Tech Fast
At St. John’s College in Santa Fe, students recently organized a weeklong tech fast: voluntarily setting aside smartphones and internet-connected devices in favor of chalkboards, landlines, and handwritten notes. The experiment was not nostalgic theater. Flyers described the week as a fast, a self-study, and a challenge, asking what attention feels like when devices no longer pulse in the background. That same impulse appears in the growing use of BRICK, a small physical device designed to lock smartphones into a restricted mode, disabling apps and notifications until the user deliberately unlocks them again. BRICK does not reject technology. It introduces friction, restoring choice where habit has taken over. Conversation slows, memory matters, and authority returns to the room when systems step back rather than press forward. The tech fast revealed what careful institutions already know: learning depends on limits as much as access. Disconnecting is not rejection but discernment, a way of restoring proportion in environments saturated with short signals.
Further Reading
Albert Einstein at the blackboard, Pasadena, 1931. Public domain.