It’s time for neo-Temperance Could Appstinence cure modern brain rot

Gnome-costumed Gen Z activists are publicly smashing their iPhones with hammers in New York. Meanwhile, on Tiktok, Bluetooth landlines are going viral. After more than a decade of being sucked ever deeper into the portal of algorithmic slop, has the resistance finally arrived?

For all the pioneering smartphone refuseniks and buzzy new alternatives, the data tells a less optimistic story. In Britain, Nokia brick sales jumped from 400,000 to 450,000 in 2024, but 68 million people have smartphones. Screentime restriction apps and all sorts of lobotomized dumbphones are not actually flooding the market. The most hyped post-screen pioneers — the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit — were honorable but catastrophic failures.

The situation is critical. The scrolletariat is swiping itself into oblivion. While distinctions between productivity and entertainment make measurement tricky, the average human spends roughly 4.9 hours on mobile apps daily. For the young, it’s even worse. American teenagers average a staggering 8 hours and 39 minutes of daily screen time for entertainment, while British 18-24 year olds clock in at nearly 6 hours and a half hours. The scale is vast, and with the rise of hyper-personalized AI slop machines, the quality is degrading further. Add to that the wider outsourcing of human cognition to AI, we risk becoming hollowed out fleshy middleware lost in an endless mind maze.

In the face of this smartphone-AI-dopamine axis of evil, various schools of neo-Luddite resistance are emerging. Like the loom-smashing weavers of the 19th century, today’s resistance is united by a distaste for the machine. However, they are divided on the best course of resistance — many want to run for the hills, others want to destroy their phones, and some believe they can tame the effects. All are doomed to fail.

To those with a more romantic vision of resistance, the digital world is only avoided by escaping into a prelapsarian Arcadia of nature, craft, literature, and “dumb” technology. They range from the Bopeas trading screen time for soil and wild swimming and the hip Gen Z resistance groups such as the gnome-hatted Lamp Club and Breaking the G(loom) all the way to noted anti-machine rager Paul Kingsnorth and The Times’ James Marriott wielding his Qin F21 Pro. They all instinctively understand the sickness, but their cure is fundamentally unscalable. Unchaining oneself means battling the network effect, the mechanism that locks users in by punishing non-participation with isolation. Escape therefore requires the social capital to survive being cut off from the herd — a luxury most cannot afford.

Equally romantic, but much less chill are the more violent neo-Luddites. These are the spiritual children of the late Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber who resisted industrial society through manifestos and mail bombs. They share a quasi-millenarian view of techno-industrial society, seeing the destruction of the mega-machine as essential to the preservation of nature and humanity, and are willing to break some legs to get there. These neo-Luddite extremists include the Greek anarchists Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei, the mystical Latin American terrorist networks of Individualists Tending to the Wild, and France’s emerging Anti-Tech Resistance. While they may be true believers, tying salvation to the destruction of techno-capitalist civilization is not a winning formula with the less insane.

More pragmatic is the network of politicians, policy wonks, academics, and journalists pursuing reforms through legislation. On the Left, Shoshana Zuboff, American author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and British journalist Carole Cadwalladr want to tame the techno-beast through privacy, anti-trust, and online safety bills. On the Right, there’s a mirror universe of pro-family tech critics, from US Senator Josh Hawley through to Tory MP Miriam Cates. While legislation is crucial, attempts are glacially slow and critics are fundamentally divided on the true source of evil. Are screens the enemy? Or surveillance? Hate speech? Big Tech? All forms of social media? Dopamine culture? Governments must play a role, but for now we are in a race against time. Endless hubs, quangos, and inquiries will not outrun the shapeshifting onslaught of innovation. Even if they do eventually succeed, citizens will bypass them.

Further, governments seeking to address the neo-Luddites’ concerns face a paralyzing paradox. While they may want to halt mass cognitive atrophy, other crises take priority. Faced with anemic growth, declining living standards, geopolitical instability, and climate pressure, government ambitions are increasingly beholden to Silicon Valley. Leaders see AI as the silver bullet in the hunt for productivity, security, and sustainability. Yet, the very titans building these frontier technologies are the same ones powering the brain rot. This Faustian pact is laid bare by the British Government’s new partnership with Alphabet to harness AI for clean energy research and public services. If Google is crucial to the state, tackling YouTube addiction is politically impossible.

Thus, we are at an impasse. If we cannot yet regulate through force or law, what is to be done? Perhaps there is a way to become masters of our domain and usher in a grand transformation of social norms.

We have been here before. The Luddites failed to stop the Industrial Revolution quashed by an alliance of government and merchants comparable to today. Industrialization continued and unleashed a different blight: cheap hard booze. From schools and asylums to factories and prisons, everyone was getting lit. The 18th-century Gin Craze, immortalized in Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane diptych, was unstoppable. Despite the Gin Acts, the state was captive to the alcohol lobby and tax receipts. Those in power, it was often said, wanted workers too drunk to organize politically, but not too drunk to operate machines effectively in their factories.

In the 19th century, the Temperance movement did what law could not. In September 1832, in a converted cock-fighting pit in Preston, Lancashire, a cheesemonger named Joseph Livesey and six working-class comrades — the Seven Men of Preston — signed a pledge of total abstinence. They believed a drunken proletariat could never be liberated and so-called “Giant Alcohol” was the ultimate tool of subjugation.

Their genius was to reframe the issue. They advanced the debate beyond religious sin to a campaign for wealth, health, and inter-generational morality. Temperance activists argued that alcohol stole a father’s wages, wrecked the worker’s liver, and shattered the peace of the home. As Benjamin Disraeli’s physician Joseph Kidd wrote in 1879, the goal was a virtuous citizen “accustomed to self-restraint and moderation”, a state he called “one of the chief delights and aspirations… of a true man”. The mission was not just to change laws, but to change the soul.

Crucially, campaigners invoked the innocence of the young. Founded in 1847, a society called the Band of Hope inspired children to sign a pledge of sobriety. It aimed to inoculate children against alcohol through a cultural program including its iconic magic lantern shows, using cutting-edge technology to project vivid, terrifying images of the drunkard’s decline. British alcohol consumption finally peaked in 1876. By 1897, the Band of Hope had enrolled 3 million children. By 1931, a Royal Commission officially declared that “drunkenness has gone out of fashion”.

What can we learn from the Temperance movement? In his 2025 Reith Lecture, “Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine”, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues that the Temperance movement is the perfect blueprint for our time. He warns that “today, we face a new addiction industry, not of wine and whiskey, but of apps and algorithms, [where ]many of Stanford’s brightest minds are building a single great moloch, an attention-hijacking machine that devours our focus”. Bregman proposes using the state to break this machine, advocating for dopamine taxes on ad revenue similar to alcohol taxes. Yet, given our governments’ increased reliance on AI companies, these changes seem unlikely to happen soon enough. If we cannot yet liberate the soul through regulation, then perhaps changing norms is the method.

This cultural rewiring begins with a return to collective accountability. Just as with the Seven Men of Preston and the Band of Hope, this begins with a pledge to personal and collective accountability. There are several leading candidates for a modern neo-Temperance movement such as America’s Wait Until 8th, which encourages parents to delay giving their child a smartphone until the end of 8th grade, and Britain’s Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC), pledging to restrict smartphones until 14 and social media until 16. The latter is particularly impressive: having only been founded in February 2023, it has already amassed over 300,000 parents — including Kate Winslet and Paloma Faith.

Will Orr-Ewing, who co-founded SFC’s Smartphone Free Schools campaign, explains that this is fundamentally about re-establishing lost boundaries. He describes the pact not merely as a petition, but as a “covenant that you sign with other parents” to hold the line collectively. The goal is to revive “the Victorian idea that children are a separate category”, establishing childhood as a “sacred time that is given special prominence” and protected from the encroachment of adult vices.

While we chew through the messy battle to regulate addictive algorithms, neo-Temperance activists are attempting to ensure existing laws are interpreted to factor in novel technologies. Orr-Ewing is already pursuing this, recently launching a Judicial Review to force schools to apply existing safeguarding statutes. He argues that schools have failed to understand that their safeguarding obligations apply to smartphones just as they do to a classroom ceiling full of asbestos. “Whether it’s a beheading video or high-definition porn,” Orr-Ewing argues, “nine-year-olds should not be watching this shit. I think we’ve still got enough moral norms to have consensus on that.”

Beyond the classroom and the courtroom, success requires rediscovering the lost art of judgment. The polite relativism of contemporary liberal culture has trained us to avoid criticizing others. Yet, if we stand by as the minds of tomorrow are obliterated, politeness is complicity. It may feel rude and fogeyish but we must scold — and be scolded. Take inspiration from Chile’s outgoing Millennial President Gabriel Boric who recently paused a speech to phoneshame 11 audience members for staring at their screens before showing off his own dumbphone. We can all harness the spirit of Boric. Be judgy. Call your friend a swipewanker. Ban phones at dinner. Smartphone zombies must be rendered socially toxic. Norms can only be transformed through a collective effort to hold each other to account.

Yet, stigma alone cannot remake a people, one needs stories and symbols woven into culture. The original Temperance movement understood this well. In art, following Hogarth’s lead, George Cruikshank’s wildly popular The Bottle (1847) series depicted a respectable British family’s descent into poverty and madness due to drink. In literature, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) shattered the Victorian illusion of the merry drunk, exposing the brutal horror of addiction. In mass entertainment, the Band of Hope’s magic lanterns inspired millions. To succeed today, the neo-Temperance movement must find and celebrate its very own Hogarths, Cruikshanks, and Brontës and propagate their works in the physical world. Who will paint the Beer Street and Gin Lane of the smartphone era?

Finally, a neo-Temperance movement will fail without a positive vision for what humans actually ought to be beyond mere pleasure–satisfying machines. Who is the post-smartphone human? What should they do instead of staring and swiping? Gabriella Nguyen, the 24-year-old founder of Appstinence, an anti-social media campaign, argues we do not need to solve this immediately. To avoid simply trading screen time for increased productivity is reductive, so first we must return to “ground zero” to work out how to live. Then, through Appstinence, we can reclaim these “luxuries of time, practice, social support, and a clear mind” and begin to “no longer see these meandering, unbound exchanges as lavish expenses of our time and productivity, but the regular course of events”. It is here, Nguyen claims, we can reflect and forge the post-smartphone human.

At this rate, billions will spend 25 years of their lives on their smartphone. Yet, mass sloppification is ultimately a choice. Neither government nor Big Tech is going to change things anytime soon. The neo-Luddites will not smash the data centers. The blueprint of the Temperance movement reveals that salvation will not come from above — it must be reclaimed from below. The solution is not a single law or tax, but a collective recovery of cognitive sovereignty. It’s time for neo-Temperance.

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