The generation raised on smartphones is choosing phone-free dancefloors
A hopeful sign that the smartphone era is turning
Enter just about any nightclub in Berlin, and your phone’s cameras will be covered with stickers before you even pay your entrance fee. The general rule in this city is:
No photos on the dancefloor.
Let others be free, without having to worry about how they might show up in other people’s pictures or videos. And let yourself be free; in the present moment, fully participating in what might make a night special, rather than being so busy trying to collect souvenirs that the night passes you by.
Lutz Leichsenring, co-founder of nightlife consultancy VibeLab and former spokesperson of Berlin’s Clubcommission, estimates that around 90% of the city’s venues enforce this no-photo rule. Break it, and you’ll get a warning. Some stricter venues even remove you immediately.
With this, another cultural dimension emerged: dancefloors are for dancing, and it’s generally not appreciated when you go stand still on the dancefloor to look at your phone for longer than a brief moment. A bit like looking at your phone in the cinema.
Berlin is a rare exception, and in many places, taking photos and videos during events has remained the norm, with a 2019 UK study finding that 70% of people find it annoying.
But something is shifting…
It’s no longer a Berlin thing. It’s going global.
London’s FOLD club has had the policy since it opened in 2018, with Fabric following in 2021. In Ibiza, Pikes introduced a blanket camera ban in August 2024, seven nights a week.
In New York, the shift has been especially visible: Nowadays has enforced a no-phones rule since 2015, and in 2025 alone, Signal, Refuge, and Green Room all opened with the policy built in from day one. For younger clubbers who have never known a dancefloor without phones, phone-free nights have become something to actively seek out. “It’s healthy, especially for my age group,” said one 25-year-old at her first phone-free party, in a NYT piece on the trend in late 2025.
I’m a millennial. I remember what life was like before smartphones. Before being always on. And I’ve been experimenting to reconnect with that feeling. My phone-free month. My no-news March. Ditching streaming.
But when I talk with younger people, who haven’t experienced the world that way, I often get a sense that it can seem unimaginable to them. Just as I once found it hard to imagine life without a TV.
Club spaces are often the first place where young people choose to be without their phones in their free time and find they don’t miss them.
What gives me hope is that there is now a generation that doesn’t remember what it was like before. They are pioneering digital fasts. In nightclubs, but also outside them, in cafes, nature walks, and even on retreats. Organisations like The Offline Club are a great example of that trend.
It’s great that millennials are saying, “Hold up, maybe we’ve gone a bit too far with all this”, but nostalgia isn’t what will get us out of this mess. A younger generation that has no recollection of what once was, but instead envisions how things might be, taking the status quo as a starting point. That’s inspiring.
No phones on the ____floor.
Let’s fill in the gaps together.
༺𓆩 Don’t miss 𓆪༻
I built a free browser extension that turns your distractions into forests and cleaner oceans. I’m not joking!
Imagine the impact we can have together.
ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, dub maestro Adrian Sherwood gave his own spin to Nightmares On Wax’s In A Space Outta Sound album. An incredibly smooth record.
love this!
I love it very much. I have hope. When I first started advocating for this issue only a couple years ago, I was met with a lot of resistance in forums such as Reddit, where people get very, very angry if you suggest that their phone use is hurting the dancefloor. But now we see the trend growing and gaining momentum. There's still a very long way to go, but at the least we're seeing organizations be more conscious about how they set this policy.