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 Public Space—& resources for reorienting yourself towards secure, preferred tech tools. See for yourself; check out the archive.
Run through a custom site and Buttondown emails, this is all done without any data-farming middlemen. We're moving on from old platform ecosystems.
Beyond those ecosystems, independent newsletters like this one depend on reader support. Your donation covers technical costs, the (human, not AI) work of curating events, and future print guidebooks.
- friends hanging out
- a glimpse at a new way to arrange society. not the only way, just another way.
- 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 status quo is teetering and with enough movement any movement we can topple it
- dreams we might share together
- a step towards a new paradigm—where our society celebrates its complexity, dances its way to widescale participation, to jobs, inventions, agency en masse
- a civic tool because group attention is activism—we share a reality again
- spaces to exhale, where presence and experimentation supplant likes and followers
- a squint towards a global view: luddite artists roam around Public Space with poetry & puppets—inventors decry a society run solely on databases—groups move to homegrown tech spaces, invite subway people to parties, get unique 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