On Friday, April 11, about a dozen students gathered on the patio of Pratt House, next to the labyrinth, beneath the rustling trees. Not a single smartphone was in sight. It was the first meeting of the Vassar Luddite Club, a new organization seeking to provide a community space that is entirely technology-free. Its four founders—Thomas Rombauch ’25, Jane Hurley ’27, Libby Surgent ’27 and George Truax ’27—have all foregone their smartphones for old-school flip phones, rebuking the influence that the digital world increasingly has over our everyday lives. An important aside: students do not need to own a flip phone to join the club.
The group gathers weekly on Friday afternoons. Meetings are built around conversation, in many cases surrounding a shared sense of disillusionment with the impact that technology has on everyday life. At a recent meeting, attendees were encouraged to bring something to read aloud: poems, excerpts, song lyrics, the back of a soda can, a memorable email or text message.
I spoke to Audrey Miller ’27, a club member who has had a flip phone since October and plans to keep it for as long as she can. She says that for her, the costs of having a smartphone outweighed the pros. “With your phone, it’s not like—it’s not a tool anymore, we don’t use it as that. Maybe 10 percent of the time we use it as a tool; but the other 90 percent is distraction, and it’s just taking your attention.”
“I thought I was the only one [at Vassar] who had a flip phone or was really feeling this way and really wanted to do something about it,” she says. “I felt so relieved after going to the first meeting.”
Vassar’s is one of a growing number of Luddite clubs nationwide. The movement started with a group of Brooklyn teens that became the subject of a viral New York Times article documenting their shared effort to unplug from technology. The founder of that group, Logan Lane, now at Oberlin College, has gone on to form a network of clubs based in high schools and colleges across the country and world.
The club is named after the 19th-century Luddite movement, when British textile workers organized armed raids against the rapidly-expanding factories and industrial machinery that had taken their jobs and pushed many into poverty. These strikes happened during a time of great political upheaval—and certainly, parallels do exist between their time and ours, with rapid technological change causing widespread harm.
In 2021, a whistleblower revealed that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, conducted and suppressed internal research that found Instagram to pose a significant mental health issue to its users. The company currently faces a lawsuit filed by a coalition of 32 states accusing the company of concealing the “substantial dangers” of its platforms, as scientific research continues to highlight the ubiquity of smartphone addiction in general and its negative impact on mental health.
None of this is new knowledge, though. We have all grown up hearing “phones are bad” rhetoric spewed at us from every angle, so much that—for me at least—it has become a given. And no matter what we are told, or what the facts show, the appeals—instant gratification, unprecedented connectivity—seem too great to give up.
But what have we lost? “Something that really bugs me,” says Ava Whitney ’27, a curious non-Luddite Club member, “is when I’m trying to spend quality time with my friends and they’re on their phones the whole time. I think it’s just kind of disrespectful to that interaction that, like… you want to give your attention to this little rectangle screen more than you want to give to our friendship and connection.”
Miller expressed a similar sentiment: “You know when you go outside on campus, and you look around, and everyone’s looking down at their phones? And it’s… it’s depressing. Everyone has their headphones on, and everyone’s looking at their phone… Thomas [a co-founder of the club] called these people ‘phone zombies,’ and I think he’s really right.”
She was not entirely critical, though. “Do I like it? No, but I get it. Especially in our generation… It’s really, just, it’s a part of our culture to be honest,” she responded when asked about our generation’s relationship with technology.
“In some ways, I think it’s great,” she admits. “In some ways I think it can really serve as a space where people can find community that they can’t necessarily find in the physical space that they’re in. But, at the same time, that online space can feel so superficial.”
People at Vassar and elsewhere, though, are finding ways out of that superficiality. Whitney says that two of her best friends from home recently decided to ditch their phones. “I’ve found it really hard to be able to stay in touch with them in the ways that I want to,” she says, “because it’s just a different way of communicating. But if you think about it, for, like, so many generations, people just had to communicate with each other in different ways—and now I can write them emails and letters, and we can have calls on an actual phone, and it just makes the time that we can connect even more special, so I’ve definitely learned to adapt to that.”
The rise of Luddite clubs across the country, including at Vassar, certainly suggests that, at least for some, rethinking the ways they interface with technology can have profound and positive effects.
Miller recalls the moment that led to her ditching her smartphone. Her old iPhone had broken, leaving her for a few days without a phone at all. She used her roommate’s phone to contact her family: “I remember I called my mom, and I was like, I’m literally just feeling so good. Like, I don’t want a phone again. I feel so much lighter and I feel more in control… Not having that obligation tied to you is so nice.”
In the months that she has gone without a smartphone, Miller has never missed it. “My [experiences] feel more solid,” Miller says, “and I live inside them—instead of hovering on the outside, trying to capture them.”
Other students, while not getting rid of their phones entirely, have begun to be more critical of their usage. Whitney says she tries to stay off Instagram, deleting the app and only accessing the site on her phone’s browser.
“I think as a generation,” Whitney remarks, “we can all come together to be transparent and open about how this is affecting us. And, there’s a lot of different ways to do that, that work for different people. Maybe ditching your phone completely if you really want to send it. Or just, like, trying to set limits. Or just even, having open conversations about it instead of… just taking it for granted that this is the way that technology is now. Because it doesn’t have to be, and, in fact, it shouldn’t be.”
Vassar’s Luddite Club is certainly not advocating mass iPhone destruction—but it has opened up a new kind of public conversation on campus, open to any student that wants to further investigate their relationship with technology. Miller comments: “It’s really great, there’s a lot of meaningful conversation. It’s a group of people seeking authentic human connection, so yeah… it’s really wholesome, it’s really grounding, it’s really present… and fun.”
She hopes that the club will continue to grow and that it will help more people question the role that tech plays in their lives. “We always joke about it, like, oh, I’m going to go home and bed-rot, and just scroll on my phone, or I’m going to go sit on the toilet and watch Reels, like… okay, we all joke about it, but do you want to do something about it?”
Clearly, some Vassar students are beginning to do just that.
I am Vassar ’80 and am surprised and encouraged by the wisdom shown in this article. Thinking critically about tech advances and impact on lives and society is so important. People who rely on their own mental acuity instead of devices are investing in themselves in ways not yet appreciated fully.