Last weekend, the population of Navarro, California, nearly tripled, as around two hundred and fifty people descended upon the small unincorporated community for Camp Grounded, a three-day summer camp for adults. Hidden deep in the Mendocino County redwoods, the camp is located on the site of what its Web site describes as a “nostalgic” nineteen-seventies Boy Scouts campground. Campers had come to “celebrate what it means to be alive,” which meant checking anything with a power button or a screen upon arrival.
When word quietly leaked about this larky, technology-free retreat in the woods, tickets, which cost about three hundred dollars apiece, sold out quickly. Attendees ranged in age from nineteen to sixty-seven and hailed from more than a dozen states and three countries. Start-up founders, engineers, and coders were sprinkled throughout the group. According to a pre-camp survey, they typically spent ten to sixteen hours staring at screens. At check-in, several campers admitted to regularly waking up with iPhones in their hands. One San Franciscan said that he had begun to catch himself blearily retyping the URLs of Web sites he was already reading. So, on a sweaty Friday afternoon, they followed a dirt road down to the eighty-acre campsite, looking to connect to something other than Twitter.
“This is a social experiment,” explained Fidget Wigglesworth, the camp director, speaking through a bushy mustache as he stood at the front of an amphitheater filled with the new arrivals. “Our mission is to reëvaluate our relationship with our digital technologies.” Massive trees flanked him. Nondigital frogs chirped as he preached that we’re more connected, but lonelier and less fulfilled. Wigglesworth, whose real name is Levi Felix, is one of the fed-up brains behind Digital Detox, the Oakland-based group responsible for the camp. Digital Detox has been throwing off-the-grid retreats and device-free mixers in San Francisco for a couple of years, but Camp Grounded is by far the group’s biggest undertaking yet. “Together, if we can ask the right questions, we can change the course of history,” he concluded. The crowd whooped.
The director stepped down, and campers split off into mini-villages of open, Adirondack-style cabins. Crushably goofy counselors presided, with names like Honey Bear and Golden Bird. (Everyone was required to use a pseudonym; campers chose ones like Ducky and Love Handles.) The weekend proceeded with archery, friendship bracelets, sing-alongs, a talent show, wading in creeks, and late-night campfires. There was a beatboxing workshop and Israeli folk dancing. Betraying the camp’s roots, an old Boy Scouts shooting range had been remade into a “typewriter range,” with an array of ancient machines set up near a sunny hillside, while a human-powered search engine answered questions: campers could pin queries to a bulletin board—“Why are some trees burnt while nearby ones aren’t?”—and hope for an answer.
The urge to check in, to check out, to Vine, to Snap, to Tumbl, faded with surprising ease. But the Camp Grounded vision of technology’s toxic influence is more holistic: money, clocks, alcohol, drugs, and any talk of people’s ages or work were all off-limits. Conversations could no longer begin with “What do you do?”
Set against the backdrop of Silicon Valley’s staggering growth, offline-ism, with its promise to, at least temporarily, offer a path out of the beeping, vibrating, quantifying, oversharing thicket, is again having a moment. Apps that block the Internet are popular; corrective social customs have surfaced around excessive texting; brave souls are unplugging in dramatic fashion; and a minor industry of Internet-free vacations and tech-rehab programs has emerged for mellower renunciations.
On Saturday, the author and neo-Luddite icon Kirkpatrick Sale sent me a rare e-mail, explaining his thoughts on the unplugging movement and vaguely anti-technology happenings like Camp Grounded: “There’s always been resistance of some kind to [technologies], and so far (with the possible exception of the Japanese rejection of guns for two centuries) that resistance has been ultimately futile. Technologies are introduced by powerful forces, and introduced to make those forces more powerful, and those forces override and overwhelm opposition.”
“Not too encouraging for your weekend,” he added.
But the weekend had its victories, such as they were. On Saturday night, a fellow named Beef rose and recited the entirety of Milton’s “On Shakespeare” from memory. At one point, campers agreed to a couple hours of silence. They wandered into the trees and along the banks of the Navarro River, then finally down a dirt road, which led them to dinner. A woman with a violin played Bach on a nearby hay-bale stage. A few hundred people milled about wordlessly as she played.
On the last morning, after a bell, bugle, and flag-raising woke the camp, the otherwise normal, guarded non-hippies stood in a giant circle on the grass and shouted out aspects of the weekend for which they were grateful: “Time to think!” “Finding a version of myself I hadn’t seen in too long!” “Groundedness!” Men and women who’d been strangers seventy-two hours earlier hugged and cried. Wigglesworth sat beneath a tree, grinning at campers’ insistence that all this happen again soon. They reclaimed their bags of phones, tablets, and computers, and climbed back into their cars.
By the next day, a nostalgic Camp Grounded Facebook group had been born. Camp names gave way to real names. The group’s members seemed torn, wanting to relive every little memory from a moving weekend, but also wanting to remember, Hey, you know, don’t Facebook so much. One group member, who wanted to be off of Facebook by the end of the year, encouraged others to “always feel free to message me.”
Chris Colin is the author of “Blindsight.” His next book, “What to Talk About,” comes out in 2014.
Photograph by Scott Sporleder.