My partner Zac has had a dumbphone for a year now. He’d been wanting to give up smartphones for some time before he went away on holiday and had it stolen. This was the sign he needed: he bought himself a small Nokia the day after returning. “My smartphone had a hold on me that I really didn’t like; it felt like I was the product, and not my phone,” he told me—a feeling that’s all too familiar to smartphone users these days. He’s been much happier and more productive without it, and is probably one of the last 500 people in the world who still play Snake.

For the uninitiated (i.e., born this millennium), a ‘dumbphone’ is any mobile phone that’s designed for calls and texts and not much else. And even when you text, you don’t often have the full keyboard, so you have to press the buttons several times to land on the letter you want. In today’s context, it’s an ironic product of smartphone-era nomenclature—before smartphones, a dumbphone was just… a cell phone. Now, people are turning back to these rudimentary devices in the hope that they will save them from their brain-rotting, attention-sucking, so-called “smart” ones.

The brick-type Nokia that Zac owns has become the symbol of an anti-smartphone movement, which is just one arm of a wider impetus to reject convenience, unplug, disconnect, and go offline in general. And while there are other ways to achieve this—using screen-time limiting apps, for example, or deleting social media—the dumbphone has gone from a representation of technological obsolescence to a symbol of resistance and digital minimalism.

There’s a cultural seachange happening with regards to how we live with our devices. Everybody I know is out to reduce their screen time, although Zac is the only person I know who’s managed to give up the smartphone for good. Worldwide Google searches for “dumb phone” have quadrupled since January 2022, and searches for “digital detox” follow a very similar trajectory. Dumbphones are even making headlines, with “best dumbphones of 2026” articles appearing in major magazines and newspapers. Dumbphones do have other purchasing power—being disposable and untraceable makes them ideal for criminal activity, their simplicity makes them an accessible choice for older folk, and Hasidic Jews often use them to adhere to their own Rabbinical decrees against smartphones—but it’s impossible not to connect their rise to a deep and widespread desire to detox from the digital realm and the devices that connect us to it 24/7.

This desire is connected to a big change in the way these devices make us feel. Owning a smartphone used to feel good. Now, increasingly, it feels bad. It’s taken the best part of two decades—the iPhone turns 20 next year—for us to realize there’s a price to pay for having the online world at your fingertips.

The list of smartphone-induced emotional and cognitive defects is colossal. It includes impaired brain function, impulsivity, difficulty regulating emotions, addiction to social networking, shyness and low self-esteem, as well as medical issues like pain and migraines, sleep problems, bad eating habits. Excessive smartphone use has even been shown to reduce the brain's volume of gray matter. The joke that smartphones are making us dumber really is no joke: your cognitive capacity and overall brain power are significantly reduced when your smartphone is within glancing distance, even if it’s turned off and facing down.

Of course, these issues have everything to do with the choke-hold that companies like Meta have on the online world and thus our attention. The human race collectively spends 11.5 billion hours on social media platforms daily, and smartphones are, for most of us, the primary (if not only) way of accessing them. A small handful of platforms have monopoly access to our sources of information, communication, entertainment and networking; and the business models behind them require them to be addictive by design.

But the relationship between social media companies and the general public is at a breaking point. Just last month a jury in LA ruled that the Instagram and Youtube apps are deliberately engineered to be addictive, and that its owners have been negligent in their safeguarding practices. The tech giants behind these platforms must now pay $6 million in damages to one victim, although both companies are considering appealing the decision.

I don’t think it’s dramatic to say we’re being harvested, or used, by our ‘smart’ devices. Even the phrase ‘digital detox’ implies that a kind of digital binge is taking place, something intoxicating and damaging for the body and brain. It can be a genuinely dehumanizing experience; its trademark ‘doomscroll’ is characterized by zombie-like numbness and a lack of control. But a culture that’s buying back into analogue and taking big corporations to task on the damage they’re doing is one that’s had enough of that. We can see that smartphones, at their worst, pose a threat to what it means to be human: to be present in our lives, connected to each other and the world around us, and free.

Although the dumbphone crowd is still very niche—and there are admittedly questions around whether the profit margins are good enough for companies to keep producing them—it proves an appetite for a different direction. The breaking-point will be long, and we’ve got a complicated mixture of dopamine deficiency, addictive user interfaces, convenience, utility and FOMO to contend with before we land somewhere healthier as a collective. But this is a start. The stakes, all scientific literature suggests, are high. I’m just waiting for someone to steal my phone so I can join the movement.