Form cover
Page 1 of 2

Month Offline @ MOMI - October 2026

Part support group, part happy hour, part classroom: ditch your smartphone for 30 days and join a cohort of neighbors for creative exercises, weekly meetups, and mutual encouragement.

If not now, when?

https://storage.tally.so/be58c369-39a6-402d-a73a-877c1def5248/background.png
Photo by Carl Mikoy; used under CC BY 2.0 with minor edits.

5 FACILITATED MEETUPS

✺ facilitated, hands-on activities to explore new ways to relate to technology
✺ collective discovery of new places, resources, and organizations in your community
✺ graduation ceremony to celebrate each other's offtime

DUMB DEVICE

☎ bring your own dumbphone -- you can find one on dumbphones.org
☎ or try a dumbphone 2 from dumb.co with option to sync calls, txts, and contacts with ur smartphone (coupon code provided for participants)

SHOW & TELL

❉ public party with friends, family, and flipmates
❉ showcase stories, artworks, and practices that emerged during the month

SPACE & TIME

We'll meet every Sunday from 2p-4p in the MOMI Lab.

COST

⁕ free! (phone not included)
☎ a limited number of dumbphones are available for participants who can't afford one

Sign up before 09/28! Reach out to Damian if u have questions or need financial support.

Name

Phone number

Electronic mail

Mailing address

What's your phone situation?

A
B

FAQs

What will the meetups be like?

Month Offline is divided into five meetups:

⁕ Introductory Meetup (@ Tompkins Square Park): Every cohort in the region gets together to start the program, set up their phones, and get an introduction to the Month Offline Program.

After the introductory meetup, participants will meet with their cohorts on a regular basis until the end of the program. For the Queens cohort, each meetup will focus on a specific domain where extractive technology dominates our lives, and each meetup will guide participants through the process of finding alternative ways to engage with those domains.

⁕ Meetup #1 (@ MOMI): This meetup will focus on environment. Participants will be invited to talk about their favorite places in their neighborhood: whether they be cafes, bars, bookshops, parks, arcades, or something else. After this, we'll talk about how we find new places, the ways that Google Maps and other mapping tools manipulate and control the terms on which we gather, and various alternative methods of place discovery.
This meetup's assignment will instruct participants to find one new place that they haven't been to before, and do so on foot, without the aid of mapping tools.
⁕ Meetup #2 (@ MOMI): This meetup will focus on media. Media discovery is one of the most common use cases for digital platforms: but is it the best way to discover new things? For this meetup, participants will talk about their favorite musicians, movies, TV shows, or videogames, and we'll also discuss the manner in which we found them. After that, we'll review the vast universe of independent publications, radio stations, and art collectives that have sprouted up over the last decade, and we'll discuss how discovering media through curated recommendations differs from discovering it through algorithms.
This week's assignment will be to engage with a piece of media that you discovered outside of social media: whether it be a recommendation from a fellow participant, or something you found through a curated publication.
⁕ Meetup #3 (@ MOMI): This meetup will focus on events. Ironically enough, one of the main reasons to be online is to find out what's happening offline. We'll review the wide world of independent event calendars and newsletters around NYC, and we'll also look at some print alternatives that have popped up in recent years.
Participants will create a collective event calendar for the coming week using the resources available to them, and their assignment will be to go to one event that they didn't hear about from social media.
⁕ Meetup #4 (@ MOMI): This meetup will focus on communication. With all the experiences that participants have accumulated over the course of the program in mind, this meetup will invite participants to write a letter to a loved one about their experience with Month Offline.
In the process, we'll talk about the ways that digital technology has changed the way we communicate from afar, and we'll think critically about whether constant communication is the most meaningful kind of communication. Stamps will be provided, and participants will do a group walk to the nearest USPS drop box to send their letters.
⁕ Graduation (@ MOMI): Participants come back to MOMI for one final reunion. This will be where participants reflect on their experiences, discuss what impact the program made in their day-to-day lives, and talk about how they want to change their relationship with technology going forward.
More importantly than that: interested participants will be plugged in to the broader Luddite movement in NYC, giving them an opportunity to push their insights even further in concert with others.
All MO cohorts are additionally invited to the Month Offline Expo that takes place after the conclusion of each cohort.
https://storage.tally.so/6f354ebe-8048-434b-af14-053da0d9c094/IMG_7136.webp
https://storage.tally.so/4f08fbf6-5b3f-4f5a-a5e5-da005cd4372e/IMG_7137_a049e4db-961b-43d2-bc2b-75dde1254662.webp