On a late Friday afternoon on Marston Quad, a group of students are seated on blankets munching on snacks, shuffling cards for a game of Egyptian Rat Slap and sharing insights from a class discussion.
A second group starts a game of spikeball as other students stretch out to work on The Student Life newspaper’s crossword puzzle. No one is scrolling. There’s not a smartphone in sight.
Welcome to the weekly meeting of The Luddite Club, which for the past year has promoted a healthy approach to technology for Pomona College students and others at The Claremont Colleges.
The idea for the club “actually came from a New York Times article that I read my sophomore year,” says co-founder Kaitlyn Ulalisa ’27, a politics and French major. “I was very, very, very heavily addicted to social media and my phone at one point in high school and a little bit into college. Then I got rid of everything.”
Ulalisa joined forces with Abhi Namala PZ ’27, a computer science major, to start the club. He too wanted what he calls a screen “detox” and a place to unwind with fellow students who also were holding themselves accountable in the “attention economy.”
The meetings have no concrete structure. Each week, the leaders bring a red wagon filled with snacks, cards, arts and crafts supplies and balls of various types. “Then we lay out blankets, and people come,” says Ulalisa. “Every week—same time, same place—so people know where to find us.”