Basically, the whole thing is an experiment designed to prove a single point: You don\u2019t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoogle knows next to nothing \/ My mom knows everything!\u201d the gnomes chant as they hand out gnome hats to random bystanders and implore them to put away their phones. The hats, I\u2019m told, are a reference to a Dutch anarchist group<\/a> from the 1970s known for their impish culture-jamming and absurd carnival humor. It\u2019s also \u201cjust kinda silly,\u201d one of the organizer gnomes explains to me.<\/p>\n At the front of the march, two gnomes carry a giant cardboard smartphone labeled \u201cChatGPT,\u201d which lists off the various<\/a> well-documented<\/a> social ills<\/a> caused by chatbot tools. \u201cEven if it gives us rabies \/ we will free the iPad babies,\u201d the gnomes continue chanting as they set the smartphone effigy down on a grassy knoll, next to a soapbox that will be used as a witness stand. The crowd is all-ages, but skews heavily Gen-Z \u2014 consistent with recent polls showing that young people have become some of Big Tech\u2019s fiercest critics<\/a>.<\/p>\n Images courtesy Janus Rose<\/p>\n One by one, witnesses take the stand to accuse Altman of numerous crimes perpetrated by OpenAI \u2014 from training models on artists\u2019 work, to inducing AI psychosis<\/a>, to accelerating the climate crisis with polluting and power-hungry AI datacenters<\/a>. \u201cI used AI to write one of my essays and got in trouble. Now I\u2019m starting a war on AI,\u201d one young person says from atop the soapbox, receiving cheers of approval. \u201cThese companies want you to think that you\u2019re dumb, but that is a lie. Everyone here is smart. Everyone here is creative,\u201d says another witness, describing how tech companies design AI tools and social media apps to make people dependent on them \u2014 making them feel helpless, alienated, and addicted to the endless scroll. The crowd roars its unanimous verdict in unison (\u201cGUILTY!\u201d) and everyone begins joyfully stomping on the giant cardboard GPT phone. Leading them is a gnome \u201cexecutioner\u201d holding a hammer that bears the phrase \u201cEnoch Made Them \/ Enoch Shall Break Them\u201d \u2014 an homage to the original 19th Century Luddites, who named the hammers they famously used to smash factory machines after the guy who made both the machines and the hammers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s tempting to compare the spectacle to something from the days of Occupy Wall Street. But what sets the Summer of Ludd apart from what one might expect of a Luddite protest is its lack of cynicism and an overwhelming abundance of raw, anarchic joy. Far from the distorted caricature of Luddites as curmudgeonly, puritanical tsk-tsk\u2019ers, the new Luddites attract people to their movement through playfulness and participation. Instead of shaming others for too much screen time, they use public events to make their points for them, demonstrating organically and in real-time that the \u201cindispensable\u201d tech we\u2019ve organized our lives around is not so indispensable after all.<\/p>\n I first met the Luddites a week earlier in Tompkins Square Park, for a press conference hosted by their official spokesperson: a puppet made of garbage.<\/p>\n I joined a small group of journalists sitting in plastic chairs and directing questions at the puppet, who is named Gowanus, after the famously putrid Brooklyn canal where the parts of its patchwork body were found. Gowanus is the Luddites\u2019 \u201cmedia spokespuppet,\u201d a stand-in created to maintain the organizers\u2019 anonymity while interfacing with digital media platforms and their operatives\u2014including me.<\/p>\n As one might imagine, the Luddites are very averse to any kind of social media. Smartphones are verboten, and they ask every journalist present to sign a \u201cTerms of Service\u201d agreement on a comically long brown paper scroll, which states that nothing we capture may be used to make \u201cshort-form video content\u201d like TikToks or Instagram Reels. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I kept my phone stowed away and used nothing but my Hobonichi notebook, a pen, and a small voice memo recorder to do my reporting for this article.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are interested in building alternative social infrastructure that allows us to be no longer reliant on Big Tech,\u201d Gowanus told the group of journalists as they dutifully scribbled notes. \u201cAll our events are free, and defy any sort of transactionalism or consumption. We\u2019re trying to dispel that transactional element and get people to participate and create the events themselves. That is what the Summer of Ludd is all about.\u201d<\/p>\n On my train ride home, I pondered the irony of being a journalist covering an event series designed to resist digital capture and consumption. When I reached my subway stop, I noticed an ad for the second-hand online marketplace Backmarket, showing a pink Nintendo Game Boy with the text \u201cAB > AI.\u201d Someone drew a heart next to it in black sharpie marker\u2014an anonymous mark of approval that felt like the opposite of the subway ads for the \u201cFriend\u201d AI device that were widely and virally defaced last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n Almost reflexively, I took a picture of the ad with my phone and posted it to BlueSky with the caption: \u201cHatred of AI now reaching the level of cultural consensus that becomes attractive to advertisers.\u201d I woke up the next morning to thousands and thousands of interactions, many from people delighted to see their anti-AI sentiment vaguely reflected in a subway ad for overpriced second-hand goods. This made me think about the classic political trap, where capitalists co-opt social movements by channeling their radical potential into harmless forms of aesthetic consumption and feckless identity politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n How can the neo-Luddites resist these inevitable attempts at co-optation? Can Luddism generate mass-appeal beyond Y2K aesthetic Tiktok trends, where Gen-Z\u2019ers marvel at flip phones, iPods, and other retro tech as a kind of performative false-nostalgia? And how do you build a successful movement while eschewing the most common (albeit flawed) tools of mass-communication?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Digital Packrat Manifesto<\/p>\n DRM and big tech\u2019s war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too.<\/p>\n Members of the Luddite Renaissance\u2014as the loose-knit, anonymous collective that organized the Summer of Ludd refer to themselves\u2014attempt to answer these questions in \u201cThe Event is the Medium,\u201d a zine manifesto referencing the famous Marshall McLuhan quote<\/a> which, naturally, is only available in physical paper format (The Luddites humbly request that none of their work be uploaded to social media). The central idea is utilizing public space to run events that get people to experience\u2014and directly participate in\u2014what Luddism has to offer in 2026, instead of just yelling at people on a street corner.<\/p>\n What should these Events entail? This is where the Luddites become intentionally vague\u2014not for lack of answers, but as a defense mechanism designed to make the Event unpredictable and unmonetizable. If social media\u2019s role is to consume and metabolize human existence into an endless scroll of bite-sized, short-form video content, then the Event\u2019s purpose is to bring people together in ways that defy categorization and documentation. Like the \u201cHappenings\u201d of 1960s performance artist Allan Kaprow<\/a>, they can be anything and everything\u2014as long as they are free, participatory, and never, ever boring.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Event may seem nebulous and surreal to you; this is on purpose,\u201d the Luddites write in their zine manifesto. \u201cDIY shows, teach-ins, art fairs, all come with a preconceived notion of what will happen. This causes people to act in a ritualized or transactional way. Any way that you can break through the monotony of \u2018coolness\u2019 to facilitate earnestness and urgency is paramount.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words: If the event is the medium, the message is that being a Luddite is fun again.<\/p>\n I returned to Tompkins Square several times over the next week. Throughout the Summer of Ludd festivities, the Luddites had transformed the formerly-bohemian Lower East Side hangout into a kind of town square. They camped out at the park each day, providing free food, zines, and plenty of ways to plug in to the various happenings throughout the city. Basically, if you wanted to find out what the Luddites are all about, you had to meet them here, in person.<\/p>\n Images courtesy Summer of Ludd<\/p>\n Somewhere in the large crowd that had gathered for the gnome protest, I ran into Motherboard founder and fellow low-tech appreciator Alex Pasternak<\/a>, along with \u201cextremely online\u201d journalist Taylor Lorenz, who recently told WIRED<\/a> that her screen time averages 17 hours a day. Also present was Reverend Billy, leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, whose corporate exorcisms and culture-jamming theatrics have been a staple of NYC protests since the 90s.<\/p>\n \u201cChronically online culture has become something we\u2019re attached to, even as activists,\u201d Bucky, one of the Luddite organizers, told a crowd of gnomes in the park, just prior to the million-gnome march. \u201cOur consumer habits are tracked, analyzed, and sold back to us. Every time we seek fun in our little light-boxes, we feed a beast which surveils us, which exploits our time and our imagination, and which lines the pockets of big psycho assholes like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesson, and Tim Cook.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI want my attention back!\u201d someone shouts in response. The crowd cheers in agreement.<\/p>\n Bucky mentions the 2012 Arab Spring uprisings as a pivotal example of how Silicon Valley extended this capture to the realm of activism. In the heyday of Twitter, tech companies and most of the Western press pushed a narrative that social media platforms were helping liberate people around the world from oppressive regimes. Thanks to these platforms and their beneficent corporate overlords, the argument went, the techno-utopian dream of the 90s internet would be realized, and dictators would crumble under the power of free information and free markets.<\/p>\n Others like Evgeny Morozov<\/a> argued that this framing was not only na\u00efve and wrong, but allowed companies like Twitter and Facebook to advance their ambitions and establish themselves as centralized social infrastructure under the guise of do-gooder tech saviorism. At the same time, the ad-powered surveillance networks built by social media enabled governments to crack down on dissidents like never before, paving the way for things like facial recognition, algorithmic manipulation, and discriminatory digital ID laws.<\/p>\n But there was another explanation for the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere that had little to do with tech.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason hundreds of thousands of people went to Tahrir Square is because a million people lived within ten miles of it. That is public space, and public space is where politics happens,\u201d said Bucky. \u201cPublic space is the new social media. Running an event is the new activist infographic on an Instagram story.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You\u2019re Invited: 404 Media\u2019s Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!<\/p>\n We\u2019re celebrating with TWO NIGHTS of good times: A live taping of the podcast, and a party the following night! Paid 404 Media subscribers get free and discounted access. Details below.<\/p>\n With hatred of big tech and AI hitting the mainstream, it makes a lot of sense that something like the Summer of Ludd would emerge in this particular moment. Everywhere I go, there is an overwhelming sense that the Silicon Valley experiment is on its last legs. The companies that once aimed to make good products and postured as democracy-loving and progressive now open ally themselves with fascists, actively enshittify the internet with slop, and force-feed us annoying AI features that nobody wants. In response, the new Luddites seek not to abandon technology entirely, but build new infrastructure that embraces proximity and in-person human relationships, instead of alienation and doom-scrolling.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an activism of the moment,\u201d internet culture theorist and media professor Douglas Rushkoff, who was also present for the Luddite gnome march, told 404 Media. \u201cEven if the whole thing is ending, even if we\u2019ve already lost, we\u2019re gonna go and party. We\u2019re gonna go down having fun. And if we can have a good enough party in face-to-face, non-technological, non-digital interaction, we will seduce the world like Abby Hoffman never could.\u201d<\/p>\n As the person who coined the rise of \u201cviral\u201d media back in the 90s, Rushkoff has been paying attention to tech backlash trends longer than most. His 2016 book \u201cThrowing Rocks at the Google Bus\u201d captures a pivotal moment where public sentiment toward Silicon Valley began to sour, as companies like Google and Facebook disrupted public infrastructure and reshaped the San Francisco Bay Area in their image.<\/p>\n Over the next decade, the tech companies did away with their vaguely progressive, \u2018Don\u2019t Be Evil<\/a>\u2019 public image, and young people who came of age in the aftermath increasingly found themselves attracted to tech backlash and the neo-Luddite movement as a reflection of their lived reality.<\/p>\n \u201cThe extent of the skinner box that this generation is living in is more extreme. We adapted to it as best we could, but they were born inside of it,\u201d said Rushkoff. \u201cTheir hearts and their somatic sensibilities have been intentionally disrupted and stymied since they were born. And so they\u2019re a good case study to show that whatever that part of us is, it will seek expression eventually.\u201d<\/p>\n Bleak job prospects and a visibly collapsing climate further explain why some of the biggest moments of Big Tech backlash in recent months have come from Gen-Z\u2014like the series of viral videos showing graduates booing tech CEOs<\/a> for praising AI during their commencement speeches. But the Luddites are quick to point out that their movement is multi-generational, and their goals for the Summer of Ludd can\u2019t be realized through the medium of news headlines and viral online attention.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/storage.ghost.io\/c\/0f\/76\/0f76b548-bc58-4f25-abc3-3f5ebca07da4\/content\/images\/thumbnail\/getty-images-MfjVCkPekQQ-unsplash-ad5aed07-ac4f-478c-b4cc-595258400611.jpg\")
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