For how much hate it gets these days, I like the algorithm sometimes. I’ve trained my TikTok like an obedient dog, only instead of laying wildfowl at my feet, it brings me videos of Egyptian wedding performers, cooking influencers from rural Vietnam and slide shows of something called “Balkan core aesthetic.” I like when my Instagram ads present me with some inane kitchen gadget shaped like a cute tomato.
But these treats come along with the many dead squirrels my algorithm also brings to me: the hollowness that follows witnessing the mundane details of so many people’s lives, the nagging sensation that everyone is somewhere else having fun without me, the flattening of my tastes and sensibilities. Do I actually like ballet sneakers, or have Meta and three paid style influencers I follow in Europe conspired to get me to buy them?
It’s why I’ve been trying to live a Summer of Ludd, a term I’m cribbing from a group that has been papering fliers all over New York City the past few weeks in an effort to get people off their phones. “NOT EVERYTHING IS ONLINE,” read one poster I saw flaking off a wall in the East Village. For me, less and less has been. I’ve been staging an experiment for the past few months: I’ve removed all my social media apps — Instagram, Twitter, TikTok — and moved them onto an old iPhone I had lying around my house. I dubbed this phone my Scroll Phone. I designated a single spot in my home where I could use it: a stripy armchair in my living room, which I have now anointed the Scrolly Chair.
The Scroll Phone has no SIM card, only Wi-Fi, and I’m allowed to use it as much as I want, so long as I’m sitting in the Scrolly Chair. The Scrolly Chair exists so that I don’t end up doing exactly what I did when my Actual Phone was also my Scroll Phone: eating dinner with my Scroll Phone, watching TV with my Scroll Phone, sitting on the toilet with my Scroll Phone. (You do it, don’t pretend like you don’t.) The Scrolly Chair allows me to tether my social media use to a single place. If I’m on the Scroll Phone, I must be on the Scrolly Chair. I even bought a phone stand shaped like a little piggy for the Scroll Phone to keep it on my shelf, a way to remind myself of what I’m doing when I pick it up: gobbling up social media like a pig at the trough.
Friends are sometimes incredulous when they have learned of the Scroll Phone’s existence. It makes it sound as if I was in the grips of a serious social media addiction. In fact, I was already tapering, posting on Instagram every few weeks at most. But I had gone through difficult life changes in the past few years, and social media wasn’t helping. I noticed that at my most vulnerable, I’d scroll to distract myself, and would only plunge deeper into anxiety and insecurity. I would delete or disable my accounts for monthlong stretches, only to re-download and binge, reaching the same depressing emotional dead end once more.
The delete-and-repeat cycle was only one strategy. I tried keeping my phone on grayscale for several months, a hack meant to make us less enticed by the addictive devices we all keep in our pockets. I took Instagram off my phone and looked at it only on desktop. I had the daily timers Apple now offers on apps. (I almost always ignored them, as I’m sure you do too.) Even if I managed to spend less time on the apps, none of it really stopped the nagging feeling of wanting to check, and check again, like a nervous tic, the way it felt when I smoked cigarettes. I remember a friend saying “Why can’t you be chill about it?” when I complained about wanting to be online but feeling terrible whenever I was. But I couldn’t be chill; regardless of what I did I felt pulled back into the algorithm’s grip.
There are things I didn’t try: Brick, a device that blocks apps from your phone until you tap it against a small magnetic square; plug-ins that make your phone screen boring; an app literally called Brainrot that gamifies reducing your scroll time. Then there are so-called dumb phones, phones that are purposely made without access to these apps that have seemed to become trendy among the neo-Luddites. But often their usage seemed performative, less like a solution I could actually apply to my life.
When I first set it up, I assumed the Scroll Phone would be another in a long line of those sort-of solutions. But somehow my Scroll Phone has completely changed how I use social media — I think, in part, because I managed to recreate how it felt when I first started interacting with the algorithm. I was in high school when Facebook started, and in college when Instagram did, so I’m of the generation that rushed to our college computer libraries to see who posted a Facebook album with last night’s party photos. The first time someone tweeted something negative about me, I didn’t get an instant ping alerting me of their 140-character snipe. A boy told me before a biology lecture; by the time I had logged on, it had been days since the person had tweeted. Looking at social media required stepping into a specific place; it was tethered to computers, which were tethered to Ethernet cables, which you basically had to be sitting down and indoors to have access to.
For us millennials, the nostalgia for the early internet is easily commodified by brands and “remember when” montages, but there’s a reason we can look back fondly on an era when internet use was limited to a place and time: You could treat it like any other hobby, not the strange extension of your psyche that comes with having constant access to information, both important and inane, about everyone you’ve ever met in the past 10 years.
My Summer of Ludd has returned me to the habits of those years, but better: I now experience an almost complete lack of FOMO. It’s hard to be jealous of what my former roommate’s friend is doing in Berlin on any given day, because I don’t see it. I rarely have the urge to lift my phone up and capture what I’m doing, because I’m no longer creating content about my life, that reflex these apps have ingrained into all of us. It makes me cringe a bit when I see people filming or photographing a thing they should just be experiencing. When I do take photos, they’ve taken on a boomer quality I’ve come to enjoy: They’re often horizontal, not vertical, less composed, no dead space for texts and captions.
And this observation is so plain it borders on trite: When I’m living my life, I feel more present. When you limit your audience to the people who are physically in your company, it’s easier to let go of concerns about how you are perceived. Fewer people are perceiving me!
When I do settle into the Scrolly Chair, I do what we all do: enjoy the wash of the algorithm coming over me. I’ll catch up on DMs; sometimes friends send me stories that have long since expired that I’m unable to see. Oh well! If it were important, they’d screenshot it and text it to me. (It never is.) I have effectively created office hours to chat with people on the apps: when I’m home, on nights and weekend mornings. Sometimes, when I interact with people on social media who know about the Scroll Phone, they’ll say “omg ru on ur scroll phone?” If I’m responding to you on Instagram, you can be sure I’m writing to you from one very specific location in my apartment.
I occasionally post to Instagram, but the process is so cumbersome (I airdrop images from my main phone to the Scroll Phone before uploading them to Instagram) that midway through doing it I realize how dumb the photo is to begin with. When you don’t post about several momentous life events, the allure of doing it for future ones fades too, and soon it’s just about having a good time every now and then.
I won’t pretend I’m some holier-than-thou Luddite, though. I read a lot of news and blogs and Reddit posts on my real phone. I gossip, I text, my screen time is still over two hours a day (down from six, I’ll have you know!). I’ll occasionally ask to see a friend’s phone when I’m out; it’s like getting a hit off someone’s vape at a party. I just do most of it where the algorithm can’t find me. Unlike the neo-Luddites, I still find joy in social media, a glimmer of fondness for what it could be when microdosed instead of overdosed. It doesn’t need to be destroyed; it just needs to be kept in a corner, on a shelf, on a pig-shaped stand that reminds me that social media was always meant to be a little unserious.
Meher Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.
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