None of the week’s events, including the play, are advertised online. Posters around the neighborhood advertise the Summer of Ludd, declaring “only in real life!” and booklets with the week’s schedule of events have been placed in community spaces around the area.
I found out about the event in a serendipitously offline way. Earlier in June, I was with a friend in the East Village, and we got caught in a summer downpour. As I was waiting it out in the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, a small venue that documents the neighborhood’s history of activism, I found the booklet outlining the Summer of Ludd’s events among several other zines, posters, and pamphlets. So here I am, phone tucked away, notebook out, playbill in hand.
The new Luddite movement has become heavily associated with Gen Z, the first generation to grow up entirely with digital technology. Despite this fact, or perhaps because of it, some young people are becoming increasingly critical of tech’s omnipresence in society. A 2025 Pew Research study found that in 2024, 48 percent of teen respondents said social media has negative effects on people their age—up from 32 percent in 2022.
In addition to young people, there are Pride-goers, families, and some older East Village veterans in attendance, one of whom explains to the young woman next to her the significance of “Bella Ciao,” which the orchestra has just played, an Italian resistance song created in response to fascism under Benito Mussolini.
The whole affair has an earnestness to it that the internet frequently loves to punish. It is, in fact, fun.
The Summer of Ludd was preempted with a press conference conducted by the organizers’ spokesperson, Gowanus the media puppet (yes, I am serious), a blue cloth being with soda-cap eyes, manned by a masked puppeteer. Gowanus was conceived of as a way for the movement to speak to the public and the media without compromising the identities of the event’s organizers, who wish to remain anonymous. According to Gowanus, New York’s Luddite Renaissance is a “loose group of organizers that have no formal affiliation as of now but have been coalescing around noticing similar problems of alienation and overreliance on Big Tech.”
