I had to register for the Luddite Conference online. It was just one of many events that made up the first-ever Summer of Ludd, a weeklong anti-tech festival put on in New York that took place last week. Other festival offerings included: a class on how to mend your own clothes, tutorials on how to flirt offline, and guided meditations. The organizers are anonymous, but the goal of the whole thing, according to a pamphlet I was given, was “to get people off big tech, into Public Space.” When I arrived last Tuesday at The New School in Manhattan for the Luddite Conference, I glanced across the lobby and saw a group of people leaning against the wall on their phones. Clearly, this was a work in progress.
Not that I was judging. I was there because I know that my phone makes me jealous, depressed, overstimulated, and anxious—and yet I keep using it, virtually every waking moment of my life. And I am not alone. Forty-six percent of Americans say they’re addicted to their phones, according to a study published earlier this year. We’ve known for years that the devices can increase our anxiety, and that social media makes people unhappy. More recently, we’ve been bombarded with stories about how artificial intelligence—an industry global capitalism is betting everything on—is causing “existential anxiety,” “chatbot psychosis,” and could potentially cause massive job displacement.
All of this is to say that the Luddites I met aren’t radical in their belief that too much technology is bad for you. They’re just radical in their optimism that something can and should be done about it. But, as I’d soon learn, nobody seemed exactly sure what exactly that something should be.
