My Year of Tech and Relaxation

Self-portrait in Mirror, August Lamm.

I used to go to the mall to use the internet. Until a few months ago, I would leave my apartment after dinner, carry my laptop five minutes down the road to the Kingsland Shopping Center, and squat on the dirty linoleum floor outside Costa Coffee, one hand balancing my laptop on my knees, the other hand typing out email replies letter by letter. Passersby would yell comments at me as I squatted; I looked ridiculous. Internet access was a humiliation ritual. If it lasted longer than it needed to, it might inflict physical and psychological damage. But hadn’t it always been this way?

My generation was the first to be granted unsupervised and unlimited access to the internet during adolescence. At fourteen, I was already displaying my nude body on ChatRoulette, dispensing marital wisdom on Reddit. By fifteen, I would make the first of three posts on the subreddit r/amiugly, a forum that encourages strangers to evaluate each other’s attractiveness, despite having never seen each other smile, speak, cross a room, or rotate in three-dimensional space. 15/f and curious what people think, I wrote. I've never been a popular girl and I don't get much attention from guys. My teeth are kind of wonky but I'm getting Invisalign tomorrow. I would make another post the following year, then again at eighteen, to see if I’d gotten any prettier. I sought feedback in other ways too, on other platforms. I posted photos, drawings, collages, songs, videos. I wanted so badly for something to take off, go viral, launch me into notoriety. Finally, the drawings did, and by my early twenties I was an art influencer with nearly two hundred thousand Instagram followers.

The peak of my influence was also the peak of my misery. Famous people say that a lot. I wasn’t famous, I just posted drawings of baby animals. I posted captions like, Which is your favorite? 1-10. I posed with pen packs and got paid for it. I spent all day with my phone, partly out of professional duty—I needed not only validation, but income—and partly out of compulsion. I had to check. Don’t check, I would tell myself. Just wait five minutes, then you can check. Two minutes would pass. Well, now you’re spending all this time thinking about checking. Might as well just check then move on with your day. So I would check. 

A few more years and my mind wasn’t suited for much else. I was anorexic and had no friends; I was absolutely killing it online. I had developed all these health issues and begun posting hospital selfies, crying selfies, depressive bathtub selfies. I was sick and sad. I’m fangirling, a girl said when she recognized me on the subway. I’m spiraling, I thought. I posted a YouTube video of myself speaking directly into the camera for half an hour, describing how social media had destroyed my life. That same day, I deactivated my Instagram account. I had started to downgrade, a process that would tank my stats and save my life.

• 

When I first conceived of writing an anti-smartphone pamphlet, my technology use was at the low extreme of what’s possible within the context of a city. My phone was a Nokia 3210, the iconic seafoam plastic brick that’s now old enough to order a beer. I had shifted my income source from print sales on social media, to illustration commissions brokered by an agency. Most days I would draw in my rented art studio until dinner, then visit friends, read books, look at old diary entries, make up songs, stretch on the floor, clean my room. Once I'd gotten rid of my smartphone, it was easy to make good choices. As such, I maintained my low-tech lifestyle effortlessly—that is, until I started to talk about it. 

I'm working on a pamphlet titled “You Don't Need a Smartphone,” I tweeted in July of this year. [It] explains the logistics of downgrading to reclaim attention & time. Topics include maps, messaging, photography, banking & more. I was not working on any such pamphlet. I just wanted to know if there would be enough interest to justify a bunch of unpaid labor. Thirty thousand likes later, my inbox was packed with demands to read, review, and publish this nonexistent pamphlet. I spent the next few weeks negotiating with publishers, emailing with my agent, and flirting with older academics at literary events, hoping to manipulate my way into a six-figure book deal. How much of it have you written so far? the publishers wanted to know. I threw out numbers: ten thousand words when I was feeling confident; five thousand when I hadn’t slept well. The real number was zero. But the ideas, I thought, were fully-formed: downgrading was all I thought about.

I finally settled on a two-prong publishing plan: first, to release a short pamphlet with an online platform that would help with publicity; second, to pitch a book-length version to a countercultural publisher. Satisfied with my plan, I took my laptop to the coffee shop—I actually went inside this time—and wrote five thousand words in one sitting. If I could maintain that pace for another day or two, cut down the draft, polish it up a bit—I’d be set in no time. That’s when the emails started.

The emails were benign at first. The team at the platform that was to release my pamphlet wanted to check in with me to establish a timeline, calculate printing costs, plan a launch event. I hoped these emails might function as a sort of friendly encouragement, sort of like those hand-drawn signs people hold up along a marathon course, except that the signs would say things like, Great to see this project coming together, and Thanks so much for being flexible. My job was simply to bring my laptop to the coffee shop and type out my anti-tech sentiments. I could do this. And all the while, friendly emails would be popping up in the corner of my screen to cheer me on.

Over the next two months, the team would send over four hundred emails. I couldn’t possibly keep up with them all. I didn’t understand what anyone was talking about. ROS meant “run of show,” and STD meant “save the date.” The tone turned brisk and professional, with the occasional sprinkle of encouragement—We’re so close to the finish line! You’ve done amazing work so far!—which only served to let me know that my declining mental state was apparent to everyone. I started sleeping with my laptop next to my pillow. I stopped sleeping. I showed up to Zoom meetings late, wearing a satin nightgown. The team had to send a series of emails, calls, texts, and Google invites over the course of days just to elicit a single, belated reply from me. The replies I did send usually contained a line saying, Sorry I missed this. I missed a lot of things, the biggest one being my life.

When had I stopped idling away the days, gluing scraps of paper into my diary, picking at my toenails, looking out my window at dogs? I now had internet access at home. I was replying to emails late at night. I was active on social media again, promoting the forthcoming pamphlet and getting called every possible epithet from Puritan to Nazi to plain old loser. My dumb phone, previously a quaint and harmless novelty object, had been co-opted by the PR team as a conduit for urgent reminders. Its little beeps, which used to signal greetings from various friends, now signaled urgent interruptions to my meals and walks and bedtime rituals. We still need you to review the Google doc, I read on a monochrome screen the size of a butter slice. Are you able to send out the rest of the press emails tonight? Time was running out, the deadline rapidly approaching. It didn’t matter that we had set it.

Up until then, I could count on one hand the number of Zoom calls I’d attended. Now, I was spending entire days toggling between Zoom meetings, documents, emails, and design files, in service of an anti-tech message. In a sense, I was beautifully illustrating my own point: tech overuse was turning me back into  the anxious, insecure, hummingbird-brained person who had, at fifteen, asked the internet if she was ugly. In another sense, I had sacrificed myself to the cause. I had died on this hill, only to find that the hill was composed of other bodies.

Fine, I thought, Let everyone keep their smartphones. Wouldn’t it be easier to live in seclusion than to try and convince society to meet my standards? I left the city. I moved to a small town in New Hampshire. The traffic noise went away but the emails persisted. I'll have a play-by-play final ROS to share out to this group by 10 a.m. tomorrow, one email read. Would love your eyes on it to make sure we maintain the re-enchantment factor.  Most people, I knew, could receive such emails without then contemplating legal action and/or suicide. But what if I was the canary in the digital coal mine? I fantasized about more extreme downgrades: living without electricity, shitting in a dirt hole, communicating only via letters. The intensity of this crisis was difficult to communicate to the well-meaning, sympathetic, yet ultimately email-greedy members of my Manhattan-based media and PR teams.

In the final stretch of the project, some of these team members seemed to forget that I did not, in fact, have a smartphone. The pamphlet was titled “You Don’t Need a Smartphone,” and it was about how I didn’t have a smartphone, how no one should have a smartphone, and how we should all get rid of our smartphones.. But still, I started receiving SMS notifications that someone had emphasized my message. Emojis showed up as empty squares; photos were too small to see. My phone sorted group chats into individual text threads, so I had to read each member’s contributions separately, then weave them all together in my mind to form a cohesive narrative. Downgrading started to feel like an obstacle, and not the goal.

What I’m describing is not out of the ordinary, as far as these things go. There was no plot against me—although in my darkest moments I felt like a new pledge in the basement of the PR frat house, forced to drink my own piss or brand myself with an iron or something. But this is simply how the industry works. We planned like crazy, promoted like crazy, and it paid off: the launch was well-attended, the pamphlet sold well, and I did a number of interviews with media outlets. Everyone did their job. They wanted to make me feel important, and I did feel important: what better evidence than a full inbox, a ringing phone, a sleepless night, a round of revisions, a to-do list that never ends?

•

We’re so inspired by you, I was told in one of my first video calls with the team. I thought this meant everyone was going to get rid of their smartphones. I thought this meant everyone would log off, or at least cut back. But logging off can always wait. There’s no urgency to idleness. Why not be idle tomorrow, once you’ve finished everything you have to do today? You will never get a midnight text reminding you to do nothing. You will never get a calendar invite to do nothing. You will never program a spreadsheet to log your idleness. Idleness doesn't have your number.

I tried to shape my idleness into something tangible, shove it into a padded mailer, ship it around the world. I was trying to sell something I no longer owned. I was panicking about peace, shouting about quiet, emailing about disconnection, working to end work, fighting screen time with more screen time. 

I wanted the world to stop, and I wouldn't stop until it did.