When I first called Caitlin Begg, the 31-year-old founder of Authentic Social, an applied research lab focused on sociology and technology, it went through to voicemail. “You’ve reached the landline of Caitlin Begg,” the message said. I tried again, and she picked up. “I got my landline in January 2023 because I wanted an alternative to smartphones,” she says. “I wanted to be reachable by people without having to go on my phone.”

Begg bought the baby blue vintage corded phone, a working 80s-era model, on eBay in early 2023, then reset it with a new telephone cord. It has a different number from her smartphone, but it’s one she has given out to work clients and friends alike – and now me. “There’s no caller ID, so you don’t know who is going to call, but that’s the fun of it,” she says. “It’s all done in one place, so you focus on the one task at hand, which is the call – you’re not scrolling on Instagram or doing other things.” She’s found that the calls tend to last longer, without the tedious preamble of texting beforehand that has become something of a social norm.

If you end up on the landline side of TikTok, which I have over the past month or so, you’ll learn that Begg isn’t the only one who posts glowing reviews of her vintage landline. It’s mostly young people posting videos of themselves using their mum’s phone, aesthetic videos of them speaking on a vintage phone, treating their smartphone like a landline, or sharing how-to accounts of how to set up a landline. Even those without a landline are posting about how they “yearn” for a landline, or would get one if everyone else was using one. In the comments, Gen Zers express the desire to return to an era of technology that they didn’t experience: “I crave the feeling of twirling a phone cord around my finger when on a call”. 

Shaughnessy Barker, a 26-year-old in British Columbia, Canada, is one of the Gen Z “slower way of life” creators showing people on TikTok how to set up vintage landlines. She installed hers in January as part of a New Year’s resolution. “I had been thinking about it for quite a while, especially because I’d only been without one for probably four years since leaving my parents’ house – they still used one,” she says. “The nostalgia was a huge part of it, but I also wanted to be more intentional with my time and my relationships.” For Barker, knowing someone can reach her if they really need to, even when she is away from her smartphone, helps relieve the pressure of being “always reachable”.

As a self-confessed bad-texter, Barker figured a landline could help her speak to the people she loves more. Over the past six months, she says picking up the phone to call her family or friends has become more instinctual than texting. “Allowing things to be a little more one-on-one has done so much for the connections that I have with people because it’s so different hearing people over the phone,” she says. “I love hanging out in my kitchen and talking to my dad every day. He just did a three-month stint in the hospital, and so it’s super important to me that if he calls me and I answer, he knows I’m home.”

“First, they were calling from their cellphone like, ‘Why do you have this?’ Now, they get it: it’s more tactile to sit by my window and carve out time for meaningful conversations. Now everyone wants a landline”

The first telephone line was constructed in 1877-78, changing long-distance communication forever. By 1900, there were nearly 600,000 phones in the US telephone system; by 1910, that number had risen to 5.8 million. Once a household staple, landlines have steadily disappeared since the rise of the smartphone. In 2004, more than 90 per cent of US adults lived in households with an operational landline. Today, that figure is little more than 20 per cent. The current online landline revival is unlikely to reverse that decline, precisely because mobile phones have become the default. Even Begg describes landlines as a “supplement to the smartphone, not a replacement for the smartphone”. For some, though, that is exactly the point: the promise of even a few hours away from their phone is reason enough to plug one back in.

After noticing that she was feeling “stressed out” every time she was on her phone, Mariah Houghton, a 29-year-old social media manager in New York, bought a landline and set up a line for it with AT&T. She’d already set up a DVD player to avoid having access to “so much entertainment”. She now uses her landline every day, giving her new number to only four people – her mum, dad, stepmum and sister – to be intentionally selective about who has access to her before 10am or after 5pm, when she tries to shut off from the “digital world”. “First, they were calling from their cellphone like, ‘Why do you have this?’” she says. “Now, they get it: it’s more tactile to sit by my window and carve out time for meaningful conversations. Now everyone wants a landline.” 

There’s enough of a market for landlines that Catherine Goetze, also known as CatGPT, says she made $789,000 in the first six months of selling Physical Phones, a new product that connects to Bluetooth. Others, like Begg, may be turning to vintage reseller sites, but it is all part of the growing “digital detox” market, filled with various iterations of dumbphones and analogue alternatives. In fact, everyone I spoke to about landlines had multiple other strategies and products for reducing their smartphone use. Begg has been reading non-fiction every morning for four years straight, while Barker refers to her landline as part of an “ecosystem” that also includes a mail club, radios, records and DVDs. “A lot of people who are gravitating towards this are just burnt out,” she says.

Simona Ruzer, a 29-year-old content creator, refers to her phone addiction as the “biggest problem” in her life. She’s not alone: a 2024 survey found that about half of Gen Z wishes that social media apps like TikTok and X didn’t exist. But it can feel near impossible to get back to analogue tech, and simpler times – AI is already rapidly developing, and addictive social media platforms have become ingrained into our personal and professional lives. Digital detox content on social media meets that yearning, but it’s also kind of an oxymoron to engage with it, even when you can’t help it. 

“There’s a niche on the internet geared towards people like me, who watch a lot of content about how consuming content is bad for you, which is pretty ironic,” says Ruzer, who has posted about listening to Lena Dunham’s Famesick through her landline. “I’ll show my friends a video of how bad phones really are, and they’re like, ‘So get off of it’. But I don’t think anyone is really arguing at this point that there isn’t some element of damage that we get from being on them for too long.” She has a Brick, a new app-blocking device, which she says has been useful for getting her screentime down, but finds using her Physical Phone landline “novel and fun”. She tries to call people from memory, committed to “bringing back the art of memorising phone numbers”.

Before getting her landline, Ruzer says her mum would often call her out on being on social media while talking on the phone. It’s something she took to heart. “I don’t live near my parents, and she could tell I wasn’t fully there,” she says. “These days, everything I’m buying is to be more mindful.” She only uses it about twice a week, but by curling the cord of her baby pink landline with her finger, she can at least feel like she lives in a 2000s rom-com. “It was all so simple then – you could just call your friends’ house and see what they were up to.”