On a summer afternoon in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, August Lamm stood behind a table distributing pamphlets titled "You Don’t Need a Smartphone," urging passersby to reconsider their reliance on modern devices. The pamphlet’s cover featured a nostalgic image of a woman joyfully speaking on a landline, an emblem of a time before smartphones dominated daily life. Lamm, 31, is leading a growing movement encouraging people to “downgrade” from smartphones to simpler technology, seeking to reclaim time and mental space lost to constant connectivity.
Once an art influencer with 200,000 social media followers, Lamm has drastically transformed her relationship with technology over the past four years. After abandoning her smartphone for a 2002-era Nokia, she later sold her laptop and is working toward minimizing email use. Today, her advocacy focuses on disengaging from ubiquitous digital platforms, substituting mindless scrolling with practices such as reading physical books and engaging in real-world interactions.
Her latest effort is an updated paperback version of "You Don’t Need a Smartphone," published this month by Vintage. Originally a self-published zine that sold 20,000 copies, the book serves as a practical manual for living without the constant tether of a smartphone. It includes unconventional advice like carrying a compact mirror and a deck of cards, alongside reflections on how pervasive screen use masks a broader social disengagement, describing crowds of people absorbed in devices as manifestations of "mass rejection."
Lamm’s journey began with her initial iPhone, which arrived shortly after her adolescence. She leveraged it to build an online career as an artist, blending medieval crosshatching techniques with Instagram’s visual culture to attract a sizable following. Yet the pressure to maintain daily posts and algorithmic relevance contributed to anxiety and burnout. A forced three-month Instagram hiatus in 2022—triggered by a password lockout—coincided with health challenges related to a degenerative spinal disorder, underscoring her dependency on digital platforms.
Upon returning to Instagram and confronting new formats like short-form videos, Lamm found the demands intolerable and ultimately deactivated her social media accounts. Freed from her devices, she rediscovered her focus, completing a novel titled "Lambing Season" and engaging in folk songwriting and freelance writing to sustain herself. She has embraced a modest lifestyle, rejecting assumptions that her unconventional path requires substantial wealth.
Lamm’s advocacy extends beyond personal practice. She founded the Center for Archaic Networks, a collective exploring pre-social media forms of human connection, and launched a residency program in upstate New York where participants can disconnect fully by locking their devices away. Her book advance helped her buy a $320,000 home intended as a space fostering presence and community free from digital distractions.
Despite the challenges of promoting a low-tech lifestyle in a tech-saturated city, Lamm’s events have attracted a dedicated following. At a recent gathering in a Lower East Side nightclub, which weather disruptions failed to deter, attendees ranged from curious newcomers to longtime supporters struggling to balance their dependence on smartphones with desires for a different way of living.
One participant, Gabriel Hurlbert, described his relationship with his devices as akin to addiction, acknowledging the complexity underlying the compulsion to stay connected. Lamm, in addressing the crowd, acknowledged the tension her audience faces: many admire her message and acknowledge its impact yet find it difficult to abandon their own devices. The disconnect between theoretical support and practical implementation remains a key challenge for the phone-free movement.
As Lamm’s event concluded, the symbolic act of an audience member filming her with a smartphone highlighted the pervasive hold of technology, underscoring both the obstacles and the ongoing appeal of her message for a life less defined by screens.