It’s only a small rectangular sticker, but it symbolises a joyous sense of resistance. Some of Berlin’s most renowned clubs have long insisted that the camera lenses on their clientele’s phones must be covered up using this simple method, to ensure that everyone is present in the moment and people can let go without fear of their image suddenly appearing on some online platform. As one DJ puts it, “Do you really want to be in someone’s picture in your jockstrap?”
Venues in London, Manchester and New York now enforce the same rules. Last week brought news of the return of Sankeys, the famous Mancunian club that closed nearly a decade ago, and is reopening in a 500-capacity space in the heart of the city. The aim, it seems, is to fly in the face of the massed closures of such venues, and revive the idea that our metropolises should host the kind of nights that stretch into the following morning. But there is another basic principle at work: phones will reportedly either be stickered or forbidden. “People need to stop taking pictures and start dancing to the beat,” said one of the club’s original founders.
He is right, but it seems that the zeitgeist might be aligning in that direction anyway. If 2025 has had any kind of defining cultural theme, it perhaps boils down to people’s increasing sense that a life completely beholden to screens is no life at all. To this, add two connected trends: a drop in millions of people’s use of social media, and a rising yearning for experiences that are more authentic. This is not, just to be clear, any kind of suggestion that we are about to reject digital technology and wind the clock back 30 years. But something is definitely up, and it is worth tentatively celebrating.
If your interest in posting what you had for lunch seems to be waning and you now look back at a habit of doing so with mild horror, you are not alone. According to analysis commissioned earlier this year by the Financial Times, time spent on social media worldwide peaked back in 2022, and fell by almost 10% by the end of 2024. There are notable exceptions to this trend, not least in North America, where growth in use has slowed rather than going into reverse. But that does not quite detract from what the figures tell us. The decline they highlight is most pronounced among people in their teens and 20s. Other data suggests that since 2014, the shares of people who use such platforms to “stay in touch with friends, express themselves or meet new people” have declined by more than a quarter.
Some of this, it seems, is driven by the new domination of platforms by high-profile influencers and AI-created “slop”. The bitter, polarised atmosphere of so many online spaces is also relevant. Over the summer, the New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka held out the prospect of what he called Posting Zero: “a point at which normal people – the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses – stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction, and the exposure.” This, perhaps, is the overlooked context for Australia’s ban on social media for people under 16: rather than being some authoritarian bolt from the blue, it looks like it may have arrived at a point when people were already changing their habits – and so, rather like modern smoking bans, it may simply end up accelerating a trend that was quietly kicking in anyway.
Or look at internet dating, the ultimate example of an attempt to replace the magical and often random nature of human interactions with cold digital logic. Thanks to Ofcom, we know that between 2023 and 2024, Tinder lost 594,000 UK users, while Hinge dropped by 131,000, and Bumble by 368,000. The value of shares in Match Group, the company that owns Tinder and Hinge, has dropped by nearly 80% since the highs they reached during the pandemic. Over the same period, Bumble stock is reckoned to have dropped by 92%. In a letter to its shareholders, Match acknowledged that younger people were seeking “a lower-pressure, more authentic way to find connections”.
For some people, that might eventually involve going to a club, putting the obligatory sticker on their phone and seeing what happens. That leads in turn to a somewhat dreamy, utopian suggestion: might some of the people whose chronic internet use has left them isolated and introverted – and sometimes angry and paranoid – sooner or later dance and socialise themselves into something better? That’s pretty much what happened at the end of the 1980s, when the combination of ecstasy and dance music quickly known as acid house began to change the cold, atomised country created by Thatcherism with profound consequences. So you never know.
As that last observation shows, I am in my 50s, so my nocturnal experiences now tend to involve watching musicians rather than gyrating until 4am. Three years ago, I had the wondrous experience of seeing Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan play live, within months of each other, in very different venues – respectively, a 600-capacity venue in my Somerset home town where McCartney played a warmup gig before his headline appearance at Glastonbury, and at a huge indoor arena in Oslo that hosted the first date of Dylan’s latest European tour. At both shows, the audience’s phones were placed in sealed pouches and returned once the show was over. What that resulted in was amazing: the first was full of a shared euphoria that brought tears to my eyes, and the second was gripped by such an awed silence that it felt almost otherworldly.
At most other gigs, by contrast, phones and the behaviour they encourage can be a menace. Three weeks ago, I went with my 16-year-old daughter to the Beacon Hall in Bristol to see the Isle of Wight-based sensation Wet Leg, who were brilliant. When they play live, their big hit Chaise Longue is an invitation to everyone present to go nuts. But one woman next to us spent its entire three minutes acrobatically shooting phone footage from every conceivable angle, which entailed repeatedly reaching over those around her, while remaining completely oblivious to how much she was spoiling people’s fun.
When people do such things, I sometimes wonder: do they go home and look at what they filmed, and post it somewhere? Or does it just sit on their phones, pointless and unwatched? And will they therefore arrive at the conclusion that seems to be hitting more and more people: that it’s good to stop, to go offline more often, and rediscover the joys of being in the moment with other human beings? A lot more hangs on that question than we might think.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His book Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs is available from the Guardian bookshop
