Inside the Luddite festival harnessing Gen Z’s rage against Big Tech
Inside the Luddite festival harnessing Gen Z’s rage against Big Tech
走进“卢德分子”节：Z世代如何利用对科技巨头的愤怒进行反抗
On a Sunday evening in the middle of Tompkins Square Park in New York City’s East Village, hundreds of people gather in front of a giant papier-mâché face of a woman wearing a crown. She’s the backdrop of a play, her body made up of curtains that look like a dress but serve a dual purpose, allowing actors to scurry on and offstage. 在一个周日的傍晚，纽约东村汤普金斯广场公园（Tompkins Square Park）中央，数百人聚集在一个巨大的纸糊女性面具前，她戴着王冠，是舞台剧的背景。她的身体由窗帘组成，看起来像是一件裙子，但同时也起到了双重作用，方便演员们在舞台上下穿梭。
I’m here to watch a performance called “Luddite Recreations,” which is a history of the Luddite movement—a group of artisans and textile workers who resisted the adoption of machines during the early years of the Industrial Revolution in England and whose resistance to being displaced from their work was met with violence by the British monarchy. 我在这里观看一场名为“卢德分子再现”（Luddite Recreations）的演出。它讲述了卢德运动的历史——这是一群在英国工业革命早期抵制机器采用的工匠和纺织工人，他们因抗拒被机器取代而遭到了英国君主制的暴力镇压。
It’s one of the opening events of the Summer of Ludd, a weeklong series of talks and activities like how to flirt and date offline, mending, and learning to fight against data centers, all focused on getting people off their phones and into community. Everything is so evidently handcrafted, giving it the energy of a high school production (complimentary). 这是“卢德之夏”（Summer of Ludd）的开幕活动之一。这一系列为期一周的讲座和活动包括如何在线下调情约会、修补衣物以及学习如何对抗数据中心，所有活动都旨在让人们放下手机，回归社区。一切都明显是手工制作的，带有一种高中舞台剧般的活力（这是褒义）。
A small orchestra, manned by people dressed in Pride regalia, sits off to one side. Behind them, a table holds 10 different zines covering everything from how to get off Spotify to the role of surveillance technology in schools to “Why GenAI Sucks.” The events will continue through July 5, with most major parts concentrated in Tompkins Square Park. (There will be a beach day cookout on July 4 as well as events in nearby locations in the East Village.) 一支由身着“骄傲月”服饰的人组成的小型管弦乐队坐在侧面。他们身后的一张桌子上摆放着10种不同的独立杂志（zines），内容涵盖了从如何卸载Spotify、监控技术在学校中的作用，到“为什么生成式AI很烂”。活动将持续到7月5日，大部分主要环节集中在汤普金斯广场公园。（7月4日还将举行海滩烧烤日，以及东村附近的其他活动。）
At the beginning of the play, the actor playing Lord Byron, the famous British poet who supported the Luddite movement, tells the crowd of about 300 the rules for the week: Be present, and absolutely no phones, recording, or photos allowed. 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. 演出开始时，饰演拜伦勋爵（支持卢德运动的英国著名诗人）的演员告诉在场的约300名观众本周的规则：保持专注，绝对禁止使用手机、录音或拍照。本周的所有活动（包括这场戏）都没有在网上进行宣传。社区周围的海报宣传着“卢德之夏”，上面写着“仅限现实生活！”，印有本周活动日程的小册子则被放置在社区的各个公共空间。
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. 我是在一次偶然的线下机会中得知这个活动的。6月初，我和朋友在东村时遇到了一场夏日暴雨。当我在“回收城市空间博物馆”（Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space）避雨时——这是一个记录该社区激进主义历史的小型场所——我在几本独立杂志、海报和小册子中发现了那本介绍“卢德之夏”活动的小册子。于是，我便出现在了这里：手机收起，笔记本摊开，手里拿着节目单。
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. 这场新的卢德运动已与Z世代紧密相连，这是第一代完全在数字技术中成长起来的人。尽管如此，或者正因如此，一些年轻人开始越来越批判科技在社会中的无处不在。皮尤研究中心2025年的一项研究发现，2024年有48%的青少年受访者表示社交媒体对同龄人有负面影响，而2022年这一比例为32%。
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. 除了年轻人，现场还有参加“骄傲月”的人群、家庭以及一些东村的老居民。其中一位老者向身边的年轻女性解释了管弦乐队刚刚演奏的《啊，朋友再见》（Bella Ciao）的意义——这是一首为反抗贝尼托·墨索里尼法西斯统治而创作的意大利抵抗歌曲。整个活动有一种互联网经常喜欢嘲讽的真诚感。事实上，这很有趣。
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. “卢德之夏”的预热活动是一场由组织者发言人——媒体木偶“高瓦纳斯”（Gowanus，我是认真的）主持的新闻发布会。它是一个有着汽水瓶盖眼睛的蓝色布偶，由一名戴着面具的木偶师操控。高瓦纳斯的构思是为了让该运动在不暴露组织者身份的情况下与公众和媒体对话，因为组织者希望保持匿名。
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.” The group says it began planning the summer’s events in January, trying to include off-tech alternatives for everything from movies (they’ve partnered with the Museum of Interesting Things to show 16-mm films) to long-distance chatting (there’s a hands-on shortwave radio and walkie-talkie workshop). 据高瓦纳斯称，纽约的“卢德复兴”是一个“松散的组织者群体，目前没有任何正式隶属关系，但因注意到疏离感和对科技巨头的过度依赖等共同问题而聚集在一起。”该组织表示，他们从1月份就开始筹划夏季活动，试图为从电影（他们与“有趣事物博物馆”合作放映16毫米胶片电影）到远程聊天（有短波电台和对讲机动手工作坊）的各项活动提供脱离科技的替代方案。
“We believe that the event is the medium to enact social change, where people can meet up in physical space. When we are trying to organize online, we have Mark Zuckerberg’s eyeballs and Silicon Valley’s fingers in the sacred human interactions of our lives,” Gowanus says. “We are striving to create an event that defies consumption.” “我们相信活动是推动社会变革的媒介，人们可以在物理空间中相遇。当我们试图在线上组织活动时，马克·扎克伯格的眼睛和硅谷的手指就会伸进我们生活中神圣的人际互动中，”高瓦纳斯说，“我们正在努力创造一种抵制消费主义的活动。”
In many ways, the Summer of Ludd is political—teaching people how to get off Big Tech products, overlapping with the Luddite conference at the New School, a New York City–based university, where speakers are discussing the role of AI in the “kill chain,” a military concept describing all the steps taken before an attack. On Tuesday evening, Dan Fox, who works for a dumbphone company and hosts phone-free meetups at his Brooklyn home for other people interested in getting offline, announces his “platformless” run for president as part of the festival. 在许多方面，“卢德之夏”具有政治色彩——它教导人们如何摆脱科技巨头的产品。这与纽约新学院大学（The New School）举办的卢德会议有所重叠，演讲者们正在讨论人工智能在“杀伤链”（kill chain，一个描述攻击前所有步骤的军事概念）中的作用。周二晚上，在一家功能手机公司工作、并在布鲁克林家中为其他有兴趣离线的人举办无手机聚会的丹·福克斯（Dan Fox），作为节日的一部分，宣布了他“无平台”的总统竞选计划。
But it is the desire to “defy consumption” on a personal level that animates several of the people who speak to WIRED. “I really like that [the event] is critical of the role of technology in our lives,” says staoue, an attendee who asks to be identified by their chosen name. They started out as a computer science student at Rutgers but “accidentally ended up in humanities classes” that made them start to take an interest in the intersection of technology, politics, and art. They found the School of Radical Attention, a nonprofit focused on helping people resist “the fracking of human attention” by tech products. “Society is getting faster, and it means that we are pressured to get faster, and we’re scr…” 但正是这种在个人层面上“抵制消费”的愿望，激励了多位接受《连线》（WIRED）采访的人。“我真的很喜欢（这个活动）对科技在我们生活中所扮演角色的批判，”一位要求使用自选名字“staoue”的参与者说。他们最初是罗格斯大学的计算机科学专业学生，但“偶然进入了人文课程”，这使他们开始对技术、政治和艺术的交叉领域产生兴趣。他们发现了“激进注意力学校”（School of Radical Attention），这是一个致力于帮助人们抵制科技产品对“人类注意力进行水力压裂式开采”的非营利组织。“社会正在变得越来越快，这意味着我们被迫变得更快，而我们正在……”