The New Prohibition

A quick report on digital moderation

Recently, I've noticed a growing trend in Stockholm: coffee shops and bars are controlling the use of laptops and smartphones in their spaces.

In one cafe, the barista came over to my friend, Owen, and I to tell us to put away our laptops - they had a no-laptop policy after 5 p.m. In another bar I went to recently, I saw a bartender tell a group of hot women to stop taking selfies - no photography was allowed. On Saturday night last weekend, I attended an art exhibit where the artist explicitly expressed his frustration with smartphones. When I asked him about his creative process, he said "fuck screens, I do this to get away from them".

It’s important to note that all of these establishments are hip, aesthetic places at the edge of urban culture in Stockholm. What this indicates to me is that digital minimalism is an elite trend. It is an act of exclusion - if you can’t control your screen use, you can’t be here.

However, this is not a luddite movement either, in fact a lot of these people work in digital marketing or manage influencer accounts. Rather, these hipsters are signalling literacy in multiple mediums - the bar is a place for social interaction and experiencing the aesthetics of a space, the art exhibit is for being present as the viewer, the cafe a place for coffee and co-working in the day, wine and conversation in the evening. Set and setting as they say in psychedelic research.

Default Friend covered a lot of this is in a recent piece, I'm Bullish on Gatekeeping and IRL Parties. Look how she mentions differentiation as a key feature of this trend.

You need to differentiate yourself. And my suspicion is that differentiation is most easily found first in who you know, second, in the physical world, and third, in the quality and placement of what you produce. People’s appetite for screen time is shrinking and the opportunities to produce new things are growing. - Default Friend

I wholeheartedly agree. And differentiation is a quality that Ritual Lab is especially interested in developing - the art of placing things in context rather than having everything, everywhere, all at once.

Like Default Friend, I believe we are witnessing a shift back to physical, real-life networks. The spirit of the age is to “find the others” via social media and then to come together at cultural events that reflect the values of the scene. This process has completely changed my life personally, and I really advocate for people taking advantage of it.

During the covid era, I went totally online and participated at The Stoa, did courses with Other Life, and got involved in the Intellectual Deep Web. These connections lead me to Europe a few years later, and now I live in Stockholm with my Swedish bf and co-run Dark Renaissance with my London-based friend Owen Cox. It’s totally true in my case that the digital life I participated in was more significant to me than my local life in Portland, OR, and I was willing to uproot myself to be a participant in a scene that was facilitated by online connection. I don’t regret it at all.

Nowadays, if you have a least one or two irl friends that get your micro culture, I would say it’s less important to uproot for continuous social interaction with an internet niche (unless you are still looking for a partner, but that’s a whole other post) and instead have a budget set aside for conferences and festivals. Like Burning Man, these experiences create pop-up zones of cultural immersion that last for a few days to a week and then dissolve until the next event.

Dark Renaissance has been hosting events that work using this strategy. We gather in person for high-impact experiences, then retreat back to our day to day lives until the next experience emerges. So far, this has been a great process for us and we are even more bullish on live events than we were when we launched in March 2024. And you bet we will include more prohibitions on screens at future events, alongside experimentation with different arrangements of digital distance and digital immersion.

So tl;dr - it’s becoming an increasingly bad look to be the one scrolling hunched over in a corner while your friends are hanging out. Even if you’re known for having a following on social media, it’s not impressive if you’re compulsively checking your feed. If anything it indicates a lack of self control, self awareness and self respect. Of course, among my friends, we are not above the addiction - the reason why we are having these conversations in the first place is because we can feel it taking over our lives and we are responding by working together.

The question is - will these trends be enough to divert digital human life in another direction at scale? Smartphone and screen addiction are still growing, even in places like Sweden, which has strong values around moderation and conscientiousness. I am very interested in who ends up winning in this addictive landscape and how we can learn from their success.

What are you noticing on the ground where you live? Similar trends or something totally different? Let me know in the comments!