NYC Off Tech is a bi-weekly bulletin for New Yorkers to leave big tech behind. It's a collection of events that bond strangers, exercise our attention, & create new avenues for creative exchange. Each letter we send is an invitation to collective action—a guide to shift your gravity into the streets—& resources for reorienting yourself towards private, preferred tech tools.
Run through a custom site and Buttondown emails, this is all done without any data-farming middlemen. We're truly moving on from old platform ecosystems.
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- friends hanging out
- a snapshot of society rearranging to save itself maybe it always does
- a personal invite for you to exercise your own vision onto the world
- infraculture
- a mess because you need mess first to find things
- a guy urging you to get off your phone & to trust that if you just do something random in the city right now it will matter because we're in a unique moment where the current paradigm is teetering and with enough movement any movement we can topple it
- a political tool because using our attention is activism we get our brains back because gathering offline is activism they can't track that
- a squint towards a global view: luddite artists roam around public space with poetry & puppets—political types decry a society run on databases—groups move to private emails together, invite subway people to parties, get flip phones, make new rituals of attention
I PUT ALL MY FRIENDS' EVENTS ON A CALENDAR & emailed everyone I knew, because who doesn't want to get off their phone for real, to spend hours in group flow, to see inside jokes and shared ideas supplant slop feeds. Firsthand I saw these were places to learn to trust a stranger—to bond over attention to the body, the searching mind, the unpredictability of each other—
Hanging out with offline organizers & Luddite artists, nonprofits & lobbyists, low-tech startups & rogue coders, I noticed something. A sudden gust, & we started shaking loose from old thoughts & old habits—& more than that, for the first time in our lives we could believe in new paths emerging.
A month in & two emails out—October 2025—the event people crosspollinated. Hosts started sharing space & ideas, & working together in free & public actions—inviting participation in all sorts of ways, pulling strangers from the street in earnest, into quiet reflections & parties—talking about how done they are with the heavy-smartphone life, then doing something about it right here & now.
No month is the same because we are growing more present—responding to what we see fit as we see it—media pushback begets a dumbphone debate; a need to dance arises, so no-phone nightlife; reckless founders want attention, so we show them real-life friends soapboxing their true feelings.
Attend to the breadth of this awakening—the so-many ways people are meeting this moment. See what happens when we keep weaving.
Off Tech Means No Phoneys