One Woman's Rage against the Machine

August Lamm's Anti-Tech Crusade

I originally wrote this intending to pair it with the podcast episode I recorded with August for the Buntzcast, which you can listen to here. But for some reason, I didn’t get around to doing that, so you get to read it now. Belated? Perhaps. But “time is bunk,” as they say.

The cultural critic Katherine Dee has long argued that the true division in our culture will prove not to be Right vs. Left but Tech vs. Anti-Tech. One can see this happening now: the relationship between tech and the Democratic party was always strained, and now that most tech CEOs have defected to Trump, a similar fault-line has emerged between, on the one hand, Trump’s populist and traditionalist supporters and, on the other, the interlopers from Silicon Valley.

But the division is also evident on a smaller scale, at the level of arts and culture. If Dee’s contention holds true, and this is just the beginning of a greater Anti-Tech vs. Tech struggle, then the artist and writer August Lamm has launched one of the initial skirmishes in this war. Her new pamphlet, “You Don’t Need a Smartphone,” might represent a relatively small battle, yes. But only eight men died at the Battle of Lexington, and it still resulted in “the shot heard round the world.”

Lamm became popular for her artwork on Instagram, emerging as an influencer. But she realized that, after a certain point, her smartphone was devouring her life. As she puts it in the pamphlet, “It’s a bit like hiring a chef: as a result, we’ve forgotten how to cook. In the smartphone analogy, your chef is also spying on you, selling your data, distracting you from your work, interrupting your conversations, damaging your sleep, and diminishing your attention span, in exchange for those meals you’re getting, which are actually bad for you. And on top of everything you’ve sacrificed to the chef, all the time and data you’ve handed over, you’re also literally paying him.”

So, she took the unthinkable step: she got rid of her smartphone. Her quality of life immediately improved, allowing her to become more engaged in her real-life community, work on various hobbies, and read more books. For instance, after tracking the number of books she read each year, she found that, in the depths of her phone addiction, the number sank to only three. After disavowing her smartphone, the number soared up to over fifty.

Lamm discusses how life with a smartphone tends to make one focus on the “packaging of the moment” rather than living in the moment. She likens this to going to a restaurant, immediately putting your entire meal in a to-go box, and then putting it in the fridge when you arrive home. At this point, it is a rare person who hasn’t recognized that their phone is diminishing their own sense of presence and embodiment.

Now, with the release of her pamphlet, a slew of podcast appearances, and the readiness of her pre-existing audience, Lamm has launched a crusade against the smartphone. After reading her pamphlet, I realized just how many aspects of my own life require or are made significantly more convenient by a smartphone. It wasn’t exactly a revelation that I relied on it, but the extent to which it is functionally mandatory is breathtaking when you survey it in full. To provide a few examples, these include banking, purchasing concert or sports tickets, using Google Maps to navigate, and using SMS verification to log into any number of websites or accounts. In her work, Lamm provides many clever work-arounds to deal with these complications.

In case this sounds like unbearable, masochistic asceticism, it’s worth noting that Lamm still uses a computer and makes use of social media to spread her gospel of turning off, tuning out, and logging off. She is not averse to turning tech’s tools against it, though it seems like more of an unhappy necessity than something she’s enthusiastically embracing.

Being a writer and feeling a compulsive need to remain plugged into “the discourse,” I haven’t yet been able to follow August into full smartphone renunciation. But reading her pamphlet did inspire me to delete the Twitter/X.com app off my phone at the beginning of the year. And the effects have indeed been noteworthy and positive (though I still look at it on my computer—and, OK, sometimes I still open it in the browser on my phone, although I’m trying not to).

(Editor's Note: Since I wrote this, I still haven’t re-downloaded it, but I’ve surrendered to opening it in my phone browser too frequently, thus negating the whole point of deleting it in the first place. Maybe I still don’t look at it quite as much, though this might be pure cope.)

It's pretty obvious that our overreliance on our phones keeps us in a state of learned helplessness. While I’m just as dependent on Google Maps as everyone else when I’m headed somewhere new, it’s interesting to contemplate the greater sense of your own environment, your own space, that might exist without the app. If you had to study maps and memorize roads and streets, you would have an enhanced sense of power and mastery over your environment, merely by having a more detailed mental map of where everything is. In a way, you end up living not so much in the terrain of the real world, but in the simulated representation of it on your phone.

It just goes to show, every convenience provided by the smartphone diminishes some native human power or strength. In Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” he notes that the same problem has always existed in some form: “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue.”

With the smartphone, we clearly have reached the terminus of this process, power seeping out of our pores and into that glowing rectangle, leaving us fully Last Men, quivering lumps of nothingness in thrall to the Machine God.

After reading Lamm’s pamphlet and talking to her for my podcast, the Buntzcast, she made me wonder if we will manage to integrate these technologies into our lives in a healthy way or if the only option is to completely renounce them. It occurred to me that the best advertisement for being less screen-addicted is simply to lay off your phone for a few days. You think that you’ll be dopamine deprived, anxious, unable to focus. You need your pacifier. But the curious truth is that, once you’ve resisted the impulse to reach for your phone a bit and instead lock into the moment, you start to feel, well, good.

I’m not sure the tech giants have counted on this particular fact: if the brain recognizes that it feels better when engaging less with the phone, won’t it naturally rewire itself based on this new experience? Perhaps our own neuroplasticity will save us, helping us naturally integrate these technologies in a less servile and abased manner. Until then, it seems likely that, paraphrasing Thoreau, we will remain the tools of our tools.