Summer of Ludd comes to NYC | BRC Understands

[some seeing eye]

Can ditching their phones make this the summer of their dreams?

Pervasive techno-pessimism has sparked a burgeoning analog movement and offline “Summer of Ludd” festival.

Illustration of a poster pasted on a wall, showing a hand flicking a phone

By Ethan Beck
NEW YORK — Dan Fox hasn’t run for office before. But that hasn’t stopped the strapping 38-year-old comedian from setting his sights on the presidency. Just don’t ask about his campaign.
“All I want to say right now is that my platform is that I have no platforms,” said Fox, whose dark brown hair and impish grin gives him a passing resemblance to Paul Rudd. “Everything is IRL. I intend to be the first IRL president of all time.”

On June 30, he’ll announce his candidacy in Washington Square Park. But Fox’s bid has been gestating for years. In 2015, he attended a Tame Impala concert, where he saw a sea of devices in the air, and left Radio City Music Hall ready to proselytize about how smartphones are ruining our lives. This crusade has taken many forms: Fox works for Light, a company that sells phones without touch screens, and hosts a weekly, phone-free gathering in his Fort Greene brownstone.

Dan Fox collects smartphones before putting them away during a weekly gathering at his home.

All of which brings us to the presidential run. Fox’s kickoff event comes three days into the Summer of Ludd, a festival designed to yank individuals off of their phones and into the real world. This fête builds off a burgeoning Luddite renaissance in New York, the result of an amorphous community of phone-free event organizers, self-described “attention activists,” aligned nonprofits and a few not-smart phone companies.

You’ll notice that Summer of Ludd isn’t anywhere online. After initial conversations last summer, in-person planning meetings started in January. (Hence Fox’s hesitance to divulge anything else about his 2028 run for an article that will end up on the internet.) But organizers have other ways of reaching potential future Luddites. More than 15,000 guidebooks to the week’s phone-free events have been printed and scattered across trendy bookstores and cafes in the city.

Wheatpasted monochrome posters, with the festival’s ethos of “Free! Public! Participatory!” and a festival hotline, can be found plastered over subway ads. A handful of activists table at Washington Square Park on Thursdays to coax NYU students and TikTok livestreamers into forgetting their phones.

But the festival’s home base is Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where, starting on June 28, daily meditations, jam sessions and puppet shows will take place. There’s even an advice session on how to date without using Tinder or Hinge.

Organizers pasted Summer of Ludd posters over different advertisements in a Brooklyn subway station, seen in

Summer of Ludd organizers describe the goal of the event as twofold: help people understand how platforms are profiting off their helpless users, and remind them of a better, more meaningful world off social media. It’s the result of years of tech-skeptical organizing, according to various people involved with the festival, intended to prove Instagram isn’t necessary to find like-minded people.

Not all of the organizers consider themselves Luddites. But many were inspired by Logan Lane’s Luddite Club, which she started in 2021 while at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School. The club’s name came from Ned Ludd, a figure from English folklore who inspired 19th-century workers in their fight against industrialization. Lane’s club received a burst of media attention, spurring on new Luddite Club chapters and similar organizations in cities from Salt Lake City to Stockholm. Even the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is hosting “Analog Nights” where participants are asked to go screen-free.

The new wave of this movement arrives as many are already renegotiating their relationship to technology through screen-limiting devices like Brick or new dumbphones, such as Dumb.co, which touts more than 1,000 users. Social media companies are also trying to get in on the techno-pessimist zeitgeist: A viral Pinterest ad states that the “best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline.”

(Lane, who has helped with Summer of Ludd organizing, interned for Light Phone and recently finished a book about Luddism, described feeling “totally burnt out” in an email in which she declined an interview.)

Amanda Hanna-McLeer, who taught film, media and graphic design at Murrow, felt relieved that her students were concerned about phone addiction. Drawing from her experience working on shows including “Broad City” and “The Americans,” she shot a documentary about Lane’s Luddite Club and the wider neo-Luddite world in New York. Now, she’s hard at work on “Luddite Recreations,” a play she’s staging three times during Summer of Ludd, which tells the story of the textile-mill Luddites — only the factory owners look suspiciously like present-day technology CEOs.

If the word luddite conjures images of anguished farmers and phone-smashing absolutists, Hanna-McLeer emphasizes that this movement isn’t about being anti-progress.

“You don’t have to have a flip phone and no social media to join us,” said Hanna-McLeer, 33, while on break from building props. “You just have to be willing to examine your life in tandem with technology.”

Fox has been waving the anti-smartphone flag for more than 10 years. But he’s felt encouraged as of late, what with this assortment of attention activists and no-phone event organizers now flourishing. Part of the anti-smartphone energy comes from the isolation experienced during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Fox, when it felt impossible to log off. Since January, hundreds of strangers have come by Fox’s weekly Phone Free Adelphi hangouts. Like most activists in Fox’s circle, he stresses that he isn’t particularly interested in the phones themselves. Instead, Fox likes to focus on what each Adelphi participant does with their time reclaimed from mindless scrolling.

“I wanted people to get the [heck] off their phones, get into flow and work on something — or just read,” Fox said, growing animated over the phone about the endless creative possibilities. “I want to collect everyone’s phones and throw them in the East River. But I didn’t do that, I just put them upstairs.”

Others have also planned phone-free events in the months leading up to Summer of Ludd. Lamp Club, a Luddite organization born at the New School whose flagship event series has a crass acronym, demonstrated outside an Apple Store on Fifth Avenue while wearing gnome hats. Kyle Barnes, 27, organizes a no-phone party series, Let’s Get Off Together, where a cardboard data center was recently constructed in the middle of the dance floor. Nick Plante, a 25-year-old who runs a biweekly newsletter named NYC Off Tech and works on the Let’s Get Off parties, helped organize an event parodying the viral AI device Friend in October. An improvisational air runs through each of these events, organizers said, noting that any activity could shift in a second’s notice.

The Come Say Hi to Friend AI event, as Plante described it, “turned into this emergent forum on the ethics of AI companions” after the founder of Friend AI, Avi Schiffmann, made an appearance. Eventually, someone in a Friend AI pendant costume was challenged to a pickup basketball game. “His cardboard was ripped to shreds,” Plante said, “And then, like, a ton of random New Yorkers were shouting, ‘AI can’t hoop, get real friends.’”

The techno-pessimism isn’t limited to New York. Last spring, a 28-year-old named Jack Nugent went looking for a Luddite organization in Washington and ended up meeting Danny Hogenkamp, who was launching a program called Month Offline. The idea was simple enough: Give people flip-phones, plan a weekly group hangout and see how they feel after a month.

Nugent loved it. He explored his neighborhood and practiced the piano in his free time. By 2026, Hogenkamp was focused on building Dumb.co, a company that would provide the phones for Month Offline events. Nugent, who worked as a software engineer at The Washington Post until last May, was asked to be chief technology officer.
“When people come up to me, they say they love the phone, but the focus is on what they’re doing because they’re not on their phone,” Nugent said. “There’s a contradiction there but that’s how we like it. That’s the mission. We’re using tech so that people don’t have to be on tech.”

In June, a Month Offline cohort in New York showcased the fruits of their dumbphone time with an art exhibit. Phones were collected at the door and blank nametags were handed out, while Dan Fox sat nearby at a table promoting the Summer of Ludd. Complete with cardboard trifolds and free snacks, the event had the loose energy of a science fair. Brendan Reis, a 31-year-old software developer who left his job in March, built a video game where one villain is a low-resolution Jerry Seinfeld.

Most of the participants were pleased with how their month went, noting the phone had Google Maps, a camera and Uber, but remained clear-eyed about the device’s limitations. (Plante, who uses a Light Phone, said he felt “energized” by the different companies making stripped-down phones but believes the devices are just one solution to a larger issue around technology use.) There’s no Ticketmaster app on a Dumb.co phone, which became a persistent issue for one regular concertgoer. Brian Luscombe, 38, allowed himself to use his smartphone only as a tool during working hours at a tech firm.

“Getting lost or not being able to choose a restaurant on the fly, you just gotta discover stuff organically,” Luscombe said at the art exhibition. “Or talk to people.”

Gowanus, a puppet, is Summer of Ludd's media representative. An anonymous organizer for the festival, who wore a black ski mask, manipulated Gowanus's mouth when speaking with The Post on June 15. (Summer of Ludd)
It’s time to meet the puppet. If you want to interview Summer of Ludd organizers about the festival, you have to go through their representative, Gowanus, who was constructed by Hanna-McLeer with shirt buttons as eyes, a reused carpet as skin and one blue sock for its arm. Worried about how the media could anoint a figurehead to Summer of Ludd, the festival organizers landed upon constructing a “media spokespuppet,” which would be brought to interviews by an organizer in a black ski mask and sunglasses. The organizer, speaking as Gowanus, declined to provide their name.

“You can actually get a lot of engagement with the public just through something that’s a little strange, a little curious, a little interesting,” said the ski-masked Summer of Ludd organizer, while moving Gowanus with their right hand. “That’s really a way for people to understand the kind of work we’re trying to do. Having a fun, theatrical puppet is actually anti-alienation praxis in and of itself.”

They had a point. Several folks passing through Union Square stopped to ask about Gowanus and left with a festival guidebook. One woman offered encouragement to the Luddites, noting that technology “separates us,” while her friend fixated on Gowanus’s careful construction. A delivery worker, wearing an Amazon vest, briefly spoke to the puppet about his sex life. (Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon.) Kaixi Yang, 28, who pulled up a chair to talk with the puppet, said that Summer of Ludd could be helpful in meeting other “people who are dissatisfied with the status quo.”

Summer of Ludd isn’t meant to be a one-time celebration, organizers said. Kostadin Kushlev, a 41-year-old professor at Georgetown University who studies the emotional effects of technology use, believes that a strong social infrastructure is required to get people offline.

“That’s what, ultimately, people are looking for — freedom from their phones, perhaps, but also a way to connect with others,” Kushlev said.

Several activists involved with the festival teach at the Strother School of Radical Attention, a nonprofit focused on how human attention gets commodified by digital technology, while others in the ecosystem plan on maintaining Luddite clubs, informal get-togethers and no-phone parties long after Summer of Ludd is over.
It’s clear that they’re all thinking big. There’s more than 120 confirmed Summer of Ludd events, including a conference at the New School, while the festival’s name is a clear nod to ‘60s counterculture.

Despite a long list of pressing issues, from the environmental effects of chatbots to job losses due to AI, Summer of Ludd is unified by a playful approach. Tea parties, clowning events, group readings of Walt Whitman — even Fox’s “fully offline” run for president — are the festival’s attempts at an antidote.

“The world is so depressing and our culture is so mired in despair,” said Peter Schmidt, 29, the co-founder of Strother School of Radical Attention. “We need a cultural revolution that people actually enjoy.”