To find out where and when Summer of Ludd events were taking place, you had to track down one of the booklets distributed at New York shops, read a manifesto, or call a phone number. The organizers also had a newsletter and an online calendar, but they steered clear of social media: promoting a festival against Big Tech by relying on Meta's algorithms would have required too much explaining.
The festival ran from June 28 to July 5, mostly in the East Village and at Tompkins Square Park. The program included 16mm film screenings, clothes-repair workshops, lessons on shortwave radio, and talks on artificial intelligence, surveillance, and data centers. There was also a course on how to flirt without dating apps.
At the opening, hundreds of people gathered in front of Gowanus, a large puppet built from materials salvaged from the trash. It was the festival's official spokesperson and allowed the organizers to remain anonymous, following the tradition of nineteenth-century English Luddites, who signed their proclamations with the fictional name Ned Ludd.
The rules: no phones, no photographs, no recordings. In an "evidence box" participants could leave testimonies about the harm tech companies had caused in their lives — loneliness, social media addiction, surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence at work.
The target wasn't smartphones themselves, but the fact that more and more social life runs through a handful of platforms. That's why some sessions were dedicated to alternatives: newsletters, RSS feeds, independent calendars, radio, and local networks. According to the organizers, deleting Instagram does little good if you still have to go back to it to meet people, find events, and organize a community.
Without group chats and real-time location sharing, putting the festival together was harder. The people interviewed by Wired were slow to answer emails, and the podcast production team had to send someone directly to the park to track them down. What would normally read as a logistical headache was part of the experiment: building a community without outsourcing how it functions to a platform.
Summer of Ludd drew mainly young people who grew up with smartphones, drawn to forms of sociality that are less efficient and less measurable. Even they, though, needed newspapers, podcasts, and web pages to get the word out. Even contemporary Luddites have to use the internet to reach the people they want to convince to use it less.
