I spent the spring and summer of 2025 on my phone. It was rarely far from my hand, this time-eating box I used to communicate with my loved ones, read the news, laugh at the brainrot comedic stylings of a few thousand people, navigate cities, check into flights and subway turnstiles, listen to songs, and about twenty-seven other things. I asked it for answers. I followed its direction. It extended my capacities; it eroded me. My phone. It was a neat tile of glass that gave me the world: as instruction, update, entertainment, alarm. It was a vast library and a slot machine. A map and a leash. The year had been a challenging one. The leash, possibly in response, was growing tighter.
Then in the fall a couple people mentioned New York City’s “neo-Luddite scene” to me. The things I read to find out more were mostly trend pieces about Gen-Z phoneless parties and the use of dumbphones, but in their interstices I could hazily perceive something more: a loose coalition of likeminded young people who, in the last couple of years, began to organize around divesting from Big Tech, spending less time online, and connecting with one another. In November, my partner, somehow both highly offline and in the know, sent me the link for a Luddite event titled “Should We Get Off?” advertised on the listings website RedCal. The panel promised a moderated discussion about “tech hopes + fears” that was open to all regardless of orientation toward Big Tech; its hand-drawn flyer featured a recumbent figure asking “touch grass or touch glass?” It would be held in the basement of a Midtown mall that Friday night.
I went. I was curious and open-minded, but also, maybe, a bit arms-folded. The way most people used the term, a Luddite was someone who eschewed technology in a willfully impractical, isolating manner. Was this anything to aspire to? The original Luddites were early-19th-century English textile workers who took hammers to the industrial looms that threatened their way of life after attempts at civil disobedience and consciousness-raising had failed. They had been set upon violently by the state; many of them were tried and executed. Perhaps to be a Luddite—to stand against technological change—was to be, by definition, on the losing team. On the train, I checked Signal and vaguely remembered that Lord Byron, a favorite of my early twenties, had spoken in the Luddites’ defense to Parliament. Maybe he had written a poem about them. I tried to find it, on my phone.
When I arrived, I found about ninety people sitting in folding chairs. The crowd looked a little twentysomething, skewed a little Manhattan. A few passers-by walking through the mall’s public space lingered, looking on curiously; the Should We Get Off? organizers encouraged them to join and take a seat. Attendees were asked to put stickers over their phone cameras. We did. The panel—a debate between youngish white speakers who ranged from tech-thoughtful to tech-critical to overtly tech-eschewing—began.
I liked the conversation well enough, but what stuck in my mind came after. A twentysomething man who’d been on the panel offered me a blade of green from a deli container: an invitation to touch literal grass. The organizers nimbly separated the crowd into smaller groups of eight to twelve, each with a facilitator, and invited attendees to talk honestly about how technology functioned in their lives. I am an immigrant multiple times over and perhaps relatedly always scanning for group culture. Here I was struck by the quality of people’s listening, by the sense of mutual welcome on display. The conversation in my group ranged from personally divulging to philosophical to imaginative, the latter mode circling how we wanted technology to function in our lives, and what we needed to get there. I felt startled by how rarely I’d encountered this line of questioning being asked at all, in participatory ways, of ordinary people, during the past two decades of warp-speed, warping technological change.
After the event, people milled about, talking and exchanging contact information, writing down email addresses and newsletters in little notebooks or in the Notes apps on their now unstickered devices. I left feeling a pooling, connective happiness. I went home and realized that I hadn’t looked at my phone for six hours.
In the months afterward, I stopped by more Luddite events. I signed up for NYC Off Tech, a newsletter that every two weeks sent a little dispatch that was half scene report, half events calendar. There were parties, a protest outside OpenAI’s offices, mass participatory readings of Ginsberg’s Howl in Washington Square Park, teach-ins, art performances, more.
I left feeling a pooling, connective happiness. I went home and realized that I hadn’t looked at my phone for six hours.
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In the depth of winter I went to S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. #3: GNOME ON THE CUBE, a rally that stood for Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience. I hadn’t read the details of the event very well and arrived expecting a protest or rally inside the Fifth Avenue Apple store, nicknamed the Cube. There was no discernible event happening inside, just people waiting for their Genius Bar appointments. Outside the Cube was a nasty little humanoid robot dancing with a cowboy hat on.
It was a demo, I gathered, from a Chinese robotics company. The thing was absolutely mobbed by a sea of smartphones. Shivering in my parka, I watched the people attached to said smartphones, all transfixed, all recording as it swayed jerkily.
The Luddites were in a small park across the street. They greeted me by name and handed out crafted paper gnome hats to me and other attendees—a nod, a key Luddite organizer told me later, to the Polish anti-authoritarian resistance movement The Orange Alternative. They had arranged a series of group activities of varying impact and whimsy: People were cheered on as they deleted social media and AI apps with little accompanying rituals; someone made a map of places to kiss in NYC; someone stood on one of the soapboxes provided and began to talk about the costs of Big Tech in our lives; someone brought out an iPad and ceremonially smashed it with a hammer.
Soon an early-twenties woman with beautiful soaring hair and combat boots was leading the crowd in a series of chants. I registered within myself a curious mixture of skepticism and longing. It was time to march upon the Cube. We crossed the street and encircled it, the glass Apple Store structure, chanting and singing as a brass band called Rude Mechanical Orchestra played. And then the crowd began to run.
All of us—circled up, chanting, and clapping—started to dance maniacally around the cube, as the band blasted something loud and impish and Slavic. So many of us, hundreds of gnomes. It was ridiculous and odd and totally delightful. A pulsing electricity found me as I moved with the others, drew me out of my mind and into the world. It was more distilled joy than I’d felt in months.
I struggled to explain any of this to other people in the days afterwards. You had to be there, maybe.
New York’s Luddite scene, I came to learn, is a mushroom ring of many sprouting entities. Many of the organizers skewed twentysomething, but there are several thirtysomethings to sixtysomethings in the mix. There are indie technologists and unemployed people, gig workers, and a group of writers working on a soon-to-be-launched magazine. There is the School of Radical Attention (SoRA), a hothouse of Princeton graduates who wanted to create a space dedicated to attention activism. There are people affiliated with companies like dumb.co and Lightphone, which offer minimalist devices and digital-detox offerings for people who want to stay connected without being pulled into the addictive ecosystems of Big Tech.
There are writers and thinkers like Brian Merchant (Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (journalist and author of the Substack “The Tech Bubble”). There are sympathetic fellow travelers who might not quite consider themselves full-bore Luddites, like the social media influencer Adam Aleksic, who has a millions-strong following on TikTok and Instagram under the handle @etymologynerd. And then there are Situationist-coded artist-activists influenced by Bread and Puppet Theater, the radical theater group born on the Lower East Side in the 1960s. Some of these latter Luddites are mentored by the performance artist William Talen and his wife Savitri, best known for their pro-environment performance group Earth Chxrch and Talen’s persona Reverend Billy and the Stop-Shopping Choir.
New York’s Luddite scene, I came to learn, is a mushroom ring of many sprouting entities.
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What unites these disparate players is less hostility to technology per se and more a desire to reclaim what the apocryphal Ned Ludd’s militants spoke of when they wrote, in an 1812 letter to an industrialist, “We will never lay down our Arms . . . to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality.”
The Luddites see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.” Collective effervescence, I suspect, was what I was surprised to encounter in myself that winter day by the Apple Cube. The phrase, first coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, refers to the electric and exhilarating energy you might find at raves, protests, marathons, and houses of worship: the feeling you have when you’re connected to something larger than yourself.
The Luddites I met made few direct demands of institutional power. There was no lobbying for antitrust legislation, or for regulating addictive design features and removing ed tech from schools (though a couple of Luddites volunteered for Alex Bores, the New York congressional candidate, and some were tracking the writer Jonathan Haidt’s work around adolescent smartphone use). Unlike their forebears, these Luddites did not advocate for property destruction, save the symbolic iPad at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. Instead, their focus was on the prefigurative, revolutionary potential of events—specifically free, public, participatory, unpredictable events.
There was a theory of change behind this. Back at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E, someone had handed me a zine titled The Event Is The Medium, a nod to Marshall McLuhan that doubled as a succinct description of the Luddites’ strategy. The event: no tickets, no invitation on social media, no closed guest list, and no promise that things would unfold according to plan. The Luddites ran these events and hoped other people would run their own events, and in doing so, change their own norms around sociality.
The aim was lofty: to undo decades of social conditioning by technology and reorient people toward unmediated, embodied connection. One in-person meet-up at a time, they would inspire people to make tech work for them instead of the other way around.
I wished to know more. One bright mild day this past May, I went to B Cup Cafe in the East Village to interview a key group from the artist-activist wing of the scene. Captain Ludd, General Ludd, Skeleton Ludd, and Lighthouse Ludd were natives of San Francisco, New Paltz, the East Village, and the Lower East Side. They were in their mid-and-early twenties, and in the tradition of their Luddite forebears they wished to be anonymous. To aid them in this mission, they’d created a spokes-puppet named Gowanus, born of a dumpster outside a salvage store in his namesake Brooklyn neighborhood. When invited to make media appearances, the group sent Gowanus. Hasan Minhaj had recently interviewed him, and Chelsea Handler was trying to.
I’d been down to meet Gowanus, but the artist-activists agreed to also talk to me as individuals. Seated on a balaclava’d Luddite’s lap, Gowanus looked large and lumpy and lugubrious. I adjusted the puppet’s tie, looked into his slightly crossed eyes—jar lids, bottle caps, hot glue—and asked if his skin was carpet backing. It was. A parade of East Village passersby gawked at us, some laughing with delight; Gowanus is an attention-getter. Some locals stopped to chat with the Luddites, who responded chirpily in a mix of English and Spanish. A baby, absolutely shellacked with drool, tried to befriend the puppet.
I asked the group why they’d chosen to call themselves Luddites—a term I noticed produced some ambivalence in people I knew whenever I talked to them about the scene. Why “Luddite” and not “attention activist” or “anti-tech organizer”? Captain Ludd, a tall floppy-haired 22-year-old writer, told me that it was because the movement was at once broader and more specific than just being anti-tech. They opposed the social costs and fascist alignment of Big Tech, not technology qua technology. The idea was to be connected to a historic tradition, a lineage of people who took a stand against technological exploitation.
Gowanus interjected to add he was unconcerned with getting “1 billion people to identify as Luddites.” The aim was to propose a new ethos for living and to spread that ethos as widely as possible, including to people who would never adopt the label or even meaningfully oppose Big Tech. As far as many neo-Luddites were concerned, you could be a Luddite and have a smartphone, though most core organizers chose not to. In general, they were open to a diversity of approaches. They emphasized people’s freedom to determine their own relationships to tools, convenience, and inconvenience. Some people in the movement were technologists themselves and wanted the machines in their lives to be more independent and less captured by Silicon Valley.
The menace, to them, was more specific than “technology,” a word too baggy to be of much use. A more precise bogeyman was data, the endless computational trawl of the Big-Tech ecosystem and its growing fusion with the state. Data, its collection, its quantification, its transformation of human beings into measurable, sortable, governable units. I asked Gowanus and crew if they considered themselves on or of the left; they said yes. Captain Ludd referenced Cambridge Analytica’s role in bringing about Trumpism and IBM’s collusion with the Nazis and direct servicing of the Holocaust. He seemed seized by the computational needs of fascist systems, which require people classified before they can rank, target, exclude, deport, or disappear them. AI was not, to them, a malevolent superintelligence so much as a gigantic intensification of data power. Data was a machinery of legibility, and legibility was often the precondition for control.
They were interested, each of them, in doing something beyond analysis and handwringing.
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“We are standing still and they’re pushing shit onto us,” Skeleton Ludd said. Lighthouse Ludd, nodding, described her little sister, sent home during the pandemic with a computer, after which she changed and grew increasingly “self-referential to the screen.” Gowanus made a distinction between a tool that helped with life and an infrastructure that captured life, and the others agreed. They were interested, each of them, in doing something beyond analysis and handwringing. That included creating a cultural front against the great replacement of public space, play, and common life with quantification, dashboards, glowing screens, and endless feeds.
Apropos of this, they told me about “Summer of Ludd,” a weeklong festival of more than 120 free and public events that would take place in Tompkins Square Park starting at the end of June. In keeping with their low-tech ways, they would not advertise on social media. Instead, they would be wheatpasting, flyering, and publicizing a hotline that anyone could call for information.
Summer of Ludd. It would be, I sensed a culture-jamming nod to Woodstock. It could be, General Ludd, a droll 25-year-old, told me, the hard launch of the movement they’d been building—a structure test to see if they could pull off a massive, magical event that wasn’t advertised anywhere online.
According to the NYC Off Tech newsletter’s website, “NYC Off Tech Is . . .”:
friends hanging out
a snapshot of society rearranging to save itself maybe it always does
a personal invite for you to exercise your own vision onto the world
infraculture
a mess because you need mess first to find things
a guy urging you to get off your phone & to trust that if you just do something random in the city right now it will matter because we’re in a unique moment where the current paradigm is teetering and with enough movement any movement we can topple it
The newsletter is run by Nick Plante, a thoughtful, slightly tentative 25-year-old who was, incidentally, the organizer who’d handed me the blade of grass at Should We Get Off?. Plante is central in the connective matrix of the Luddiverse, an unobtrusive power broker in contact with its many leaderless arms. He described himself as someone whose life and thinking were shaped by the atmosphere of digital saturation. His early tech consciousness began as a feeling, a life-thinning malaise of alienation and ennui. When he was in high school, around 2015 or 2016, his school shifted most student life onto iPads: exams, homework, classroom communication. He remembered emailing a girlfriend during the school day and thinking that every teacher should be telling the students to put the iPads away.
Plante left his home of Long Island to go to UPenn, where he studied the social and developmental effects of social media and smartphones. He saw evidence that people undervalued situational factors like groupthink and cultural norms when it came to device use. “[People] overestimate their own willpower,” Plante said. They figured that if tech really became a problem for them, they would know it and be able to quit.
But the explosion of screen-mediated connection and the atrophy of non-digital avenues of communication means that quitting is challenging. In fact, the rise in AI companionship and synthetic intimacy—chatbot friend, therapist, qt gf, always-available listener—made the Luddites’ insistence on the embodied, unoptimized, social encounter feel political in itself. Tech had an “outsized effect on us as sexual beings in the world,” Plante said of his generation. “By the age of, like, 12, I’m scrolling through a feed that’s like half girls my age in swimsuits, half baseball players on the Yankees. That has implications for how you understand yourself and approach each other.” Without interventions, a society organized around frictionless and synthetic responsiveness could lose the muscles required for reciprocal life. My partner went to one of the Ludd parties and told me about an activity where strangers were guided through making sustained eye contact with each other. He seemed genuinely moved by the exercise while finding it difficult to articulate why.
For Plante, the movement now is bigger than phones, social media, or gen-AI adherence or resistance. “What’s happening is a much wider-scale renegotiation of what it means to be with each other in this city,” he said to me in Tompkins Square Park, one of the central nodes of Luddite organizing in New York’s urban space, chosen in part for its historical ties to labor struggles and ’60s counterculture. “It is kind of this shared project in being re-enchanted with each other, the time we spend with each other, and the rest of nature that we share. . . . I think we know more than enough in our bodies and in our spirits that it’s time to move past [phones and platform-dominant life] onto something else.”
Damian Thomas, a 25-year-old freelancer, writer, and technologist, has been working on an adjacent puzzle: how to wrest back from Big Tech the infrastructure that supports independent and community culture. Thomas grew up a Black gamer in Florida and started messing with computers when he was 11. Though he was still a kid when Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram started to dominate the internet, he still remembers the arrival of Web 2.0 as a kind of break. “I felt,” he said, “like the internet had been taken from me.”
Now he lamented how much Big Tech had succeeded in wiping out the old architecture of independent culture: alt weeklies, local papers, record stores, bulletin boards, magazines, event calendars, and small publications devoted to subculture and scene.
Thomas moved to New York and met Plante at Delete Day, a Luddite event. In January 2025, he built Unplatform, an interactive guide to help people leave social media, but he found it was hard to get people to quit. People weren’t on Instagram because they loved it as a social media platform. They were there because their friends, shows, events, political updates, artists, and creative communities had all been pushed there.
Thomas began to shift his focus toward rebuilding what platforms had leveled and replaced. The question was how musicians, writers, artists, organizers, venues, and scene-builders could stop trying to play the algorithm like Vegas slots and instead build a combination of offline and Web 1.5, lower-tech alternatives—the kind needed to figure out that crucial question: What’s happening?
I asked Thomas whether Luddism, in practice, had a little bit of the logic of the carbon footprint baked into it: a focus on changing individual behavior rather than aiming for industry regulation. He said he appreciated the energy around tech regulation and thought it was good that you had people, “not just dweebs,” thinking about tech company accountability, no phones in schools, and Lina Khan-style doctrine. But also, he believed that politics flowed downstream of culture, and so culture was what he and his comrades were concerned with.
“I don’t think that the US federal government is going to produce much meaningful action on any of these issues any time soon,” he told me. “The enclosure of culture is happening right now. There’s an immediacy,” he said. “It’s much better to be creating the organizational capacity within grassroots communities to resist, and then at some point down the line, that capacity can be leveraged to push congresspeople in the right direction.”
People, in his eyes, were staying on platforms that made them actively unhappy because they wanted to be in the know, because they wanted to follow the artists and spaces and musicians they liked. “That is not a consumer problem,” Thomas said, “that is a producer problem. And that’s why I’m trying to organize those producers.”
For most of my life, I was something of a techno-optimist. In childhood I was thrilled by The Jetsons, by the compact iridescence of the CD, by the science-fiction-made-reality of Biosphere 2. In my early teens, the Internet came into my life with its screechy dial-up yawp and exploded through the restrictive compound of my early-aughts upbringing in the Gulf. I was a real romantic for the utopianism, borderless freedoms, and playful expression of the early web.
Social media platforms, in my lifetime, helped ordinary people find one another, narrate their lives, organize against power, pressure institutions, and make visible much in our culture that had long been deliberately unseen. They had caused the culture to shift in infinite ways, many of them ridiculous and terrible, some of them tilted toward social justice and historical honesty. Marriage equality, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, mutual aid networks, disabled communities, gay kids in hostile towns finding one another—it seemed only truthful to say that the age of social media and smartphones helped make these more possible. And some of those shifts in mass opinion were easy-come, easy-go: mercurial, shallowly held, easily co-opted; the reactionary backlash we are now living through seems evidence enough of that.
The platforms are rancid now; the incentives of capitalist forces and quantification have mined and fracked the internet into an arid, increasingly joyless desert. But for a time, they changed the conditions under which people could encounter one another and be encountered by the world. The Luddiverse, I could see, was trying to make this happen again.
Technology protracts us. It extends our capacities and faculties as human beings, and in that extension, there is a simultaneous amputation, a something-lost that is often only visible or admissible in hindsight. Earlier in the week that I met the Luddites at B Cup, I caught up with one of my oldest friends about my experience of the past year, which included the second real depression of my life. Having loved addicts, I’ve always been mindful of dependence on substances, adhering immoderately to an anything-in-moderation vibe. But now that I was doing better, I had to face how intensely attached I’d become to my phone during my lowest period, an attachment all the more overwhelming for how easy it was to hide. If I had taken to drinking, my loved ones would have noticed in weeks. Instead, I read article after article, followed subreddits down to their magmatic cores, let myself be hypnotized by YouTube, ironically becoming worse than I’d ever been at responding to anyone.
My friend, unusual in my circle for being something of a tech booster, furrowed his forehead. He asked me how many hours of screentime we were talking during my lowest point, like actually. I looked off into the distance, feeling a profound desire to not respond honestly. Then I gave my answer.
“Jesus, Sarah,” my friend said, the shock visible in his face. “I had no idea.”
It’s the oldest, AA-ass saw: the first step is admitting you have a problem.
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I hadn’t told Plante and Thomas all this. I did ask them about tech addiction. They seemed a little wary of approaching tech resistance through that lens. They didn’t want their version of Luddism to be a latter-day temperance movement. Plante told me he saw more of a parallel to feminist struggle: consciousness raising, awareness of how power structures manifested in our personal lives, and the injunction to choose the life you want. Less the shallow choice of consumer will, more the existential clarion call to claim and free yourself, claim and free others, to be sufficiently courageous to take the reins of your own life.
But the hallmark of addiction is the inability to choose. The difference between a habit and addiction is precisely choicelessness, the compulsion toward something regardless of its consequences. Our dominant technologies have, for reasons of profit-seeking, been engineered to maximize our dependence on them. Every time I went anywhere, from the subway to the streets, I saw the vast majority of people staring into the portals of their smartphones. I learned that the global average TikTok user watches over 100,000 videos annually, and the average American spends 50 hours a week on screens, 16 of those on social media platforms. An American born in 2025 is projected to spend 21 years of their lifetime looking at screens.
It’s the oldest, AA-ass saw: the first step is admitting you have a problem.
Mark Fisher wrote of the debtor-addict as late capitalism’s ideal subject, bound by need and compulsion, disciplined through private shame: the definition of unfree. What I found most chilling when I considered what the Luddites were trying to resist was how this choicelessness felt structural. Big Tech dominance was framed to us as inevitable; the public was getting genAI rammed down its collective throat, the sheer inconvenience of not having a smartphone at all was shocking to parse, once I looked into it for myself. But people were doing it—refusing, divesting, going without. So much of what the Luddites were working on was making these refusals easier, less socially and structurally costly.
It is the hardest thing in the world to see clearly: yourself, the world, yourself in the world, the world in yourself. This is part of what makes “online” so difficult to think about. It is not a place, exactly, though we go there. It is not a tool, though we use it. It is not a substance, though we reach for it when we are anxious or curious or bored or sad or wanting. In The Dark Forest Theory of The Internet, writer and academic Bogna Konior asks us, as a thought experiment, to conceive of the internet as an alien invasion. The desire to “exhibit, externalize, and express,” she points out, drives us as if we are automatons, programmed, NPC. She goes on to reference the philosopher Anton Barba-Kay, whose book A Web of Our Own Making is one of the better texts I’ve read on digital technology. He posits that the internet operates for us the way heaven and hell operated for Christians of old: it is a place entered daily—or hourly—by our imagination and desire, a place that we make real by behaving as if it were real, transformatively reprogramming how we think and act.
The online world presents itself as spectral, nowhere and everywhere, a cloud, a feed, a scroll. But it has in actuality taken over and transformed the physical world: undersea cables that span continents, data centers the size of Manhattan, child laborers in cobalt mine shafts, satellites in the exosphere, server farms, water, electricity, logistics, and militarized supply chains. Konior conceives of the online world as a vast terraforming project, perhaps one of the greatest such projects our species has undertaken. We have changed, physically changed, the whole world for this spectral realm. We have changed, ourselves, individually and as a public. We will continue to. The question for me is: To what end? And also: Who decides?
For the moment, anti-Big-Tech sentiment is multipartisan, with adherents on the right and left alike. Data center protests are lighting up the country: In 2026, Gallup found that seven in ten Americans opposed an AI data center being built in their local area. JD Vance has praised Lina Khan’s antitrust approach and has supported keeping Big Tech in check so smaller firms can compete in the market. Weeks before meeting the Luddites at B Cup Cafe, I’d sat in the pews at a church in small-town Illinois while the guest pastor talked about social media as a kind of sin, and how it had affected her life and wellbeing.
The Luddites I spoke to seemed to embrace this big-tent potential. Many of them eschewed what they saw as the homogenizing features of left organizing in favor of the attempted “socialization of all.” I remained curious about how the Luddites would orient as their young movement grew and matured. In ways that coexisted with being moved by their organizing, I felt discordance and uncertainty around other things, ranging from questions of access for the time-poor, socially anxious, or disabled, to wondering who might be welcomed or sidelined over time in the big white circus tent of the Luddiverse.
Keeping their movement ideologically open and the barrier to entry low is part of the Luddites’ resocialization project, an antidote to the algorithmically-fueled sectarianism and siloing created by social media platforms. It also seems strategically necessary. They and other anti-tech groups are up against titanic forces: AI companies with eye-watering investments, tech corporations increasingly fused with and financially backed by governments. A true mass politics might be the only way.
At the end of June I attended the opening day of Summer of Ludd. It was syrupy day, and I exited the subway without looking at my phone for the time or directions; I’d been working to lean on it less. The keynote was a free, public play in, you guessed it, Tompkins Square Park. A growing crowd of hundreds sat in front of the makeshift stage beside a tent hawking flyers, handouts, guidebooks. The play, written by filmmaker Amanda Hanna-McLeer, was “the story of the original Luddites, as told by the Luddites of the new world.” Its narrator, played by General Ludd, in fishnet tights and embroidered blazer, posh of accent and bleached of eyebrow, was my old fave: poet, playboy, activist, Lord Byron.
People wandered up, stopped, watched, sat down. Some raised an eyebrow, took in the high-theatric vibe, and walked right on by. The play’s chorus sang a reworked-for-Ned-Ludd version of ‘Solidarity Forever.’ I overheard one fiftysomething give another a deeply inaccurate definition of what a “Loodite” is. On stage, the players acted out the degradation of English textile workers under the affordances of new factory machines. The new industry practices included orphan labor; a papier-maché baby was fed through machine cogs to boos from the crowd. As the play toggled between past and present, sneering English capitalists in top hats were replaced by smug polo-shirt-wearing tech oligarchs. The Luddites of old were now agitating, peacefully and fruitlessly; the picket signs reading “Union Now” and “Pause Production” and “Stop Child Labor” read like a smarting callback to the mass protests of Trump 1.0. On stage now: a huge, shining foil-wrapped sledgehammer. The actor-Luddites yelled at the actor-capitalists: “Your machines are harmful to commonality!”
It was the historical record brought to life: the Luddites not as naïve primitivists but skilled workers resisting their own dispossession; the factory owners, resorting to force, drawing first blood; the state rewriting the laws of capital punishment to penalize the machine breakers with maximum cruelty. Lord Byron, who had been twerking for some reason, now challenged Parliament on behalf of the Luddites. I walked the edge of the crowd, now maybe four hundred strong, and watched the play enact what for me was the strangest, most poetic fact. Byron had a daughter: Ada Lovelace, the pioneering technologist and mother of modern computing, who found in the weavers’ frames the inspiration for the work that helped rewrite our world.
It glimmered in my mind, holographic: the Luddites and what became computing, historically entangled. The hammer and the computer as kin.
It was boiling hot; the growing crowd obscured my view. I sidestepped a gaggle of chic Brooklynites and nearly walked smack into Lighthouse Ludd, here with her immigrant grandmother. She watched it all—the play, the crowd of hundreds, the work of months from her and her comrades—and wept. “It’s so beautiful, to see this, all these people” she said to me.
I stood close to the stage while the play neared its finale and thought that I should take a quick video, make sure I got the details right. Out of my bag I took my phone, tapped its glowing screen, chose camera mode, positioned it to get the actors and papier-mâché backdrop in the frame.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder: a Luddite organizer I hadn’t yet met.
“Could you put that away?” she asked, mild irritation in her face. “We don’t do that here.”
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