A no-phone festival in New York’s East Village is trying to turn anger at large technology platforms into something harder to monetize: people standing in a park, talking to one another, and declining to post about it.
Summer of Ludd, a weeklong series of events centered on Tompkins Square Park, opened with a Sunday performance called “Luddite Recreations,” according to WIRED, which reported from the gathering. The play retold the history of the English textile workers and artisans who resisted industrial machinery that threatened their jobs in the early 19th century. The crowd numbered about 300, WIRED reported.
The rules were explicit. An actor playing Lord Byron, the poet who supported the Luddites, told attendees to stay present and put away phones, cameras and recorders. The festival itself followed the same logic: organizers did not advertise the events online. Posters in the neighborhood and printed booklets in community spaces carried the schedule under the slogan “only in real life,” according to WIRED.
The program runs through July 5 and includes sessions on dating offline, mending, resisting data centers, watching 16-mm films with the Museum of Interesting Things, and learning shortwave radio and walkie-talkie basics. A July 4 beach cookout and nearby East Village events are also on the schedule.
The organizers have kept their identities private. Their public spokesperson is Gowanus the media puppet, a blue cloth puppet with soda-cap eyes operated by a masked puppeteer. Gowanus told WIRED that New York’s Luddite Renaissance is a “loose group of organizers” drawn together by concerns about alienation and dependence on major technology companies.
That framing fits a wider revival of the word “Luddite,” especially among younger people who grew up with networked devices as default infrastructure. A 2025 Pew Research study cited by WIRED found that 48 percent of teen respondents in 2024 said social media has negative effects on people their age, compared with 32 percent in 2022.
The festival’s critique is broader than screen time. WIRED reported that zines at the event covered leaving Spotify, school surveillance technology and generative AI. The week also overlaps with a Luddite conference at the New School, where speakers are discussing AI’s role in the military “kill chain,” the sequence of steps before an attack.
Some attendees described the project less as nostalgia than as infrastructure work. Damian Thomas, a web developer who runs Unplatform, told WIRED that most people cannot quit social media all at once because their friends, events and work may still be tied to those systems. His answer is to build alternatives that do not push people back into the same feeds.
An unnamed former Big Tech employee and security engineer told WIRED he became more sympathetic to the movement after seeing companies encourage nontechnical workers to use AI-assisted tools to write code and ship it to production. He described that as alarming from a security perspective.
Mara McGuire, a 20-year-old student taking a break from school, told WIRED she joined after seeing the group rehearse in the park. At a “Google in Real Life” event, she read tarot cards while attendees asked one another about areas of personal expertise. McGuire said she wanted to learn from people directly rather than through an information-saturated online environment.
Andrew Maynard, a professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University, told WIRED the original Luddites were primarily fighting labor displacement rather than technology as an abstract evil. He said the modern label can still be useful for people pushing back against systems that reduce their autonomy. He also doubted a festival would substantially change behavior, since people often keep using phones, social media and AI even when they believe those tools harm them.
That is the stubborn bit the festival cannot solve with papier-mâché, zines or good intentions. Leaving a platform can also mean leaving the people and logistics trapped inside it. Summer of Ludd’s answer is modest and physical: make another place to meet, and see who shows up without a notification.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
