None of the week’s events, including the performance, are advertised online. Posters in the neighborhood read, “Only in real life!” Ludd Summer is advertised as saying. and leaflets with the weekly schedule of events are posted in surrounding community spaces.
I came to know about the event by accident offline. In early June, I was in the East Village with a friend and we got caught in the summer rain. While I was waiting for him at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, a small space that documents the neighborhood’s history of activism, I found a booklet describing a summer of Ludd events among several other magazines, posters, and brochures. So here I am, phone in one, notebook out, player in hand.
The new Luddite movement became very relevant With Gen Zthe first generation to grow up entirely with digital technology. Despite this fact, or perhaps because of it, some young people are increasingly critical of the ubiquity of technology in society. A 2025 Pew Research study In 2024, 48 percent of respondents said social media had a negative impact on people their age—up from 32 percent in 2022.
Along with the youth, there are Priders, families and some older East Village veterans, one of whom explains to the young woman next to him the significance of the orchestra just playing “Bella Ciao,” an Italian resistance song created in response to fascism under Benito Mussolini.
There’s a seriousness to the whole thing that the internet often likes to punish. This is actually fun
Ludd Summer was ushered in by a press conference held by the organizers’ spokesperson, media puppet Gowanus (yes, I’m serious), a blue cloth with soda cap eyes controlled by a masked puppeteer. Gowanus was conceived as a way for the movement to speak to the public and the media without compromising the identities of event organizers who wish to remain anonymous. According to Gowanus, New York’s Luddite Renaissance “is a group of freelance organizers who currently have no official affiliation but who see similar issues of alienation and overreliance on Big Tech.”
