Camp No iPhone

Via The New Yorker, an account of three days at Camp Grounded, a three-day technology-free “summer camp for adults”:

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.

I definitely do that retyping thing sometimes. Although my preferred method of unplugging would definitely be more of the “lock yourself in a cabin with a dozen books” variety, this piece makes Camp Grounded sound pretty fun:

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.

Would you go to a retreat like this? Do you also spend 10 to 16 hours each day staring at a screen? Who’s going to organize Camp Hairpin?