On a sunny Friday afternoon at Memorial Glade, the center of UC Berkeley’s campus, students set up volleyball nets, cornhole, picnic blankets and a makeshift plywood stage for live music.
Their goal? To throw a phone-free party.
Music blasted from a speaker near a snack table. Colorful, handwritten signs read messages like “Favorite app? Delete it,” and “Take back your mind.”
At a check-in table, students had the option to seal their cell phones in a plastic bag. Nearby, students propped up gravestones cut out of posterboard, each bearing the logo of a different social media app.
The event was hosted by Project Reboot, an organization born on Berkeley’s campus, with the mission of helping young people “reset their tech habits, reclaim their time and regain their focus.”
The project began in the form of a semester-long class that helped students reduce their screen time.
“I feel like [screen] addiction has kind of been our birthright,” said Dawson Kelly, a third-year student and one of the event’s hosts. Kelly said he’s working on a thesis about digital dependence. “We need more infrastructure for our generation to take back our time, take back our agency, and look at all the things that have been stolen from us, and not let this be the anxious generation that we’ve been made out to be.”
Sahar Yousef, a Berkeley neuroscientist and lecturer who serves on Project Reboot’s research advisory board, said her students are increasingly pushing back “against the default of being on their phones, constantly scrolling.
“This is truly a demonstration that they’ve wanted to put together,” Yousef said, “to demonstrate what has really been taken from them.”
According to a survey of UC Berkeley undergraduates, 78% of students reported that they believe their phone use “prevents them from thinking deeply, being creative, or engaging fully with ideas.”
Third-year students Ashlyn Torres and Izzy Newman said they found out about Friday’s event from a flier, instead of through the usual social media channels. Torres said she left her phone at home before joining.
“It was different this morning because I was able to recognize there is life around me,” she said. “And we probably should talk to each other more and just listen to what the world has to offer rather than just what our phones have to offer.”
Jonny Vasquez is a third-year student and advocate for reduced screen time on campus. To reach other students, he said, he started standing in a busy area of campus holding a sign that read, “Lowest screentime contest.”
“People would either completely ignore the sign,” Vasquez said, “or they would come up and say, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve been waiting for someone to help us with this.’”
Vasquez said that since he deleted his social media accounts, he’s stopped comparing himself to others and experiences greater overall satisfaction with his life. He said he hopes to continue to share that with others.
Several students offered each other tips about creating some distance with their phones, including plugging it in out of reach overnight, turning it completely off while socializing, and leaning on a community with like-minded goals to hold each other accountable.
Kelly said that the movement the students hope to create is about their personal agency.
“These are the peak years of our lives, and they’ve been stolen from us by companies that are making billions and billions of dollars every single year to take as much of our time as possible. We have to fight back, and we fight back by connecting and engaging in a life that we should have been living from the beginning.”
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