To Scenes Through Screens? A Study of The Offline Club Digital Detox Community

As daily life, social relations, and labour increasingly unfold through digital media, users seek to regulate their digital engagement by adopting dumbphones, uninstalling applications, or participating in “digital detox.” In high-connectivity contexts such as the Netherlands, digital disengagement has gained traction among middle-class citizens and expatriate professionals. This article examines how digital disconnection is commodified, socially valorised, and collectively experienced through a case study of The Offline Club (TOC), a Netherlands-based initiative offering curated digital detox events. Drawing on a netnographic approach, we analysed 35 posts on TOC’s Instagram page, conducted participant observation at two events, and carried out nine semi-structured interviews with attendees. We argue that TOC constructs digital disconnection as a curated, temporary practice that unfolds within urban contexts where the role of digital technologies becomes increasingly ambiguous. While TOC markets disconnection as resistance to digital saturation, its own reliance on social media and platform infrastructure for outreach and legitimacy reveals a paradox of disconnection-through-connection. Our findings demonstrate how such initiatives both respond to and reproduce platform logics, simultaneously cultivating community while inadvertently reinforcing cycles of commodified digital non-use. From a digital humanist perspective, we critique the limitations of initiatives like TOC that offer symptomatic relief without addressing the structural conditions of digital dependency. While participants may temporarily reclaim attention and presence, the broader socio-technical systems that underpin digital overload remain unchallenged, raising critical questions about the efficacy and politics of commercialised digital detox movements.