An eight-day anti-Big Tech festival called The Summer of Ludd is now underway at various locations around mostly Lower Manhattan, offering an eclectic spate of events for anyone intrigued by the prospect of a better digital reality.
“The upfront pitch is pretty straightforward: It’s a week of free public and participatory programming to encourage people to get off Big Tech and into public space,” said co-organizer and indie web advocate Damian Thomas.
So far, Thomas says The Summer of Ludd –– named for a group of anti-machinery 19th-century textile workers called the Luddites –– is going even better than expected.
Happenings ranging from a saddle stitching workshop in Tompkins Square Park to a discussion of privately owned public space at 180 Maiden Lane have drawn substantial, energetic crowds of locals, passersby, and even some who flew in to attend. This is despite the fact that the festival has functionally no internet presence and has been marketed almost exclusively through minimally informative wheatpastes — randomly distributed guidebooks — and word of mouth.
At a Monday panel discussion on NYC event calendars, an array of neighborhood characters, older punks, fresh-faced flip phone users and various others packed the stone steps of East Village community garden La Plaza Cultural to discuss ways to learn of IRL happenings without social media.
Representatives from NYC Off Tech, Unplatform, Red Cal, Nonsense NYC, Technoqueers, Moon Bulletin and an encrypted, Proton Mail-based email newsletter called The People’s Circuit discussed embracing Web 1.0 coding, loathing tech behemoths, not making money and adoring the moon. No love was lost for Partiful.
It wasn't a revolution — the vibe was intellectual, earnest and calm — and it wasn't televised: The unspoken social pressure to keep phones out of sight was effective. Many brought physical notebooks. When phones did emerge, they were held low, and then quickly disappeared back into bags and pockets. When one organizer's non-smart device repeatedly rang, he sheepishly chucked it into a nearby planter.
Overall, the evening was largely a technical discussion on how to build and maintain your own website or newsletter. It never got particularly ideological. Indeed, the prevailing ethos of the Summer of Ludd is not anti-technology as a whole but more against the monopolization of the internet and the harnessing of its powers by Silicon Valley for money, not for fun.
“It's not a digital versus analog thing. It's a question of who controls how your community operates itself. Is it Mark Zuckerberg or you?” explained Thomas. “You are not an idle passenger of history. You get to control the impact that technology has on you and your society.”
The Summer of Ludd continues through July 5, and all its programming is free and open to the public. A mostly accurate schedule of events is, usefully but perhaps self-defeatingly, available online here.
