That advice to "Eat UR Phone" comes from the Lamp Club, which The New York Times describes as "part of a growing ecosystem of 'neo-Luddite' groups across the country that encourage people to transform their relationship to technology. Other groups include the Luddite Club, APPstinence and Breaking the (G)Loom — organizations that, for the most part, were started not by parents wishing their teens would get off their devices but by the teens themselves, who fault phones for fraying human connections as well as accelerating inequality and climate change."
If you'd like to follow up (and if The Times' paywall policies permit), you can get additional information about these "non-Luddite" groups from an article authored by T.M. Brown, and published in The Times on October 30, 2025. Online, the title of Brown's article is, "They’ve Come to Free ‘the iPad Babies.’ I have learned from the article that there are now more than two dozen Luddite Clubs in North America, from Ithaca, N.Y., to Irvine, California.
Those who read my blog on any sort of a regular basis (and I certainly do encourage that) will know of my personal skepticism and distrust of some of our most modern technologies - so-called "artificial intelligence" definitely being included. For about ten years, I taught a course at the University of California at Santa Cruz called, "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom." The basic idea of the course was to get students (persons whom Brown apparently calls the "iPad Babies"), to think about whether "technology" is going to result not only in a loss of "privacy," but also in a loss of "freedom." I admit to being happy to learn that some young people are spontaneously starting to question where our modern technologies are taking us (and without the benefit of some aging, adjunct professor telling them there's a problem).
Want to think some more about this topic? Here's another article worth reading (paywalls permitting, of course): "Brave New World Dept.: Information Overload - Inside The Data Centers That Train A.I. And Drain The Electrical Grid." The article is by Stephen Witt, and it appeared in the November 3, 2025, edition of The New Yorker. Witt's article describes where we are, and where we seem to be going, with respect to the construction of mammoth "data centers." Consider Witt's New Yorker article an extensive followup to my blog posting yesterday, but note, too, that our concerns should not be limited to the finite nature of the water and other resources that are being diverted to support data centers. Ultimately, it is the nature of our human reality that is really at stake, as Witt makes clear in this ending to his article:
Robots are everywhere in China. I saw them stocking shelves and cleaning floors at a mall. When I ordered food to my hotel room, it was delivered by a two-foot-tall wheeled robot in the shape of a trash can, with the voice of a child. I opened my door, nonplussed, to find it standing in front of me, decorated with an ersatz butler’s outfit and chirping in Mandarin. A hatch on the front of the robot popped open, and a tray of noodles slid out. The machine chirped again. I took my food, the hatch closed, and the robot wheeled away. I stood there for a time, holding the tray, wondering if I would ever talk to a human again.
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