The pitch sounds like a stunt: a former social media influencer, once followed by roughly 200,000 people on Instagram, now travels the country telling audiences to throw their smartphones in a drawer. But August Lamm's argument is less a stunt than a confession. She started using a smartphone at fourteen, spent her twenties building an art following online, and eventually found the whole apparatus unbearable. When she finally sold the phone and switched to a basic flip model, she says her mental health improved, her attention span came back, and so did her curiosity. On Monday, October 19, she brings that story to Francie & Finch Bookshop at 130 S. 13th Street in downtown Lincoln, where she will present her new book, You Don't Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading Your Phone and Upgrading Your Life, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
The book, released October 6, is part memoir and part field manual. Its opening lines set the tone: "When I owned a smartphone, my life was bad. I knew this. What I did not know was that I had a choice." From there Lamm walks readers through the practical obstacles that keep most people tethered, from picking a replacement handset to navigating without GPS to the genuinely modern annoyances of digital-only tickets and two-factor authentication. The premise is that a phone-free life is not merely possible but better, and the publisher has framed it as a manifesto for the Information Age. Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, blurbed it as "the essential guide to putting down your phone — and coming back to real life."
Lamm is not a newcomer to this argument. She has written about quitting her smartphone for The New York Times, in a 2025 opinion piece describing her Nokia 2780 flip phone, and for The Free Press. Before the book, she circulated an illustrated guide to going dumbphone, sold through her own website. Her writing has also run in literary outlets including Hobart, The End, Salt Hill, and Forever Magazine, and she is at work on a debut novel, Lambing Season, forthcoming from Dialogue Books. She is from New Haven, Connecticut — a detail that fits the persona: a writer who has built a career, somewhat paradoxically, on the subject of being unreachable.
The Lincoln stop lands in a fitting room. Francie & Finch has become one of downtown's more active literary addresses, hosting author events, poetry readings, writer workshops, and First Friday Artwalk traffic just a short walk from the University of Nebraska campus. Its inventory leans deliberately local and international at once, and its event calendar mixes touring authors with Nebraska voices. A free, drop-in hour with an anti-tech activist is squarely in that tradition — the kind of small, unglamorous bookstore evening that a city's reading life is actually made of.
There is an irony worth naming, though Lamm has made it part of her material rather than a contradiction to hide. She built her audience on the very platforms she now urges people to leave. Her message is not that the internet is evil but that carrying a computer in your pocket should be a conscious choice rather than a default — a distinction that tends to land differently in a room full of people than it does in a headline.
That is likely what the Francie & Finch audience will get: not a lecture about willpower but a set of workarounds, offered by someone who has already done the awkward part. The event runs one hour, the book is on shelves now, and the shop is taking pre-orders through its online store. For anyone who has ever caught themselves reaching for a phone during a quiet moment, the appeal is obvious. For anyone who has not, it may be the more interesting hour.