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 bottom, I agreed to “forego” the use of my smartphone for 30 days and thereby “trade dopamine for daylight, doomscrolls for detours, pixels for paper maps.”The other members of my cohort, who would meet on Monday nights in a still-semi-industrial corner of Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood (near a soup factory), were mostly women, mostly in their late 20s or early 30s.

They had heard about Month Offline from a friend, or they had seen a wheat-paste flyer (Flip Off!) on the street, or, in at least one case, they had come across a post about MO on the party-planning app Partiful, which is where this person did their scrolling after having deleted all other forms of social media from their phone. Several people in our group had full-time jobs in technology, and nobody I spoke with considered themselves to be “anti-tech.” But they all felt like smartphone use was costing them hours of free time every day, access to stores of creativity, and opportunities for adventure and friendship in the great city of New York.One salve for these anxieties could be a different kind of phone.

Month Offline has spun off a tiny start-up, dumb.co, that sells the sort of flip phones that you might want to use when your iPhone has been hidden in a cardboard box. Their design is more than just a relic from the aughts. It’s a relic from the aughts that has been kitted out with a custom operating system designed by a former Washington Post software engineer named Jack Nugent.

You can pair a dumb.co flip phone with your smartphone through an app called Dumb Down, such that your normal calls and text messages are forwarded to your dumb.co number. (Many of the numbers in my cohort had the Atlanta area code 404, as a joke about going offline.) Nugent’s system also comes with scaled-down versions of Uber, WhatsApp, Google Maps, and Microsoft Authenticator. “Before this device, a lot of people would say something like, I wish I could use a dumbphone, but I need X,Y,Z,” he told me. So he started adding X and Y and Z.

The next version of the flip phone will allow for music streaming and include the retro phone game Snake. Nugent said he drew a hard line at email, though—the dumb.co flip phone will never have email.For several weeks I took my dumbphone everywhere I went, and for several weeks strangers asked about it. Even people who did not seem like they would hang out in semi-industrial Bushwick were intrigued.

One evening in lower Manhattan, a polished-looking man who had just been talking with someone else about his job in finance turned and saw my flip phone sitting on the bar. His face lit up. He wanted to know where I’d gotten it, and said that he’d been thinking about getting one too.

A spirit of dumbphone curiosity seemed to be all around me.Clearly, one of the flip phone’s thrills is that it flips. It flips, and the feeling of its flipping is neat and familiar. For people of my cohort’s age (and mine), it’s a reminder of our first phones, which were amazing devices that conferred agency, independence, and the possibility of receiving secret messages from a crush.

It’s nice to have a flip phone again.Month Offline leans into this feeling of nostalgia. At my second weekly meeting, my fellow travelers and I had the thrill of our lives decorating our new flip phones with stickers, just as we might have done in 2007. I added one baseball sticker to the front of my phone and one to the back, but some others created intricate patterns with rhinestones.

The get-togethers were heavy on crafts; we often expressed ourselves through crayon. At the end of each meeting, we received a gift to help us get through the next week in an ever more analog fashion—a disposable camera, a book of crossword puzzles, a compass on a carabiner.A key concept, discussed every week, was that of “friction”—or the specific discomfort we were feeling whenever we ran up against our reliance on our boxed-up smartphones. One week, we used the crayons to draw a “moment of friction,” and most people