The Offline Club

Ayelet Baron
2 min readJun 16, 2024

Why Are We Paying for Everything?

When you join the Offline Club, you trade your phone for board games, books, and tranquility. This Dutch digital detox cafe encourages members to leave their devices at the door.

Originating in Amsterdam, the promise of the club is a calm space away from the relentless digital hustle.

It promises to promote quiet introspection over mindless scrolling and fosters spontaneous conversations rather than brief, typed arguments.

With board games, a piano, people and books, you recharge your soul instead of your device. Ironically, word spread through social media, and now the club has expanded across the Netherlands and is set to launch globally.

Many who battle stress and anxiety are finding peace in this community.

The concept began with offline retreats and then opened its first phone-free hangout in Amsterdam’s Cafe Brecht. Within a month, it attracted 125,000 new Instagram followers.

It’s also funny that the only available metrics relate to social media and not how many lives or communities benefited from these experiences. While we create new spaces, we need to design holistic systems.

--

--

Ayelet Baron

Pioneering Futurist. Author. Former Cisco strategist. Thinkers50 author. Forbes 50 Female Futurists #indieauthor