“We will free the iPad babies,” went one chant at the Summer of Ludd. “No Gemini, no GPT, no Grok, no Claude,” went another. The festival for big-tech sceptics, held in New York from June 28th to July 5th, stayed mostly true to its principles. Phones were banned. The event had no social-media presence. Organisers relied on posters and word of mouth to publicise the festival. Perhaps as a result, the crowds were small. Yet those who came, most of them in their 20s, reflect an ambivalence about technology that is increasingly common among Generation Z.
Members of this cohort are the first to have grown up entirely in the age of the smartphone. Now many are reflecting on what it has cost them. In 2024 nearly a quarter of Gen Z-ers told Harris, a pollster, that they wished smartphones had never been invented. More recent polling by Pew found that over half support banning under-16s from social media. Many are trying to reduce their own screen time, deleting apps or setting limits. Others, like the self-described Luddites in Manhattan, go further. At one point during the festival, devices were “executed” after standing trial.