In New York's East Village, a week-long festival called the Summer of Ludd is turning Gen Z's frustration with Big Tech into live theatre, workshops and old-fashioned community gatherings, all built around one rule: no phones allowed.
A Play That Revives the Original Luddites
One of the festival's opening events is a performance titled Luddite Recreations, which retells the story of the original Luddites, the artisans and textile workers in early Industrial Revolution England who resisted the machines that were replacing their jobs, a resistance the British monarchy answered with violence. The production has the homemade charm of a school play, in the best sense. A small orchestra dressed in Pride regalia performs off to one side, while a nearby table holds ten different zines on topics ranging from how to quit Spotify to the surveillance technology used in schools to one titled Why GenAI Sucks. At the start of the show, an actor playing Lord Byron, the British poet who backed the Luddite cause, lays out the week's rules to a crowd of about 300 people: stay present, and no phones, recording or photos of any kind.
An Event That Refuses to Go Online
The Summer of Ludd runs through July 5, with most of its major events centered in Tompkins Square Park, alongside a beach day cookout on July 4 and additional gatherings around the East Village. None of the week's events, including the play, are promoted online. Posters around the neighborhood advertise the festival with the line only in real life!, and printed booklets listing the full schedule have been left in community spaces across the area rather than shared on any app or website.
Why Gen Z Is Turning on the Platforms It Grew Up With
The new Luddite movement has become closely tied to Gen Z, the first generation raised entirely with digital technology. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, growing numbers of young people are turning critical of how much tech dominates daily life. A 2025 Pew Research study found that 48 percent of teen respondents said in 2024 that social media has negative effects on people their age, up sharply from 32 percent in 2022.
Pride Flags, Families and a Song of Resistance
The crowd at Tompkins Square Park mixes young attendees with Pride-goers, families and older East Village residents, one of whom explains to a younger woman standing nearby the meaning of Bella Ciao, the Italian resistance song the orchestra had just played, originally written in response to fascism under Benito Mussolini. The whole event carries an earnestness that the internet usually mocks, but in person, it works, and it is genuinely fun.
Planning Since January, Offline Alternatives for Everything
Organizers say planning for the week began back in January, with the goal of building offline alternatives to nearly every digital habit, from movies, screened as 16-mm films through a partnership with the Museum of Interesting Things, to long-distance chatting, covered through a hands-on shortwave radio and walkie-talkie workshop. "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," says Gowanus, one of the organizers. "We are striving to create an event that defies consumption."
From Computer Science to the School of Radical Attention
Among the attendees is staoue, who asked to be identified only by their chosen name. "I really like that [the event] is critical of the role of technology in our lives," they say. staoue started out studying computer science at Rutgers but "accidentally ended up in humanities classes" that sparked an interest in how technology, politics and art intersect. That path led them to the School of Radical Attention, a nonprofit that works to help people resist what it calls "the fracking of human attention" by tech products. "Society is getting faster, and it means that we are pressured to get faster, and we're scrolling to cope when what we really might want is to learn a new language or new hobby," staoue says.
Andrew Maynard, a professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University, says the original Luddite movement was primarily about labor rather than being anti-tech in a blanket sense. Still, he sees the modern use of the term in a positive light, describing it as a way to identify someone who is "pushing back against the prevalence of tech and how it pulls away from their autonomy on multiple fronts."
staoue says cutting back on social media use pushed them to become more active offline, including attending more protests against the Trump administration's immigration policies. "There's a tension, because I want to stay online to talk about these things, so I'm always thinking about how you hold that contradiction," they say.
Tarot Cards and Google in Real Life
At a session called Google in Real Life, attendees pose questions to each other based on their personal knowledge and expertise. Mara McGuire, a 20-year-old student currently taking a break from school, spent the session reading tarot cards for anyone interested. McGuire says she first came across the group while they were rehearsing the play in the park and asked how she could get involved. "The main thing that interested me was the emphasis on human connection and finding ways to really gain other perspectives from getting out in the world," she says, adding that the online world is overwhelmed with information. "I wanted to be able to learn from other people."
The Tech Insiders Who Switched Sides
After an hours-long jam session, conversation turns practical: how to find events without relying on social media at all. Damian Thomas, a web developer who runs Unplatform, described as the definitive guide for escaping social media and joining the indie web, says his own experience working in technology directly shaped his involvement in the Summer of Ludd. "Most Luddites were technicians in some way, but they had to rent the infrastructure, the big machines. With things like Claude Code and SaaS, that's what we are seeing now," he says. Thomas acknowledges that most people cannot simply quit social media or other tech products outright, but says "it's about building infrastructure" that doesn't funnel people back toward social media and lets them change their own habits gradually.
One attendee, a former Big Tech employee who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, says his time working at both startups and one of the world's biggest tech firms made him sympathetic to the Luddite cause and worried about how companies are deploying new technology. "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." Having worked inside the industry, he says he understands exactly how hard it is to get people to change. "If you leave Facebook but all your friends are still on Facebook, you've just cut yourself off from your friend circle," he says. He adds that having alternatives matters, but the pull of major platforms and pressure from employers is likely to keep slowing any real shift away from them.
Part of a Wider Backlash
The hostility toward technology's outsized role in daily life on display at the Summer of Ludd is part of a broader trend. More people are abandoning dating apps in favor of meeting others at in-person gatherings such as run clubs. Commencement speakers who praise AI have been booed by college graduates. Analog gadgets like cyberdecks are gaining popularity as well.
Will Any of This Actually Change Behavior?
Despite the enthusiasm on display at the Summer of Ludd, Maynard says he doubts the festival will shift behavior in any major way. "Even when people agree that they think these technologies are harmful, it rarely impacts the way they live their lives. They're still using their phones, social media, AI," he says. "But the questions a movement like this raises are critically important."
Thomas takes a similar view but frames it differently. Even if not everyone can join the festivities or fully quit social media, he says, "we are where public opinion is."
