A small but growing movement wants you to put down your phone

[AP Photo]

More than a dozen millennials gathered in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn and placed their phones in a metal colander before two hours of reading, drawing and conversation — anything but staring at screens.

A similar scene played out a few miles away, in an early 20th-century cardboard box factory turned high-end office space. Nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of their neighbors.

The exercise was meant to drive home the importance of paying attention to real life, not the gleaming little screens that have taken over our world.

Two decades after Steve Jobs premiered the iPhone, a small but passionate movement — with offshoots in several countries — is rebelling against the omnipresent screen.

“The products have become more insidious and more extractive, exploitative,” said Dan Fox, 38, who hosted the house gathering. Members of the nascent movement “want to start a revolution,” he said.

But can an “attention activism” movement of millennials and Generation Z members break free of the world’s largest companies?