I began my low-tech writing journey by inconveniencing everyone around me. As an MFA student I often turned off my phone and laptop until I met my daily goal of spending three hours writing by hand. Given access to the internet, I checked social media, browsed deals on cashmere, rescheduled dentist appointments, read Substacks I didn’t care about, bought knitting patterns, parsed explanations of benefits, scowled at undesired emails, and fretted over the non-arrival of desired emails. I would literally do whatever I could to avoid focusing on the work that was theoretically more important to me than anything else.
But disconnecting completely came with downsides. On weekends I felt like I was missing out on seeing friends unless I planned a rigid slate of activities in advance. I had to remind family members that an hours-long delay in response to texts or calls did not signify I had suffered a fatal injury. My boyfriend, hoping to gauge my availability to watch edifying documentaries in the evenings, resorted to relaying messages via my roommate. Anxiety about what awaited on my phone could itself become a distraction.
I had no appetite to exit society à la Thoreau. And my roommate didn’t want to be my unpaid amanuensis, so she bought me a vintage rotary telephone. The millennial pink phone signaled an old-school devotion to craft and an insouciant approach to the intractable dilemmas of modern life. I sheepishly Googled “how to use a rotary dial” and disseminated my new landline number to a small stable of friends and family. Within hours of activating the connection, I received my first spam call.
Still, I wrote more, and much more happily. Every day I guaranteed myself a few hours free of online slop while remaining available for what really mattered. I could make plans for the evening or even call a friend without sliding into an internet abyss. My word count went up, and I got a taste of what writers everywhere are seeking when they revive analog devices, or invest in digital fixes, or subscribe to screen time apps: a different kind of time, in which I felt simultaneously part of my world and free from the internet age’s destructive claims on my attention.
In recent years backlash against constant connectivity and omnipresent devices has become a cultural phenomenon. Scholars warn that social media companies are “fracking” human attention for profit. “Neo-Luddite” teenagers eschewing smartphones are reclaiming the moniker of the eighteenth-century British factory workers who smashed mechanized looms in protest of the Industrial Revolution. In 2024 a group of Harvard graduate students launched Appstinence, an organization that aims to counter “the moral degradation of an entire generation […] rooted in the normalization of addictive technology.” Smartphone alternatives like the Light Phone and the Minimal Phone have hit the market, while Nokias and other models from the dawn of cellphone technology are newly popular. On Instagram, influencers walk their followers through low-tech routines assisted by the Brick or the Unpluq, physical devices that hobble a smartphone’s distracting capabilities. This past summer a group of New York City organizers hosted the “Summer of Ludd,” a week of free programming including workshops on reducing dependence on big tech, fighting data centers, and flirting IRL.
Many anti-tech advocates are millennials, like me, or members of Gen Z. That’s probably not a coincidence: Those of us born with the flip phones that now personify vintage cool have entered adulthood in an era when nearly every interaction is mediated by an internet-connected device, but we can recall just enough of the supposedly halcyon time before to want it back. I don’t remember where I stowed my slide-out keyboard phone while I wrote my first short stories, because it offered little by way of distraction; nor was the family computer in my parents’ office an insurmountable draw. Today the conditions I once took for granted can only be re-created with great effort.
For writers who rely on computers with powerful word-processing and even more powerful distracting abilities, that effort seems increasingly worthwhile. Evan Ramzipoor, author of The Ventriloquists (Park Row Books, 2019), downloaded the app ScreenZen last year while feeling the urge to procrastinate on a difficult project. The app allows users to set hard limits on app time. Each day, Ramzipoor allows themself twenty-five Instagram minutes, which can be consumed in five-minute chunks. When unlocking Instagram, they first confront a Mary Oliver–inflected note to self: “Is this really how I want to spend my one wild and precious life?”
“Today, when I was going to tackle a difficult scene, my impulse was to check Instagram,” Ramzipoor says. “But when I saw I only have five Instagrams today—I’m not going to waste one on this moment of procrastination at 9 AM. I ended up having a pretty good writing session, whereas previously I might have sat and scrolled.”
To curb her social media consumption, writer M Lin uses Opal, a screen time app with several features, including the ability to block apps completely during preset hours. Lin, the author of The Memory Museum (Graywolf Press, 2026), uses a function that forces her to pause when unlocking Instagram. The length of the pause varies depending on the number of recent unlock attempts.
“If you haven’t unlocked anything for four hours, you wait ten or twenty seconds,” Lin says. “If you try to unlock something three times in an hour, the wait will increase to a hundred seconds.”
For Lin even the momentary pause can allay the itch to scroll. Other writers prefer the accoutrement of the pre-internet age. Sebastián Moya, a Brooklyn-based writer from Texas, writes at night, the only time he doesn’t feel “bombarded” by incoming communications or the pace of life in New York City. When his internet service provider was giving out free landline connections as part of a promotion, he bought a rotary phone much like mine to keep on his desk. These days he turns off his cellphone from about 11 PM to 4 in the morning. He likes knowing that he’s reachable in case of emergency and takes periodic breaks for ten-minute calls with friends that he finds restorative but not disruptive.
“We’re all looking for a way to sever ourselves from the hauntings of modern life,” he says. “That’s the only way I can connect to my work.”
August Lamm, author of the anti-tech manifesto You Don’t Need a Smartphone, which was published by Vintage Books in October, has taken the techless writing routine several steps further. Finding herself easily distracted by her computer even after downgrading to a flip phone, she ditched her laptop for a Smith Corona typewriter. Now Lamm writes first drafts by hand in a notebook before editing on a typewriter and then using a computer at the public library for final versions. The key to a smooth transition, she says, was investing in a pricey, well-restored typewriter, since most devices on the secondhand market haven’t been maintained or cared for since the machine went out of fashion.
“My process, from the outside, probably looks convoluted and tedious, but it actually takes less time than it took me to write something on a computer,” she says. “When I’m working on my writing, I’m only working on my writing.”
Indeed, many have turned to devices that offer word processing without online distractions. The Alphasmart, a portable keyboard that debuted in classrooms in 1993, allows users to view snippets of text on a tiny screen. Companies like Freewrite manufacture modern versions of standard typewriters and Alphasmarts that continuously sync to the cloud as users type.
The fiction writer Aisha Ali uses Freewrite’s Traveler, a portable digital typewriter. The size of a tablet with an e-ink display, it allows users to view slightly more text than the Alphasmart—about a paragraph at a time—while providing the same word-processing capacities. Ali bought the Traveler to use in coffee shops and other public places where she generally works. “I wanted something I could have on me at all times, without having to think about, ‘Am I going to take my backpack?’” she says.
Ali enjoys the freedom to use her Traveler without internet and see her word count as she works. But other aspects—like reviewing text she has just typed—have proved onerous. She still finds herself turning to more basic analog methods, like writing on a legal pad or editing longhand. “There was some wishful thinking—if I get this, the writing might be easier,” she says. “But that’s not necessarily the case.”
While my landline has helped me stay at my desk, I use a newer device—the Brick, which I admittedly learned about while aimlessly scrolling Instagram—to channel Luddite energy into my online hours. A magnetic square that lives on my fridge, the Brick blocks access to distracting apps (for me, social media and nonessential communications like email) when I tap my phone to it. I have to make contact with the physical object again to unlock the phone’s full capabilities.
I brick my phone when I’m out and about or relaxing after dinner, moments when I might want to listen to an audiobook or use Google Maps without also receiving a constant drip of marketing emails. Besides nudging me to actually read the books I pack for the subway, the routine has restored a little bit of the attention and focus I wistfully remember from my pre-smartphone years. Recently when I bricked my phone for an entire weekend, I found it much easier than usual to sit down at my desk and settle into my work.
Sometimes the tangible reminder that writing requires its own form of attention is all you need. Fed up with “apps on my phone that block other apps on my phone,” Avigayl Sharp bought an inexpensive iDiskk lockbox in 2023 while working on her novel, Offseason (Astra Publishing House, 2026). The lockbox allowed her to set a timer for a period during which she wanted the phone to be inaccessible. Sharp now locks her phone for four hours during writing days and says the device has become a key part of her writing practice, as both a tool and a “ritualistic gesture.”
“I’m so fond of it,” she says. “When I pull [the lockbox] out I have to enter the work in a serious way. I know that good things are going to happen—or, if not good things, something different from looking at my phone.”
Irene Connelly is a fiction writer and freelance critic from New Jersey. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in New York City.
