LUXEMBOURG CITY, Luxembourg — It’s a bitterly cold day in the Low Country of Luxembourg. So when James Damore opens the door to a seventeenth-century cathedral, offering it up as a kind of refuge, I fall in line behind his gangly footsteps and follow him inside.

“I like noncommercial spaces,” he whispers softly, as we shuffle through the soaring Notre-Dame de Luxembourg. The cathedral is dark, lit mostly by stained glass windows and dozens of candles at the altar. He likes walking through here, he tells me, to appreciate the beauty, the stillness, and “a project meant to serve a higher purpose.” But it is also a suitably analog setting for a man who, ever since he became persona non grata in Silicon Valley back in 2017, has been living like a Luddite.

Damore has blocked digital ad networks from using his personal information to serve him customized ads. He’s switched his Android phone’s colors to gray scale so that it will not visually appeal to him. He uses neither its ringer nor vibrations to alert him to incoming calls (only his wife’s calls can break through). And—perhaps most remarkably—he told me he doesn’t even read the news. “If something is important,” he says, “then other people will tell me.”

As a result, he is often unaware of the existence of celebrities. Timothée Chalamet? Never heard of him. Chappell Roan? Nope, not her either. But what surprises me most is that Damore has never heard of Dylan Mulvaney and the controversy over the trans influencer’s involvement with Bud Light. “Me not knowing is never notable to me,” he says.

He has had very good reason to log off.