Escape the Digital: Detox journey
What would life be like without digital devices? How would you communicate? How would you make ends meet?
Are you capable of it at all? Or are you trapped?
Escape the Digital is a one-day retreat exploring practices for a non-digital life, including a role-playing game to test your potential in the analogue world.
The day’s agenda
The day starts at 10am as we stow digital devices and reflect on our objectives:
- Learn ways to cut digital devices out of your routine.
- Reflect on how you use them and how you would exist without.
- Develop alternative, analogue routines that you can use going forward.
Next, we warm up with analogue activities for expression such as thoughtful letter-writing. These pen and paper techniques can boost productivity and expand your imaginative horizons whilst displacing machine habits.
In the afternoon, we dive into a specially designed LARP: you’ll enter the analogue job market. With help from the career advisor, you consider suitable analogue professions, create a CV poster, put it up on local walls, and await the results. Before the day’s out, you may well have found a new job and got paid, all with no reliance on digital devices.
This playful escapade questions your ability to get by outside of the fragile constraints of the digital realm. In doing so, you might need to go a little out of your comfort zone and play a role you never have before – getting a job in the real world is not easy.
Just before we end at 6pm, we will review our findings, the letters we’ve written, and pledge to weave these approaches into our daily life.
Come and grow your analogue self
Escape the Digital is a visionary detox event designed to boost your non-digital qualities and spark positive behaviours of change.
Take this opportunity to build a more digitally-independent you.
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More info
Who hosts the event?
Matthew Linares is a futurist who critically embraces technology through code, talks, workshops and games. I’ll guide you through this experience to playfully reframe your ways.
What to bring?
You might want to bring some snacks. We will go to lunch together at a local cafe (menu available in advance).
If you have existing journalling tools, like a favourite pen and notebook, bring those.
Other than that, you won’t need anything.
Does it need to be all day long?
We have prepared a full day’s worth of activities and suggest that you stick around to experience the whole trip.
There is actually a multi-day version of this event available for people and teams who want to go deeper. That is, in fact, the preferable way to do this, as it takes some time to start unpicking our habits.
Will I really learn to cut my devices out?
You will really get an opportunity to reflect deeply on how digital devices affect your life. Alongside that, we will work with genuine effective alternatives. Together, these should have a memorable impact on you, although everyone is different. You will almost certainly have an interesting and fun experience.
How do I sign up?
Send us an email and we can make your booking.
Sign up here to hear about future sessions.
What’s the location?
We usually host the event in private studio or office spaces in London. We can also bring the work to you across the UK or anywhere in the world by arrangement.