Program: 05 | Brain Rot: Meet the people who ditched their smartphones. Is it worth it?

Ange Lavoipierre: Where's the last place you went that your phone couldn't come?

Stan Awtrey: They tell people, leave your mobile phones in your car, don't bring them on the property. Because what will happen is if they find you with one, whether you're using it or if it's in your pocket, they will escort you from their premises, take away your badge. I mean, it is that strict.

Ange Lavoipierre: It's not a maximum security prison.

Stan Awtrey: And I've had friends and colleagues make a mistake of walking out with a cell phone and getting caught.

Ange Lavoipierre: And it's not the White House Situation Room.

Stan Awtrey: One guy was banned for two years because of what he did.

Ange Lavoipierre: Or a meditation retreat. But we're getting warmer.

Stan Awtrey: Some people have described going to the Masters as almost a spiritual experience. And I think that's true for the most part. Woo! It's interesting to be in a large crowd of people and no one has their cell phones because the people are actually watching the golf and they're staying in the moment. And that's very rare and unusual these days.

Ange Lavoipierre: It takes dedication to be a spectator at the US Golf Masters in Augusta, Georgia. Every April, thousands of golf enthusiasts make the trade. Your phone for uninterrupted golf.

Stan Awtrey: You can just kind of be quiet, pay attention and watch. Keep the memories, make the memories and keep them in your brain for a change.

Ange Lavoipierre: That tournament has had a no phones policy in place since before smartphones were invented. It just goes to show that sometimes if you stand still long enough, the zeitgeist comes to you. Because in 2025, more and more people seem to be fantasising about a life off the grid.

Vox Pop: I can definitely live without internet. I want to so bad. I've tried to a lot and then I'll get all my friends' numbers and text them instead. But you just, like, you fall out socially so quickly.

Ange Lavoipierre: Today, we meet the people who aren't just fantasising about it, they're going through with it.

Jameson Butler: Having a flip phone in 2025 definitely does make my life harder in some aspects. But honestly, since I've gotten rid of my smartphone, I'm more on top of everything. I've become a lot less scatterbrained.

Ange Lavoipierre: I'm Ange Lavoipierre, the ABC's national technology reporter. And this is Brain Rot, a series from Science Friction about how tech is changing our brains. 

In our final episode, you'll hear from the people and entire communities who are so keen to avoid those changes that they've noped out of smartphones altogether, maybe for good.

Jameson Butler: We realised that the hardest part about making that transition is the feelings of isolation that come with it and a lack of community. So we decided that we wanted to create a community of like-minded people.

Ange Lavoipierre: So what is it like to make the switch? Can governments make the switch for us? And at the end of the day, is it worth it?

(Music)

If you drive about 45 minutes south from central Paris, past the fringes of the city, you'll find a 12th century village nestled on the banks of the Seine River.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): So my name is Vincent, that's my first name, Paul Petit, and that's my last name. And I am the mayor of the commune, of the commune in France, a commune of 2,000 inhabitants in Seine-Port.

Ange Lavoipierre: If you're picturing the village from the movie Chocolat, you're not far off. Saint-Paul is full of old stone buildings and churches. There's a horse-riding school, a meditation centre, a fishing club and a creperie.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): It's a life of... it's a village life. I see my job as mayor as managing the city, of course, but also taking new initiatives to transform social life, to improve social life, so that there develops a solidarity.

Ange Lavoipierre: But no matter how picturesque the location, there's no escaping smartphones. And Vincent Paul Petit is not a fan.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): In front of schools, it's terrible. Parents don't talk to each other anymore. They're all glued to their screens. There are some who walk down the street to watch their favourite series, and then in gathering places, it's still sad to see that natural, spontaneous exchange no longer exists or is damaged at the very least.

Ange Lavoipierre: So a few years ago, he came up with a somewhat radical proposal.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): I announced it in June 2023 at the school fair, since I still saw many, many children staring at their smartphones in the street or everywhere. I announced that we were going to ban screens, the use of smartphones in public spaces, in the town. It was a form of provocation to help everyone wake up to this social issue, which is a huge issue, a huge social difficulty.

Ange Lavoipierre: It was decided the town should vote on it, and at the beginning of 2024, after some debate, Seine-Port’s smartphone ban was passed, with 54% of people voting in favour. That meant no scrolling outside the school gates, in parks, on footpaths, and certainly not in the creperie.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): The shopkeepers are very happy with the progress we've felt in the town. They've all put a sticker inside their stores, a big sticker saying, screen-free spaces, smartphone-free spaces. So the impact has been quite clear. They appreciate being able to interact with their customers. People laugh at the mayor who arrives and says, hide your phone, the mayor is coming. That's the side of it. Well, it's really rather amusing.

Ange Lavoipierre: There's one problem, though. It turns out the ban wasn't strictly legal.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): Well, officially, it's not completely official, all that, because, well, from a legal point of view, it's quite weak, because the mayor doesn't have the power to prohibit the use of a telephone, a smartphone in the street, in your town. I know that.

Ange Lavoipierre: So the ban was wound back slightly. It's now referred to as a guideline or a charter, because 54% might be a majority, but it's only a slim one.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): There are people who also didn't agree with this measure. You know, I've heard that I'm against freedoms. So it's a criticism, which I understand, but which is obviously paradoxical. Yes, banning the use of a device in public spaces or for young people is reducing their freedom. You could say that. We can also say that spending eight or 10 hours a day behind a screen is against freedoms.

Ange Lavoipierre: Despite the fact that his ban turned out to be less of a ban-ban and more of a ban-vibe, he's convinced it's made a real difference.

Vincent Paul-Petit (Translation): What matters is that people have adopted this charter and they themselves believe that we need to stop. Objectively, people talk to each other more. In front of schools, at the school gates, I don't see smartphones anymore. You know, I'm from a community of 2,000 inhabitants who wanted to live better together. I've had, I think, roughly 350 to 400 interviews around the world, half in France, half in the rest of the world. So we're touching on something that's absolutely central to our lives.

Ange Lavoipierre: Vincent Paul Petit isn't the first political leader who's tried prying people away from their screens using the legal instruments of government. The bigger question is whether laws and statutes are the best way to go about it. And Australia is about to find out.

Radio Announcer (Archive): On today's program, the Parliament passes legislation banning under-16s from using social media.

Ange Lavoipierre: From December this year, Australians younger than 16 will, at least in theory, be banned from most of the world's major social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Anthony Albanese (Archive): Social media is doing harm to our kids, and I'm calling time on it. And I want Australian parents and families to know that the government has your back.

Ange Lavoipierre: The ban passed Parliament late last year on a wave of public enthusiasm, but the policy has always had its sceptics.

Lisa Given: It had bipartisan support, and certainly the percentage of parents and other adults were saying, we want this legislation, mainly because Australians are struggling with inappropriate content online. My worry is that most Australians likely did not read the fine print or understand exactly what the limitations of the legislation were when we were having those discussions.

Ange Lavoipierre: Lisa Given is a professor of information sciences at RMIT University, and one of many experts who oppose the policy. 

Lisa Given: We certainly at the time saw, you know, about 140 experts sign an open letter saying that the social media ban was not the solution. You know, many people are expecting that this will keep kids safe. At the end of the day, the only way to do that is really to address inappropriate content at source. This legislation does not deal with the content. It does not hold tech companies to account in that way.

Ange Lavoipierre: She, like a lot of experts, has a long list of doubts about this policy. They're worried about whether the right tech to pull this off even exists yet, what asking 20-something million Australians to prove their age could mean for their privacy, and how well it'll actually work.

Lisa Given: There are flaws on either side, and so we are going to see kind of a messy situation emerging immediately where people, you know, will have what they call false positives, false negatives. And if we now introduce another layer of inappropriate guessing of people's ages and potentially locking out older teens when they should have access, as well as the introduction of workarounds, VPNs, and even just getting access through older siblings or friends or other ways that people have often found their way into material that was not age-appropriate, at the end of the day, it's not going to achieve what the government had hoped it would achieve.

Ange Lavoipierre: Even if the ban works perfectly, it's built on a largely unproven assumption because there is ongoing debate in the scientific community about how much harm smartphones and social media are actually responsible for. There's plenty of evidence linking excessive phone use to worse outcomes to do with attention, mood disorders, social isolation, just to name a few. But the proof that it's actually causing those problems is harder to come by. Still, on some level, people do seem to want to get away from their tech.

Vox Pop: To be able to log off and live without any other stimulation is almost a privilege, I suppose. Maybe, like, go on a camping trip or something like that, but apart from that, I don't think you could probably do it forever.

Vox Pop: It's almost like you don't have the option to delete the app, which is a bit annoying, actually, because I would like to just delete it because I don't really find any value in it.

Ange Lavoipierre: In fact, a recent survey in the UK found almost half of the 16- to 21-year-olds they asked would rather live their lives without the internet full stop. Australia's ban is really just the government's effort to address that public mood. But policy takes years, and even then, there's no guarantee it'll actually work. So in the meantime, people have started looking for their own solutions.

Steph Challis: As soon as my eldest child was born around eight years ago, I was worried about screens.

Ange Lavoipierre: Steph Challis is a high school teacher in Echuca in regional Victoria and a parent to two primary school-aged kids.

Steph Challis: I was really conscious to not have my screen out, to not have my phone out around my children, and it was this gut feel that it wasn't the right thing to do, but I could never quite put that into words or I didn't have any evidence to back that feeling up.

Ange Lavoipierre: Then she read The Anxious Generation. It's a hugely popular book from last year, written by a social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt.

Steph Challis: I all of a sudden had the evidence in front of me about why screens, and particularly smartphones and social media, were not appropriate for kids, and that's really what galvanised me to try and do something about it.

Ange Lavoipierre: It's worth noting that, along with a ton of praise, Haidt's book has copped a fair bit of criticism too, mostly for skipping over that ambiguity in the science so far about whether phone use is actually causing all the problems he's worried about. But it spoke to Steph so powerfully that she decided to take action.

Steph Challis: I created a survey, just asking a few short questions about how worried people were about what they thought they would do with smartphones and social media in terms of their children, and I just sent it, ironically, through social media platforms to all the parents that I knew around my district.

Ange Lavoipierre: The 60 or so parents who responded to Steph's survey seemed just as worried as she was.

Steph Challis: And that gave me some confidence to move forward. So we called ourselves The Phone Pledge.

Ange Lavoipierre: The Phone Pledge is parents agreeing to delay the moment they give their kids a smartphone.

Steph Challis: We would encourage parents to wait until 16 at least. Personally, I'm not giving my children a smartphone, ever. They can get one themselves when they're adults. That's not saying we won't give them a, you know, a Nokia or another sort of retro phone that they can call and text on. I have no qualms about that at all.

Ange Lavoipierre: There's no set age they have in mind. The point is really just to put it off.

Steph Challis: Delaying as long as possible is what we're advocating for. If we reach parents that were probably going to give their children a smartphone and a TikTok account in Grade 5 and they decide to wait until Year 7 and Year 8, that's still progress and that's still something to be celebrated.

Ange Lavoipierre: And while reading Jonathan Haidt's book might have galvanised her into action, Steph's feelings on the matter first formed in the classroom.

Steph Challis: I work at a K-12 school, so our Grade 5 teachers and our Grade 6 teachers are reporting that that's really when the issues are starting to play out. Students are just tired all the time and they openly admit that a lot of that is because of their electronic devices. Even if children are not intending to stay up quite so late, they're finding that they're staying up later than they intend to due to the fact that they're just losing track of time on their phones, which we all do. We know how easy that is to do.

Ange Lavoipierre: Similar movements have emerged around the world, and some are massive. In the US, an organisation called Wait Until 8th asks parents to hold off on buying their kids a smartphone until 8th grade at least. Then there's Unplugged Canada and a group called Take The Pledge in the UK. But in the same way governments struggle to make bans work, there's only so much parents can do if their kids are still determined to go online.

Jameson Butler: I think that experience of being young and knowing what it's like to have someone telling you how bad screens are and trying to take away your screens, that experience really informed the mission of the Luddite Club.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Jameson Butler. She's one of the co-founders of the Luddite Club, a group of young New Yorkers rejecting smartphones and social media.

Jameson Butler: Nobody's taking away your phone. You're giving up your phone. And I think that perspective switch is so, so important, especially for young people and if you want to get young people to do anything.

Ange Lavoipierre: Jameson's 18 now, but she was 10 when she got her first smartphone.

Jameson Butler: Around 12 is when I started becoming really engrossed in my phone and it started to take up a much larger chunk of my life. Despite all the times my parents tried to warn me and try to limit my screen time, it wasn't until I reached the conclusion that my phone had been harming me and my wellbeing that I really decided to do something about it.

Ange Lavoipierre: The turning point was COVID, when her screen time reached eight hours a day.

Jameson Butler: You know, something clicked and I was like, oh my God, I am wasting my life. I was kind of just sitting in my bed, wasting away. You know, I'm 14 years old and the world is so big and I've decided to just spend my whole day on the phone. I need to do something about this.

Ange Lavoipierre: Jameson got off social media and bought a flip phone, which is in theory at least one of the more isolating things you can do as a teenager in the 2020s. But a couple of months later, she met someone else her age who had done the same thing.

Jameson Butler: One day I was at a show of a local band in the park, the local park, and I met this girl named Logan, who was two years older than me. And at that point she had no phone at all. And I just remember being totally amazed and also incredibly inspired. This was the first time I had ever heard, let alone met someone, another young person, who was interested in this idea of unplugging. So there was an instant connection that she felt too. I don't think she had met any other like-minded young people. So we decided that we wanted to create a community that was dedicated to being offline, living in the moment, and helping other people unplug from the digital world.

Ange Lavoipierre: They had the idea, but they still needed a name.

Jameson Butler: I think it might have been Logan's mom pitched the idea of Luddite. And I remember having no idea what that word meant in ninth grade and looking it up in the dictionary. And it is basically a derogatory term for somebody who is skeptical of technology and rejects technology. And I was like, oh my God, this is perfect.

Ange Lavoipierre: Then they started holding meetings.

Jameson Butler: We asked that everybody put their devices away for the duration of club because we've noticed that there's immediately meaningful conversations spawning. There's meaningful connections. There's the use of, you know, imagination, creativity, all these things that are just inherently human totally come back and reanimate people when you take away their phones.

Ange Lavoipierre: Not owning a smartphone is the stuff of fantasies for lots of people. But every time I've felt the urge to lob mine into the ocean, it's not a love of technology that holds me back. It's the necessity of it. So what happens when you do?

Jameson Butler: Having a flip phone in 2025 definitely does make my life harder in some aspects, especially as we now see QR codes everywhere, links to websites everywhere. A lot of my schoolwork is online. But I don't know if it's necessarily bad to put a little bit more effort in. For example, a lot of people are always like, oh my God, but GPS, how are you navigating around, you know, such a huge metropolitan city without a GPS?

But the truth is, people have been navigating New York City without a GPS for so many years. I know it sounds stupid, but it's really empowering to know how to get places and take myself there and super consciously navigate these situations rather than just having some device tell me exactly where to go.

Ange Lavoipierre: The Luddite Club has grown beyond New York. There are chapters forming in Florida and Philadelphia, but she's had blowback too.

Jameson Butler: We definitely, like anything that, you know, gets publicity, have had some negative responses. I think one that was more popular was that the Luddite Club is classist, classist or pretentious.

Ange Lavoipierre: And while calling it classist might sound far-fetched, it's basically the idea that if the world is now, for better or worse, optimised for smartphone users, not having one can make life harder in a lot of ways. Some of which Jameson mentioned, but there are more. Access to health care, transport, even doing your job. Like she says, most, if not all, of those barriers can be overcome. But if you're on minimum wage and just generally up against it, you may not have the time or energy for those battles.

(Music)

Jameson has been smartphone-free for about four years now, and plenty of people doubted she would make it this far, including her parents.

Jameson Butler: Just because they knew me when I was so chronically online, I think it was really surprising for them to see me throw all of that away and completely veer in this new direction. I don't think they thought it was going to last. But I think as it did, they're definitely happy with it. Honestly, since I've gotten rid of my smartphone, I definitely spend more quality time with my family. I do my schoolwork faster, I have better grades, I'm more on top of everything. I've become a lot less scatterbrained. At family dinner, I'm like, Mom, get off of Facebook, because it used to be, Jameson, get off of Instagram.

Ange Lavoipierre: Screen addiction is not an official diagnosis at this stage, but something useful that anyone who's fought addiction will tell you is that you have to want to quit. Government bans and pledges from parents are one thing, but back in Echuca, Steph Chalice says not all the kids are convinced just yet.

Steph Challis: I guess there's a variety of responses depending on their age. My children are quite young, they're five and eight, and so I don't have any pushback from them yet because they're not interested in these devices yet. I think it's really key that we start this conversation with our kids as early as possible, because by the time they get to the point where they want smartphones and social media, then, I mean, they will have more pushback. I'm sure they'll still be annoyed at us at some points, but this message will be so embedded in them that I'm hoping that they've sort of resigned themselves to the fact that this is how it's going to be.

Ange Lavoipierre: As a preview of what she might be in for there, the Year 7 and 8s she teaches don't really get it.

Steph Challis: I talked to them a little bit about the social media minimum age bill and they think it's stupid, they love TikTok, they love Snapchat, it's their life. 

Ange Lavoipierre: But older students see it differently.

Steph Challis: When I talk to Year 11 and 12s, they have a completely different point of view. They've matured a little, they can look back, they can see how these devices affected them throughout their adolescence, and the vast majority of them, even the ones who I know are addicted to their devices, have said to me that they think it's a really good thing that we're doing and that they don't think younger kids should be on social media.

Jameson Butler: Being told by so many adults in your life, in your parents, this is bad for you, this is bad for you, this is bad for you, and obviously not listening, I think, and finding out for yourself, that experience is so universal. Our goal is to empower young people and give them the tools they need to help themselves because time and time again we see that kids are really not going to always listen to their parents and want to listen to adults, and it's really, it's not the most constructive way of creating change.

Ange Lavoipierre: That's it for this episode of Brain Rot and for this series, which was made on the lands of the Gadigal and Menang Noongar people. Thanks as always to our producer Fiona Pepper and senior producer James Bullen. Thanks also to Sam Goerling for her help with the French translation for this episode, and a special thanks to our executive producer Patria Ladgrove and science editor Jonathan Webb.

Brain Rot is a production of ABC Science and Radio National for Science Friction. If you liked the series or want to get in touch for any other reason, you can email us at sciencefriction@abc.net.au. My name's Ange Lavoipierre. Thanks for listening.