Being a Luddite Is Fun Again

I’m marching across Lower Manhattan in the middle of a heatwave with a friendly mob of Luddite gnomes, and there isn’t a phone in sight.

It’s Fourth of July weekend in New York City, and the brutal temperatures haven’t stopped a hundred-or-so people from donning pointy hats and dancing in the streets while chanting anti-Big Tech slogans. “Fuck, fuck, fuck AI,” the Luddite gnomes – people in colorful, pointy homemade hats – chant as we march, urging the confused spectators recording us to put away their pocket rectangles and join us in our sweaty, phone-less revelry. The gnomes are headed West, towards Washington Square Park, where they plan to carry out a public show trial for OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. It’s the fourth iteration of a theatrical protest event they call “S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E,” which stands for “Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience.”

This time, the protest isn’t a one-off. It’s part of the “Summer of Ludd,” a week-long festival of free public events organized and advertised entirely off of tech platforms and social media. The Summer of Ludd doesn’t have a website, but you can call a phone number to get a run-down of the events happening each day around the city. The schedule includes everything from an “offline rizz” workshop designed to help you ditch dating apps, a phone-free rave called “Let’s Get Off Together,” internet piracy 101 skill-shares, and an outdoor play that retells the story of the original Luddites. I found out about the Summer of Ludd from a local event mailing list called NYC Off Tech, but other folks I met throughout the week learned about it from posters wheat-pasted around their neighborhoods, paper event guides distributed to bookstores and coffee shops, or just word-of-mouth from friends.

Basically, the whole thing is an experiment designed to prove a single point: You don’t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun.

“Google knows next to nothing / My mom knows everything!” the gnomes chant as they hand out gnome hats to random bystanders and implore them to put away their phones. The hats, I’m told, are a reference to a Dutch anarchist group from the 1970s known for their impish culture-jamming and absurd carnival humor. It’s also “just kinda silly,” one of the organizer gnomes explains to me.

At the front of the march, two gnomes carry a giant cardboard smartphone labeled “ChatGPT,” which lists off the various well-documented social ills caused by chatbot tools. “Even if it gives us rabies / we will free the iPad babies,” 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 — consistent with recent polls showing that young people have become some of Big Tech’s fiercest critics.

One by one, witnesses take the stand to accuse Altman of numerous crimes perpetrated by OpenAI — from training models on artists’ work, to inducing AI psychosis, to accelerating the climate crisis with polluting and power-hungry AI datacenters. “I used AI to write one of my essays and got in trouble. Now I’m starting a war on AI,” one young person says from atop the soapbox, receiving cheers of approval. “These companies want you to think that you’re dumb, but that is a lie. Everyone here is smart. Everyone here is creative,” says another witness, describing how tech companies design AI tools and social media apps to make people dependent on them — making them feel helpless, alienated, and addicted to the endless scroll. The crowd roars its unanimous verdict in unison (“GUILTY!”) and everyone begins joyfully stomping on the giant cardboard GPT phone. Leading them is a gnome “executioner” holding a hammer that bears the phrase “Enoch Made Them / Enoch Shall Break Them” — an homage to the original 19^th Century Luddites, who named the hammers they famously used to smash factory machines after the guy who made both the machines and the hammers.

It’s 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’ers, 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 “indispensable” tech we’ve organized our lives around is not so indispensable after all.

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.

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’ “media spokespuppet,” a stand-in created to maintain the organizers’ anonymity while interfacing with digital media platforms and their operatives—including me.

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 “Terms of Service” agreement on a comically long brown paper scroll, which states that nothing we capture may be used to make “short-form video content” 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.

“We are interested in building alternative social infrastructure that allows us to be no longer reliant on Big Tech,” Gowanus told the group of journalists as they dutifully scribbled notes. “All our events are free, and defy any sort of transactionalism or consumption. We’re 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.”

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 “AB > AI.” Someone drew a heart next to it in black sharpie marker—an anonymous mark of approval that felt like the opposite of the subway ads for the “Friend” AI device that were widely and virally defaced last year.

Almost reflexively, I took a picture of the ad with my phone and posted it to BlueSky with the caption: “Hatred of AI now reaching the level of cultural consensus that becomes attractive to advertisers.” 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. 

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’ers 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?

The Digital Packrat Manifesto

DRM and big tech’s war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too.

Members of the Luddite Renaissance—as the loose-knit, anonymous collective that organized the Summer of Ludd refer to themselves—attempt to answer these questions in “The Event is the Medium,” a zine manifesto referencing the famous Marshall McLuhan quote 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—and directly participate in—what Luddism has to offer in 2026, instead of just yelling at people on a street corner.

What should these Events entail? This is where the Luddites become intentionally vague—not for lack of answers, but as a defense mechanism designed to make the Event unpredictable and unmonetizable. If social media’s role is to consume and metabolize human existence into an endless scroll of bite-sized, short-form video content, then the Event’s purpose is to bring people together in ways that defy categorization and documentation. Like the “Happenings” of 1960s performance artist Allan Kaprow, they can be anything and everything—as long as they are free, participatory, and never, ever boring.

“The Event may seem nebulous and surreal to you; this is on purpose,” the Luddites write in their zine manifesto. “DIY 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 ‘coolness’ to facilitate earnestness and urgency is paramount.”

In other words: If the event is the medium, the message is that being a Luddite is fun again.

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.

Somewhere in the large crowd that had gathered for the gnome protest, I ran into Motherboard founder and fellow low-tech appreciator Alex Pasternak, along with “extremely online” journalist Taylor Lorenz, who recently told WIRED 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.

“Chronically online culture has become something we’re attached to, even as activists,” Bucky, one of the Luddite organizers, told a crowd of gnomes in the park, just prior to the million-gnome march. “Our 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.”

“I want my attention back!” someone shouts in response. The crowd cheers in agreement.

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.

Others like Evgeny Morozov argued that this framing was not only naïve 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.

But there was another explanation for the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere that had little to do with tech.

“The 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,” said Bucky. “Public space is the new social media. Running an event is the new activist infographic on an Instagram story.”

You’re Invited: 404 Media’s Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!

We’re 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.

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.

“This is an activism of the moment,” internet culture theorist and media professor Douglas Rushkoff, who was also present for the Luddite gnome march, told 404 Media. “Even if the whole thing is ending, even if we’ve already lost, we’re gonna go and party. We’re 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.”

As the person who coined the rise of “viral” media back in the 90s, Rushkoff has been paying attention to tech backlash trends longer than most. His 2016 book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus” 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.

Over the next decade, the tech companies did away with their vaguely progressive, ‘Don’t Be Evil’ 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.

“The 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,” said Rushkoff. “Their hearts and their somatic sensibilities have been intentionally disrupted and stymied since they were born. And so they’re a good case study to show that whatever that part of us is, it will seek expression eventually.”

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—like the series of viral videos showing graduates booing tech CEOs 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’t be realized through the medium of news headlines and viral online attention.

Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, “AI SUCKS!”

So, what am I doing here? Why am I writing this article, attempting to capture the essence of a movement and an event that—by its very nature and stated intention—refuses to be captured? Maybe it’s because journalism is best when it acts as a cultural placeholder, a blurry indication that something happened here, and perhaps will keep happening in the future. It’s also a kind of beacon for others to find—an indication that the “inevitable” future tech companies keep threatening us with is perhaps not so inevitable, and that humans aren’t so hopeless at finding each other and creating new ways to live.

“Part of the concept is: You had to be there,” Rushkoff told me. “It’s like oh, Earth? You had to be there. Life? You had to be there.”

You just had to be there.