Hall. It felt as if everyone in the
audience was filming the concert on their phones instead of immersing
themselves in the music.
“I realized the phones are literally getting in the way of the things I
love,” Fox said.
Mobile internet access has so thoroughly permeated modern life that one
of the few places in the world where it’s not readily available is
wartime Iran, where authorities shut down the internet during mass
protests in January.
A growing backlash
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 the corporate harvesting of human attention.
Along with MS NOW host Chris Hayes’ bestselling “The Sirens’ Call: How
Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” his work is part
of a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from
screens and pay attention to life.
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Participants take part in a digital detox evening of the Offline
Club in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Tuesday, April 7, 2026. (AP
Photo/Peter Dejong)
 Burnett says the “attention
liberation movement” is about throwing off the yoke of time-sucking
apps. People “need to rewild their attention. Their attention is the
fullness of their relationship to the world.”
The people in Fox's living room started the evening by introducing
themselves, as if at 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.
Other chapters have cropped up around the world
Across the Atlantic Ocean in the Netherlands, people filed into a
neo-Gothic cathedral late last month for a meeting of the Offline
Club.
“We create our events and gatherings with different themes. One of
them is connecting with yourself through creative activities or
reading or writing or puzzling,” said co-founder Ilya Kneppelhout.
“Really something that makes you slow down and reflect, go inward.”
There are several dozen “attention activism” groups across the
United States and Canada, and the movement has also cropped up 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 and spreadsheets in
January, expanding to a ban on technology in the shared spaces of
the 1950s brick building.
“People expressed a feeling of relief about not needing to be
checking their emails, or checking their texts or checking the news.
That allowed us to spend a lot of time just talking to each other,”
said junior Ozzie Frazier, 21.
During the monthlong co-op project, Frazier said, people started
checking out CD’s from the library, and enjoying arts and crafts
nights, live music and the board game Bananagrams.
“A lot of people felt very connected to each other. Not having the
devices gave them some kind of mental space,” Frazier said.
Wilhelm Tupy read “Attensity” after stumbling across it at a Vienna
bookstore and visited the School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn’s
DUMBO neighborhood on a trip last month.
He felt he had found something that united his sporting career as a
judo champion — with its need for focused “flow” — and his
postretirement work as a business consultant.
“Discipline is not enough nowadays,” he said. “It’s becoming more
and more difficult to keep the attention and to keep the focus on
goals and whatever you want to achieve and want to do.”
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