In March, I put my iPhone into a yellow cardboard box with MO stamped on top'the M looked like a riff on the Motorola logo; the O looked like a flower. Over the next several weeks, I left my phone there for roughly 23.5 hours out of every day. I did so as a participant in 'Month Offline,' which started last year in Washington, D.C., as a kind of Dry January challenge, but for smartphones. Now it is a fledgling business with a footprint in New York City. Members of each monthlong 'cohort' pay $75 for the experience, during which they swap their iPhones for a lower-tech device and participate in weekly meetups. I joined the cohort that began on March 2 and received an email just before the first meeting: 'Excited 2 see u soon,' it said. My month offline began with the MO pledge'a document with curious capitalization that declared us all 'Free and Independent Human Beings' who were 'Absolved from all dependence on big tech and their attention-grabbing algorithms.' By signing at the...
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