In New York City’s East Village, a weeklong festival dubbed the “Summer of Ludd” is bringing hundreds of young people together to learn how to live without constant digital connectivity and to resist the omnipresence of technology companies.
Wired reports that the Summer of Ludd festival, held in Tompkins Square Park and surrounding areas through early July, represents a growing movement among young people and others to reclaim their lives from Big Tech’s pervasive influence. The event features workshops, performances, and activities designed to help participants engage with the world offline, from learning how to date without apps to understanding how to fight against AI data center proliferation.
The festival opened with “Luddite Recreations,” a theatrical performance chronicling the original Luddite movement of early 19th century England, where textile workers and artisans resisted industrial machines that threatened their livelihoods. The play unfolds in front of a giant papier-mâché woman wearing a crown, with actors moving behind curtains that form her dress. A small orchestra dressed in Pride regalia accompanies the performance, while nearby tables display ten different zines covering topics from abandoning Spotify to surveillance technology in schools.
At the start of the play, an actor portraying Lord Byron, the British poet who supported the Luddites, establishes the week’s ground rules: attendees must remain present and cannot use phones, take photos, or record anything. This commitment to offline engagement extends throughout all festival events, none of which are advertised on the internet. Instead, physical posters around the neighborhood and booklets placed in community spaces promote the gatherings with declarations of “only in real life.”
This message resonates with Generation Z, which poll data shows is growing increasingly negative about AI. As Breitbart News previously reported:
The percentage of young respondents who reported feeling hopeful about artificial intelligence dropped sharply from 27 percent in the previous year to just 18 percent in the current survey. Similarly, excitement about the technology among young adults has decreased. Perhaps most striking, nearly one-third of survey participants indicated that AI made them feel angry.
These findings suggest that concerns about artificial intelligence extend well beyond older generations and have taken root among young adults who are currently navigating their entry into the workforce and establishing their professional identities.
Festival organizers speak through Gowanus, a blue cloth puppet with soda-cap eyes operated by a masked puppeteer. This unusual spokesperson allows organizers to communicate publicly while maintaining their anonymity. According to Gowanus, New York’s Luddite Renaissance consists of a loose coalition of organizers who began planning in January, united by concerns about alienation and overreliance on Big Tech.
“We believe that the event is the medium to enact social change, where people can meet up in physical space. When we are trying to organize online, we have Mark Zuckerberg’s eyeballs and Silicon Valley’s fingers in the sacred human interactions of our lives,” Gowanus says. “We are striving to create an event that defies consumption.”
The festival programming includes partnerships with organizations like the Museum of Interesting Things, which screens 16-millimeter films, and workshops teaching participants to use shortwave radios and walkie talkies for long-distance communication. Events overlap with a Luddite conference at the New School examining AI’s role in military operations, and Dan Fox, who works for a dumbphone company, announced a “platformless” presidential campaign as part of the festivities.
Andrew Maynard, a professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University, notes that the original Luddite movement centered on labor concerns rather than anti-technology sentiment. He views the modern interpretation as describing people “pushing back against the prevalence of tech and how it pulls away from their autonomy on multiple fronts.”
A former Big Tech employee attending the festival, who requested anonymity to avoid professional retaliation, explained his sympathy for the movement stems from workplace experiences. “I quit my last job because our leadership was encouraging non-technical people to write code with AI-assisted tools and pushing them to production,” he says. “As a security engineer, that is just so concerning.”
Breitbart News social media director and author Wynton Hall explains in his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI that conservatives at the government level as well as within the family unit must help young people create a bright future working with AI as a tool, not as a replacement for humans. Hall recently wrote that leftists will attempt to weaponize the fear over potential job loss at the hands of AI to sway the midterm elections, a fear evident in the polling data from college students.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, praised Code Red as a “must-read.” She added: “Few understand our conservative fight against Big Tech as Hall does,” making him “uniquely qualified to examine how we can best utilize AI’s enormous potential, while ensuring it does not exploit kids, creators, and conservatives.” Award-winning investigative journalist and Public founder Michael Shellenberger calls Code Red “illuminating,” ”alarming,” and describes the book as “an essential conversation-starter for those hoping to subvert Big Tech’s autocratic plans before it’s too late.”
Read more at Wired here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.