BY KEITH PAUL MEDELIS

DECEMBER 26, 2021

I paid $675 to be forcefully disconnected from my phone for three days. I was joined by twenty other self-described digital addicts as we made a pilgrimage to an inn in the small New York corner of the Berkshires that would play host to a battle for our future selves—to remain controlled by our hyperconnectivity or to disconnect in order to reconnect with ourselves.

We had come to a digital detox retreat. In place of our devices, the retreat offered spirituality—daily yoga, vows of silence, and plant-based ayurvedic meals to heal our like addictions. As we arrived, we got in our last hits of digital dopamine. One woman looked for strength by texting with an ex whom she later described as asshole. Another wrestled with the decision to part with both her phone and her iPad—if she hid it in her room this would be the time to act. I paid an overdue rent payment then prepared myself for the oncoming void.

“The great switch off begins tonight,” said Doyal Gauranga, the spiritual leader who had come to cure us of our heathen technology addictions. When I first spotted him, he was copying the retreat schedule down into a notebook from a Google doc.

I had come when the news was dominated by the harms of Facebook and Instagram on our mental health. Internal documents from that multi-conglomerate connection corporation had shown what we all had suspected— our presence online, essentially a requirement of modern life, was hurting all of us—especially our young girls. Meanwhile, the world’s richest and most socially awkward social media tycoon wants us to go further into the metaverse of his creation. Maybe the answer was just to log off. Maybe Gauranga had the answers.

Gauranga, a former Hindu monk, had accumulated a decade of knowledge living in a monastery in India. He now leads retreats and runs workshops on spiritual life for The Bhakti Center, located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. We all had placed ourselves in his hands to guide us through our logging off journey.

In 2018, Marie Kondo encouraged us to reject what has served us well and put the rest into a perfect, plastic boxes. As minimalism became the currency of capitalism, digital culture piled on with its own solution to what ails us. Jaron Lanier, inventor of digital reality and research scientist for Microsoft, debuted his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. A digital detox camp, Camp Grounded, became wildly popular for the Silicon Valley working class tech bros. The adult summer camp in Mendocino County, California, allowed them to play archery, swim, and spend three nights in a shared cabin with bunkbeds for $350. For the truly elite, and for upwards of $2,500 for three nights, there were “glamping” excursions in Joshua Tree that advertised their prestigious lack of amenities along with their past celebrity guests like Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon.

Now, the connected masses want in on the privilege of disconnection. Getaway, a tech company that rents out off-the-grid cabins for boutique disconnected vacations within two hours of many major U.S. cities, is more than happy to provide. The company reported a 150% increase in bookings during our 2020 pandemic year and an expansion into five more cities bringing their total to 17. In an SEC filing from early 2021, the company reported it had raised $41.7 million, nearly doubling the amount they had raised in the previous five years combined.

Gauranga had rented out the Inn at Shaker Mill Falls for our journey. It was once a grist mill for the Shakers who lived in communal, equitable utopia while also spending hours twitching and jerking in chaotic dances that were meant to display their own spiritual devotion. We know them now as a minimalist arts and crafts furniture brand that sells for thousands of dollars in fancy shops. Their old mill shows its 197 years since the Shakers built the place. We were told that the flushing of the toilet in Room 5 will determine the success or failure of our entire weekend. Ladders, caution tape, and boxes of shingles indicate that the roof is in desperate need of repair. A repair man had come and never returned to complete the job. There is rain in the forecast.

We gathered to turn in our devices in the meditation room on the back of the inn. A plastic Trader Joe’s bag was revealed as their home during our detox. Gauranga sat enrobed behind in a coral-colored scarf behind a massive drum. Both secured his part as spiritual guide. “Breath something in through nose and out through the mouth,” Gauranga said, preparing us for their departure.

I followed the rest of the twenty participants and breathe in the aura of Gauranga’s zen spirituality—here to cure me of my phone—and breathe out panic. I breathe in disconnection and breathe out connection. Each of us then placed our devices into the bag one by one. The asshole ex was silenced. The woman with the additional iPad relented. My rent was paid.

The digital detox had begun.

• • •

My digital detox retreat comes after nearly two years spent staring down the barrel of Zoom. This was not my first attempt to create a more meaningful relationship with technology. It began with putting my phone in the living room at night. Then, deleting Facebook. Then, removing social media apps from my phone. Nothing helped. I then turned toward another strategy. To relinquish this holy device from my clutches, I would just change its function. I downloaded an app to make me meditate—Headspace. After begging me to pay after my free trial had expired, I moved to the free Breathing App. The Breathing App pulses in an expanding circle for the length of time it deems is the appropriate amount—10 seconds in and 10 seconds out. I wanted to exhale at 9 but had to obey anyway. 

The tech titans know that most us cannot afford the digital detox retreat and they are more than accommodating with apps to simulate a more everyday sense of disconnection. Novelty apps have come and gone. Siempo, an app for Android phones, converted the intoxicatingly bright colors of our phones to grayscale, fading them into uselessness. Space, in the Apple store, serves as a “rabbit hole” monitor—when it thinks you’re wandering too far from your original task, it slows your phone down to virtually useless. Siempo went offline this past August and Space had its last update in 2019.

But the guys behind the Light Phone had a totally different idea in mind—they wanted to bring to the market an entirely new product: the dumbphone. The dumbphone can make and receive calls. It can send and receive texts. And that’s about it. Any other features—a text-based mapping app, a calculator, and a podcast player have to be opted into by logging onto to their website. If the smartphone is the cause of the problem, buying a dumbphone might be the answer.

Joe Hollier, creator and CEO of the Light Phone, met me for coffee in a Bushwick café’s backyard. That day, construction frequently drowned out our conversation; winds of Styrofoam snow occasionally descended into our cups. Hollier was 27 when the Kickstarter launched. He is now a young-looking 33 with beautifully conditioned long hair.

Hollier set out to raise $200,000 and reached well over $400,000 in a Kickstarter campaign in 2017. The campaign announced the appeal of “going light” by shunning the endless possibilities of our smartphones. Hollier was pleased with the fundraiser but instantly needed millions to get their device shipped.

That plea was met by venture capital in excess of two million dollars—mostly from tech millionaires. Facebook’s former director of monetization and later president of Pinterest, Tim Kendall was one of those investors. They secured the rest from Biz Stone cofounder of Twitter, Scott Belsky the chief product officer of Adobe and the Creative Cloud’s executive vice president, and John Zimmer co-founder and president of Lyft.

What I came to understand from Hollier is that many users of the dumbphone were really just adding it to their exhausting device collection that were themselves the products of his investors. “There's a lot of self-identified minimalists that like the Light Phone but in a way, it can be the opposite of minimalism,” said Hollier as a gust of Styrofoam debris envelopes him.

He says his more hardcore, cold-turkey users include a porn addict who is trying to live a normal life, a teen girl suffering mental health issues from online hate, and that he has surprisingly strong sales amongst Mennonites. But more often than not, Hollier tells me that the Light Phone is just a total chick magnet. One guy intentionally left it out on the bar every night, inevitably striking up a conversation.

The Light Phone is self-consciously stupid. That the tech industry is interested in promoting it along with their shiny, miracle devices is worth a pause. There’s business in creating social stigma of connection.

The device looks like a tiny Kindle. It is the size of a credit card. The screen display is in electronic ink, or e-ink, that is entirely in grayscale. With every tap there is resistance and a small pulse followed by a delayed response of a fraction of second—an impossible length of time on a smartphone.

Hollier tells me that he’s been successful though isn’t forthcoming on how successful the thing actually is. What he does offer is that the original model sold somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 phones.

10,001 or 99,999? I asked.

His business partner doesn’t like him to say. But since we were seated at a café that seems near collapse and not a massive building in Silicon Valley, it’s safe to say Hollier’s phone is still niche.  He tells me that his users are mostly 25 to 45 years of age. They are computer savvy, creative, connected people.

As I check on the Light Phone’s website today, the phone is only available for pre-order but the newest model has been selling for over two years. It begins to feel like the prestigiousness of this stupid phone is part of the point. You want it but can’t have it. It will be the cure you need but for now you are stuck with your endless scroll.

• • •

The Romans popularized the use of scrolls—a roll of parchment that was long and written on from left to right. This inefficient way to keep records was replaced in the later Roman period by books, or codices, for ease of reference. Carbonized scrolls at Pompeii were deemed to be garbage in initial excavations until archeologists began to understand them as essential documents. Without the ability to un-scroll them, however, they are just sticks of charcoal. Scrolls, it turns out, suck for efficient record keeping. The Oxford English Dictionary records “scroll” used as a verb for the first time in English in 1606, meaning “to write down in a scroll”—or to scroll on a scroll—and later in 1868 to mean “to curl up”—to scroll on a scroll and then scroll it. When the verb of scroll comes into the primitive digital age of the 1970s, it became adopted to describe downward movement on a screen. That screen then became never-ending in our current digital era as we unfurl the web to see what message it contains. The “infinite scroll” suggests that there must be something, somewhere that we have yet to see further down that will give us the answer we are seeking. To scroll the Internet is to find meaning.

We spent the entirety of the following day of the digital detox retreat finding new meaning outside of our scrolls by practicing yoga, meditating, and in various states of vows of silence. In the evening, Gauranga conducted a kirtan that consists of singing the Hare Krishna mantra for hours. I had only been familiar with this from the guys in orange robes in Union Square that sing the mantra while selling books. But apparently this is taken quite seriously by Gauranga’s followers.

Hare Krishna, hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, hare, hare

Hare rama, hare rama, rama, rama, hare, hare

Gauranga describes the mantra as a spiritual alarm clock—to wake up our heart and devote it to the worship of Krishna. Because the mantra is song by the spiritual leader and we recite the same back to him, it is meant to communicate that when we are offered love, we should return it. These ceremonies in India can last for entire days to weeks. They involve fasting while dancing and repeating the mantra begging Krishna for love. Devotion is mutual if we want it badly enough.

As the kirtan continued for hours into the evening and the same three words were chanted over and over again, I began to wonder what new things could be found in these words. This kind of devotion began to feel like my endless scroll that I was attempting to escape back in my connected life. Most of the time, the mantra is tedious, rote. I mumbled it under my breath waiting for something to come over me. But after about an hour, I could only look around at others. One woman had thrown her arms up as tears streamed down her cheek. Another man had gotten up off the floor and was swinging his hips back and forth. Something about the mantra had moved him to get to this point. Just like a lovely text from an ex would send me aflutter. Just like a match on Tinder. Just like a retweet on Twitter. Just like a like.

The philosopher E.O. Wilson says that we are a species in transition. We are using our primitive brains to go up against medieval institutions with god-like technology in our hands. Simply, our brains are not wired to understand these miraculous and ubiquitous machines we have deemed essential. Marshall McLuhan, known as the “high-priest of pop culture” said in a 1969 interview with Playboy, “most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them.” He later warned of an oncoming “Narcissus narcosis” that could plague our society if we did not recon with understanding how these new technologies would affect us. McLuhan never saw the wonders of the modern Internet. Would that we still had his primary concern about “media.”

Not participating to my fullest in the kirtan began to feel like my life online. I needed to be a better activist by tweeting more. I needed to be a better friend by texting more. I needed to turn on read receipts. I needed to follow. I needed to like. At the spiritual digital detox, I needed to pray. I needed to chant. I needed to feel something in the same words repeated. If I hadn’t felt it yet I had to keep scrolling.

Our online lives, in Marxist terms, has made us the always-on means of production, enslaved to our owners. We turn toward the ideologies of religion and the gospel of our phones to provide meaning to that chaos. But there is a warning there too. “Religion,” Marx said, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” The only choice is to revolt. That revolution is not going to be purchased for $675 at a digital detox retreat.

That evening, as I sat over a bowl of unsalted broth after completing hours of kirtan training and spiritual devotion meant to cure me of my digital addictions, I wondered what curing I would need from this digital detox. If my brain cannot handle the speed of digital life or the wonders of Krishna, what hope do I have? It started to rain. All I can think about is Room Five’s toilet. I lie awake for hours wishing I could have Netflix lull me to sleep.

• • •

A new class divide has emerged. There are still some parts of the U.S. that remain disconnected but, assuming that the infrastructure bill takes shape, that gap will increasingly close. The divide now is pointed to by Alex Beattie, postdoctoral research fellow at the Victoria University in New Zealand, who studies all things disconnection. He says that a new era is upon us—those with unparalleled access to the Internet and ability to escape it and the rest of us that, “will remain lost in the digital noise, forever glued to their devices.” The new class divide will be the disconnected elites and the connected masses.

That those that work in tech—seemingly our most connected people—are increasingly finding themselves instead as disconnected elites is an important warning sign of where we are headed. Athena Chavarria, a former executive assistant at Facebook, forbid her children from having a smartphone until they were in high school. Chamath Palihapitiya, an ex-Facebook vice president in charge of growth later admitted that the company was destroying society and that his kids were “not allowed to touch this shit.” It’s the electromagnetic frequencies that the Internet gives off that has the 45-year-old retiree Jack Dorsey living his life as a hermit. He reportedly owns a $5,499 electromagnetic radiation blocking tent.

In July, Bella Hadid (47.4 million followers on Instagram) announced that she was dating a low-key, normcore person with a private Instagram account. How sexy. The disconnected elites aren’t concerned with needing to be online. What used to be the mark of the Internet’s most elite people—the influencers—are increasingly seen as a sign of weakness. The disconnected elites are cool enough to find that form of attention useless and far too attainable.

As the remote work trend grows, the connected class are becoming the modern proletariat. Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson write in Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, the desire for working remotely is an enticing one that should encourage every industry to rethink the notion of what an office should be. But the problem is that most employers are not that creative and are instead chaining their remote employees to productivity in an always-on work environment. A new ingenuity is required of employers in this new system to help their employees not feel oppressed by this hyperconnectivity—an optimistic prediction at best.

The problem of the right to disconnect has reached the highest levels of concern in Europe. In 2016, a French labor law was adopted declaring the workers’ right to be disconnected. The law states that disconnection is a human right. Workers have the right to avoid work calls and emails during their personal time. In response to the accelerated remote work brought on by the pandemic, the country issued a reminder to employers that they maintain the employees’ right to rest. “All rules regarding work time remain applicable,” a decree stated. “The distinction between work time and leisure time must be clear and guarantee the employees’ right to disconnect.”

Germany has a similar regulation imposed by some major employers like Volkswagen. In early 2021, the E.U. began to consider adding to its constitution disconnection as a human right. “Digital tools used to work have created the phenomena of always being connected and always-on culture, creating digital obesity,” said Alex Agius Saliba, a Maltese lawmaker who is leading the charge to fortify the workers right to disconnect. “We have a fundamental choice to make tomorrow. We either provide workers with the right to disconnect or turn our backs at them.”

• • •

The Trader Joe’s bag landed unceremoniously on the rug, carried by our leader and guru guide—their smooth and sleek corners beckoning us from inside their reusable plastic home. It was time to reclaim the holy objects we had spent so many hours previously revering.

“We will now seal the intention we have just set,” Gauranga said on the final day as he instructed us to deliver a word or two about our new found relationship to technology.

“Faith,” one said.

“Don’t let it control you,” said another.

“I’m not alone,” said another.

When all of the objects had been returned, they began to vibrate and pulse with excitement. Their high contrast colors and never-ending squares had returned. Our Screen Time had missed us.

I see a text from mom. A like from an ex. An email from my credit card company. Ahhh, the good stuff. Then someone opened a Macbook. It’s trademarked F-sharp major chord filled the room like magic.

“Om,” we all say in unison.

I kept the detox going for as long as possible.

But I still had remaining questions. So I went back to see Gauranga for an exit interview after several weeks away—now as a journalist in a connected world, with the ability to conduct a recorded interview on my phone. I could sense that Gauranga was skeptical of my presence at the retreat. Now would be the time to come clean and ask my tough questions. An email sent to Gauranga confirming a time to meet went unanswered so I just showed up to his six-story Hindu spiritualism palace on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

A sign read “Your Spiritual Home” on a locked front door. There was no buzzer but a number to call for deliveries. I called. No answer. I called again. A kind woman answered before quickly descending the stairs to greet me. She sends a WhatsApp message to Gauranga and before long he appeared from one of the floors above.

“May I hug you?” Gauranga said kindly. Of course, I said.

He takes me to the third-floor temple, a long, rectangular room with portraits of Krishna adorning the walls. A Square reader for donations stands by the doorway. “Every Thursday, we do kirtan in here,” he said—that magical ceremony I had become suspicious of in our time spent in the throes of its repetitive mantras.

He gestures for us to sit down on opposing sofas, looking directly at one another. It feels like a confrontation though I’m not sure who is doing the confronting. I ask Gauranga to reflect on the retreat. This is the second digital detox he has offered and he tells me that he wants to host them regularly. “At least once a year if not multiple times a year,” he said with a smile like an used car salesman talking about the disconnection business.

“You go in thinking this is going to change the whole way you interface with technology,” he said. “It doesn’t take more than a day or two. You’re just right back in there.” A solid business plan to keep the customers coming.

I think, is he just as addicted as I am? Have we just spent hundreds of dollars to cure ourselves but instead shifted our devotion to technology—to a devotion of Krishna—or worse to our spiritual leader?

“The idea of being devoted is a natural inclination of the soul. It's where we find fulfillment,” he said. “I think the real question is: am I intentional about where I offer my devotion?”

Are people devoted to you, I asked.

“I hope not,” he said.

A priest walks by in beige colored robes. “I am devoted to you,” the priest said. They laugh.

I then want to ask about those kirtans. I ask what he feels as he leads them. Is he in the throes of ecstasy by showing his undying love to Krishna for hours, repeating the manta, with his devotees hanging on every note.

“I feel extraordinary smallness and at the same time grandness,” he said. “It feels whole. It feels complete.”

“It feels connected.”

We paused. Now I was left with more confusion than I came to the retreat with. Am I meant to be connected or disconnected? It was clear that there would be no answers for me here. I glanced around the room at the paintings of Krishna. I scrolled on my phone. I stared out the window at a crisp, bright sky. I breathe something in through the nose and out through the mouth.

He paused our interview to look at his phone. “Hold on, this is my wife. Let me just make sure she’s ok,” he said.

• • •

Photos and text by Keith Paul Medelis