take me back where the sun shines

I threw a phone-free, analog event in SF

Weaving through the Presidio on the 43 bus, I can’t unsee it. Golden hour has sprung and the sun’s setting, spraying stripes of reds and purples on our overhead canvas. The trees are humming in unison. The birds are chirping along. We’re slaloming through the most beautiful part of San Francisco. And nobody’s looking outside. Not even me.

Our necks are hunched forty-three degrees downwards, eyes gripped on screens. Beside me, a guy in cargo pants swipes through his daily bread of YouTube Shorts. He half-gazes through the latest lemony-garlicky-miso-gochujang one-pan pasta from the New York Times. Reduce the sauce until it coats…aand he swipes up before the final reveal. Thirty seconds is too much to spare in this economy.

His next treat: a travel influencer shows him a destination bedazzled with pristine blue waters, bronze-kissed skin, and glistening beach sand. Her video has twenty-two million views but she swears this is Europe’s best-kept secret. Speaking in the signature social media tone and cadence that makes it seem like you’re listening to a friend, she’s selling him “Croatia” on an “Albania” budget. He watches every last second.

All this time, nature is painting her masterpiece outside. And we’re not looking. Because everything we could ever want is sitting in our palms. I am the same as CargoPantsMan. We all have our signature poisons. I’m a sucker for this guy who cooks staples from countries that no longer exist. I love videos of men and women starting fires outside, roasting whole pigs outdoors, and eating with their families.

I love seeing people pluck herbs from their home gardens, pickling vegetables I can’t recognize, vegan-this-vegan-that, and eating tons of tinned fish. Every week, I might as well write a check to YouTube for the hours I’m gonna donate to them. But like you, I feel the effects of short-form invading all the spaces of my life.

Sitting outside on a wooden bench at a warmly lit wine bar in North Beach decorated with all my friends, we’re people watching, we’re gazing and giggling away. Laughter is overflowing. Chilled ice buckets drip slow as they lubricate the evening. When one wine bottle runs empty, another is swiftly recruited. A king’s platter of accompanying cheeses and figgedy figs amouse our bouches. We’re dancing, we’re slapping shoulders, we’re watching the sun set. Enveloped in this warm, wonderful moment, I couldn’t ask for more. So why, please tell me why, do in this moment, feel a physical nudge in my body, telling me to open YouTube?

Who programmed me this way? What could I possibly be searching for? If there’s no answer, then why do I do it?

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I’ve been frustrated with my phone usage for years. This year, I started fighting back with phone-free walks and grocery runs. Navigating the frozen goods aisle of Trader Joes without Scott Galloway ranting in my headphones has been tough but I’m surviving. My phone has lived on grayscale and DND for nearly two months, and aside from when someone sends me a meme or picture, it’s been great. But memes are never urgent and when I eventually see them in color, they’re still funny. And when I’m really feeling adventurous, I just leave my phone at home, especially on Saturday mornings and afternoons when I’m hanging with friends for hours.

I wish we had more explicitly phone-free spaces: restaurants, cafes, and bars. Places where people can connect face-to-face without screens getting in the way. Spaces where we can exist and be enough without needing to document or memorialize beautiful experiences. Two weeks ago, I made this dream come true:

I threw an analog, phone-free event in SF for 35 people
in a photography studio in the Mission fitted out with six interactive stations and copious amounts of wine.

Guests were encouraged (bribed?) to deposit their phones into little velvet pouches¹, and to thank them for complying, I gifted small sachets of East Mediterranean spice from OakTown Spice Shop². I designed the stations to elicit conversation between people. The first station was the “caption station”, I printed out six funny A3-sized pictures of my friends. Guests were asked to write funny captions. The funniest four went on to win self-care prizes: a matcha set, artisanal honey, a purple soap collection.

I designed a postcard station fitted with beautiful vintage postcards like this:

and guests were invited to hand-write messages to people they missed: a friend, a family member, a crush, or an old teacher! And I provided stamps so they could actually send them! No excuses! None of that internet stuff where you passively watch someone’s IG stories for years and never say a thing. Grab a pen, let your hand touch paper, craft your message, cross your t’s, elongate your l’s, and write some real words to somebody!

The “instant film” station invited guests to capture a fleeting, imperfect moment from the evening. No retakes. No redos. Just a moment in time.

phones were banned so we took some film photos

I performed readings of my spoken word from unreleased pieces I’ve been working on all year. “The meals that stay home when immigrants depart” opens with me scrolling Doordash on my living room rug wondering why some delicious, ethnic meals fail to cross the Pacific. In “don’t you dare touch my nutmeg”, I experiment with a musical style of writing to celebrate a few scenes from the history of nutmeg, a seed with an explosive history and more thrills and suspense than Game of Thrones.

“Authentic is a fictional point on a curve” reads like an essay, but it’s really a song. It travels around the world and in time, asking what we mean by
”authentic” food”? Is it about ingredients or technique or posture with which we eat?

Our dream station asked people to think of something they’ve always wanted to do and share with a stranger:

I curated vintage magazine poster cut-outs from Etsy and created a collage pairing them with printed excerpts of my poetry and snippets from other artists I admire. We hoisted up a huge canvas for everyone to paint on it—in many ways the canvas served as a living metaphor for the event itself as it emerged over time.

Because it’s San Francisco, I had a “ponder station” for people who wanted to chat a little deeper. I printed out this famous DFW quote:

Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.

David Foster Wallace (1996)

and asked people to discuss what it means given the state of the world today and how AI might affect this trajectory? Given attention spans are already in the gutter, and we lose too many hours to hyper-personalized videos, do we like where we’re heading? Is that utopia or do we dream of something different? And in that place, how do people gather, and how do they spend their time?

My thesis remains that all the present and upcoming AI, all the chatbots, all the overbearing phones will push us to yearn for the analog. We will see more offline experiences, more digital detoxes, and more expressions of authentic connection without screens.

To that end, I’m planning more events—one likely in NYC in February, and more in SF next year. I’ll keep you all posted.

1. I was worried people would feel uncomfortable with this suggestion because it might feel too paternalistic. But I was pleasantly surprised with the response. People understood the intention perfectly and just placed their phones away.

2. The very kind people at OakTown Spice Shop donated a ton of spice samples for the event. I sent a cold email asking to collaborate and they just said yes? Crazy what happens when you just ask for things…