For the past few months, a shadowy company called Dumb and Co. has been convincing people in Washington, DC, to ditch their smartphones for a month. It’s part of a project called Month Offline, where participants get a flip phone and access to a support group to talk about algorithms, doomscrolling, and why smartphones make us feel so lonely.

This isn’t just another digital detox retreat. To me, it sounds more like a hip social club. The home base is a bar called Hush Harbor, the first phone-free bar in DC, and early on, the experience of joining involved calling a 1-800 number and leaving a voicemail application.

The local movement is going national. There’s now a website and an option to join a cohort from anywhere in the United States. For $100, you get the Dumb Phone 1, which is really just a TCL flip phone; a new phone number with a 404 area code; and a curriculum of sorts to guide you through the month. There are also weekly dial-in radio programs that take the place of the in-person meetings. It all smacks of the same nostalgia that led to the resurgence of CDs and the return of compact digital cameras. The idea of a piece of technology that does one thing and does not take over our entire attention span is appealing.

“The phone certainly amplifies some of our avoidant tendencies,” said Grant Besner, one of the co-founders of Month Offline. “Just replacing it even for a little bit and needing to sit with your own thoughts to be bored can be a transformative and really positive experience in someone’s life.”

Month Offline is part of a new generation of solutions to your smartphone-addled existence. These include carefully designed smartphone alternatives, like the Light Phone 3. There’s also the Brick, an NFC-enabled magnet that blocks access to certain apps when you tap your phone against it. You can........

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