One hot summer day, August Lamm stood cheerily behind a booth in Tompkins Square Park, offering a stack of pamphlets titled “You Don’t Need a Smartphone.” The cover featured a retro photograph of a woman lying on the floor and talking on a landline. She looked ecstatic.
Lamm had come to the park, in part, to invite participants to a “downgrading” event that evening, in which she would lead phone addicts toward less-connected devices. The crowd floated silently past. Their ears were stuffed with AirPods. Their eyes were watching their phones. The people who most need Lamm’s help, she has found, are the least likely to look up and notice her.
Lamm, who is 31, was like them once. Four years ago, she was an art influencer with 200,000 social media followers. Then she traded in her smartphone for a 2002-era Nokia cellphone. Later, she pawned her laptop. Now she’s working to divest herself from email. And she’s become an advocate for disengaging from technology and, as she puts it, “reclaiming your life.”
At the park, Lamm wore a thrifted black top with a paper clip in place of a missing button. She appears somewhat out of time, her face cleansed of TikTok makeup trends and her silhouette freed from the long jorts that have seemingly drop-shipped onto everyone in her age bracket. Unled by Google, unfed by DoorDash, unmatched on Hinge, she navigates a version of New York where seemingly everyone else is locked in a tragic embrace with a personal device. When she walks outside, she is now the rare human who is alert and open for engagement.
Soon Louis Toledo, 73, sidled up to the booth, the white cords of his headphones swinging from his chest pocket. “Phones, huh?” he said. “No one calls me.”
He told Lamm about his divorce, his relationship with his siblings, his difficulty in grade school, his service in the Air Force and his condominium in Puerto Rico, before returning finally to the topic of the smartphone, and his suspicion that “the G5, G4, 5G, whatever” can “kill your sperms.”
“Well,” Lamm said, empathizing: “At least you don’t need them now.”
He saw things differently. “Listen, I got more to offer you today than you could imagine,” he said. “We can have two kids and live beautifully in Puerto Rico.”
She asked if he would be willing to get rid of his smartphone, and when he said no, she smiled sadly. “That’s a dealbreaker for me,” she said.
A young couple approached, brandishing a flip phone. They had been experimenting, they said, with leaving the house with one smartphone between them.
Passerby asked if Lamm was affiliated with dumbphone companies, or the Luddites, or the Summer of Ludd. Over the past few years, the smartphone resistance has grown: there is the phoneless weekly Brooklyn gathering Phone Free Adelphi; the 30-day group challenge Month Offline; the biweekly techno-critical event bulletin NYC Off Tech; and the Luddite Club, with chapters from Santa Monica High School to Stockholm, Sweden.
Lamm has emerged as a kind of bard of this scene, writing about her own experience divesting from technology and encouraging her peers to replace mindless scrolling with actual books. Now she’s selling one: After moving 20,000 copies of her self-published $10 zine “You Don’t Need a Smartphone,” Vintage published an updated and expanded paperback under the same title this week.
It’s a practical guide to a post-smartphone life: Lamm draws her own maps and checks her email once a week at the public library. She advises carrying a compact mirror and deck of cards, as if passing down the ancient texts. The book is also a deeply observed account of what everyone else is missing. “Ironically, looking at screens is how we tune out the sad state of our public spaces,” she writes. “We can’t bear to face a crowd of indifferent souls. It’s mass rejection.”
After an hour and a half at the booth, Lamm packed up her materials and dragged them under the sidewalk umbrella of a nearby poke spot. She was underslept. The previous evening, she had attended a birthday party for the publisher of an offline low-tech zine, and “as happens when you don’t have a smartphone, I did not take the optimal train trip back home,” she said.
Downgrading is the inverse of optimizing. It’s a wandered path, logistically and socially. “I feel very out of touch,” Lamm said without concern. “People don’t feel the need to communicate any cultural trends in real life anymore, because they’re assuming that you’re getting it online,” she said. “I didn’t know who Chappell Roan was for like a year.”
As we finished our rice bowls, it began to rain, which caught Lamm by surprise. Soon it was pummeling the Lower East Side. A stream formed down Avenue A, rushing toward her “downgrading” event. She worried the storm would suppress turnout.
“I really need to start looking at the weather,” she said. “I need to get a newspaper delivered to my house.”
Life at 200,000 Followers
Lamm got her first iPhone shortly after she got her first period. It was, she writes in the book, “a treasure chest,” a “dozen gifts in one.” Later it would bring a bigger prize — she would leverage it to become a working artist, one who made a living not through connections in the art world but through followers on social media.
After college, where Lamm studied South Asian art history, she took up crosshatching, a drawing style forged in the Middle Ages that she savvily repositioned for the Instagram age. As she worked by day in a Berlin ice cream shop, she gained an online following for drawings of tiny ink animals that she photographed posed with a pen in a kind of digital illusion — a koala seems to hug the barrel; a pigeon perches on the uncapped tip. Lamm posed herself for Instagram too, where she had morphed into a recognizable type — an indie artist of the 2010s, with bangs and slim high-waisted jeans. She sold drawings and consultation sessions to her followers, as well as an online guide to how they, too, could make a living as an artist on social media.
Art Instagram is assumed to be one of the cozier parts of the internet, but for Lamm it was high-stress. When the fire alarm went off in her apartment building one morning, and she missed posting her daily drawing at the optimal time, she had a panic attack on the lawn.“I was going to lose my credibility, my algorithmic rank, my income if I took that day off,” she said.
But she also found that the more emotional she got on the app, the more attention she got for her work. “When I posted about being anxious, having a breakdown, going through a breakup, I would sell more,” she said.
She took a break from Instagram in 2022, but not on purpose. After entering the wrong password too many times, she was locked out of her account for three months. The timing felt catastrophic: She had a book on crosshatching coming out that she hoped would be a bridge to a writing career. She had been diagnosed with a degenerative spinal disorder, and when it flared, she said it was difficult to draw, and to use her phone. “I couldn’t tap with my thumb,” she said. Now, on the eve of her book’s publication, her platform collapsed.
When Lamm’s account was finally restored, she felt as if she had returned to a different Instagram, one ruled not by static photographs but by looping short-form videos. Meta paid her a few hundred dollars to make her first reel, and she was overwhelmed by how much time it required — time she could be drawing or writing. Her monthslong banishment had shown her just how reliant she was on tech companies.
This knowledge was at first horrifying, and then liberating. By the end of the year, she had traded in her smartphone for a less advanced model and deactivated her social media accounts.
With the phone gone, “my thoughts grew back,” she writes. Her memory was so sharp that she wondered fleetingly if she could be a “late-blooming genius,” she jokes. She read “Anna Karenina” and “Moby Dick,” recorded diaristic folk songs in her bedroom, and wrote a novel, “Lambing Season,” based on her experience moving into a ramshackle home with a student pilot she met on the internet. She supported herself by busking, freelance writing and selling that pamphlet, which answered all the questions she kept fielding about surviving without a smartphone.
Sometimes strangers examine Lamm’s life (she is from Connecticut) and assume she must be secretly rich. Her real secret is living “very cheaply,” she said. “It’s not a comfortable existence.”
Lamm said she left home when she was 16, shortly before her stepmother was incarcerated for running a pyramid scheme out of the living room. When her father died in 2024, Lamm was left to pay the funeral costs. The privilege of the low-tech lifestyle is not necessarily one enjoyed by the leisure class, which, she writes, “devotes much of its leisure time to screens.”
In 2025, Hilary Redmon, the head of nonfiction at Knopf, was working from home one day when her college-age daughter wandered into her office, looking at her phone. “Have you heard of August Lamm?” she asked. “I have to get rid of my phone.”
Redmon downloaded a PDF of Lamm’s zine, and was struck by her voice. “It made an impact on my daughter, who is pretty quick to dismiss people trying to influence her to do anything,” Redmon said. Soon Lamm had been offered a two-book deal, for the anti-smartphone book, and her novel.
Fans and Their Phones
Lamm arrived for her downgrading event at Nightclub 101 looking as if she had run through a sprinkler, which did not trouble her. Without the practice of constant self-surveillance, she had lost “the reflex of self-consciousness,” she said.
She dried off as she zipped around the moody basement space, preparing her various offerings. She set out a group of bound short stories published by Loose Tooth Press, which she co-founded with her friend Magdalene Kennedy.
Kennedy is one of the people Lamm calls on her flip-phone when she needs a human being to access the internet on her behalf. “She was at the bookstore and she was like, ‘I’m looking for a book on how to make decisions, can you look it up for me?’” Kennedy said. “And I tried, but there were so many books on how to make decisions.”
Next to the Loose Tooth stories were copies of Lamm’s new zine, “Archaic,” which you can’t read or buy online. The first issue includes a letter from Dave Eggers and poems by Tao Lin.
It’s an outgrowth of Lamm’s Center for Archaic Networks, a group she founded that’s “dedicated to the study and revival of human networks pre-dating social media.” She recently spent $100,000 of her book advance to put a down payment on a $320,000 house in upstate New York, where she will live and host a residency where applicants can stay for a week or two and lock their devices in a safe for the duration.
“I’m so excited to have this privilege that everybody else in human history had,” she said, “which is just to live in a house where everyone is present.”
In the end, the rain did not deter dozens of young New Yorkers from Lamm’s event. Gabriel Hurlbert, 26, met Lamm at a downtown literary reading in 2024, and started exchanging letters with her. He arrived at Nightclub 101 that evening with two smartphones, one provided by his employer, Deloitte.
“My relationship to my phone, for long stretches of time, has been like that between a heroin addict and heroin,” he said, though he believes the phone itself is symptomatic of a deeper problem. “I haven’t really located the source of the malaise,” he said.
On a bench, Lamm handled a small collection of minimalist phones that she had been gifted by Keyphone, which sponsored the event; by night’s end, she’d have given them all away. She has become a kind of Luddite influencer. Dumbphone companies have offered to pay for a mention in her book, and her publisher’s marketing team has floated the idea of a brand partnership. (She’s not interested).
I asked Lamm if she’d considered reactivating her dormant 180,000-follower Instagram account for the book launch. She had never fully deleted it, in case of emergency. “This does not qualify as an emergency to me,” she said.
When Lamm stepped onstage, the stakes of her project became clear. In battling the smartphone, she was fighting for her time, and for her mind, but also for some company. She could not bear to do this alone.
Lamm read an excerpt from the book, in which she lamented that her fans often told her that her zine changed their lives. But they still have smartphones. “They were theoretically in favor of the movement, and yet personally unable to partake,” she said. “They wished me the best with my activism. They had no doubt it would make a difference.”
As she spoke, a woman in the audience lifted her phone and zoomed in.
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