THERE WILL BE LUDD:
a conversation with a puppet



In the process of scheduling a time to interview some members of the Luddite Renaissance, a neo-Luddite group in New York City known for theatrical displays of anti-technology sentiment, we were informed that we would have to go through Gowanus, their spokes-puppet. So we invited him to an apartment on Bushwick Ave and, over a bottle of natural wine, discussed the history of Luddism, artificial intelligence, public spaces, and how to protect interiority in a technological landscape designed to infiltrate it. 


Gowanus the Luddite Media Spokes-Puppet: It’s a nice windy day out here, you know, ambience. Cars going by and all that. Tell me when to go.

CO: It’s a pleasure to speak to you.
 G: Pleasure’s all mine. So this is the, uh, Clocked Out Magazine?

CO: Correct.
G: I’ve been hearing about this a bit from my friends. Also I only have one arm right now, it seems like I lost my other one. Okay, Zoe and Fiona? Beautiful. I’m gonna ask my handler if I can use his arm so I can speak to you guys.

(To handler) Can I use your arm?

Okay we’re good. 

CO: Would you mind introducing yourself?
G: Yes, of course. Of course. I would love to introduce myself. My name is Gowanus, I am the Luddite media spokes-puppet. I am named after my birthplace, the wonderful neighborhood of Gowanus. I was born in a dumpster there in the middle of January of this year. I was brought to life by the Luddite Renaissance out of garbage and trash, as you can tell by my appearance. Yeah, I think it's a great place to be born.

CO: The Gowanus Canal.
G: Yeah, right next to the Gowanus Canal. The Gowanus neighborhood. There’s ten feet of sludge at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal. Did you know that? And there is black mayonnaise on top where there are new life forms they never even imagined were possible inside there. 

CO: Black mayonnaise?
G: That’s what they call it. The scientists.

CO: What are your eyes made of?
G: My eyes are made of some kind of bottle cap situation. 

CO: Who are your parents?
G: My parents—well, my creators are those of the Luddite Renaissance who felt that they did not want their image attached to the Luddite Renaissance. They were trying to devise a media strategy that would be anti-spectacle, would allow them to retain their anonymity, and would allow them to highlight the fact that the Luddite Renaissance happens in-person, not through the media we may consume about it. So the Luddite spokespuppet, me, Gowanus, is sort of an invitation to come and learn a little more, then you can meet the real people involved. But for the media, it’s just gonna be me.

CO: How do you feel about the media?
G: The media— 
(loud car horn erupts)
Ah! The CIA is after me. There’s people all around. You can’t trust anybody.

CO: You seem a bit paranoid, Gowanus.
G: It’s tough being the media spokespuppet. I’m ah-lergic to the media. But I’m the best one. All the other luddites, they don’t wanna have to deal with the media at all. That’s why they have me do it.

So, yeah, I feel a little skeptical, a little paranoid, but there is value in engaging with the media to spread your message to the masses as long as you are very intentional about it, and really do your best to be in control. But it’s kind of an impossible task. 

CO: That does answer our first question, which was why are we speaking to a puppet—
G: Can I speak something before we get into it? I got some contracts here for you guys to sign. So maybe you could take a look.
(We sign contracts agreeing to maintain the anonymity of Gowanus’s puppeteer and challenge wholeheartedly the beliefs of the Luddite Renaissance.)
Beautiful.

CO: What happens, Gowanus, if one of your puppeteers says something that is not in accordance with the principles of the Luddites?
G: That’s a great question. You know, the Luddites were having this discussion the other day in regards to our manifesto of sorts, The Event is the Medium. We have a lot of printings of it, and I think each printing of Event is the Medium will be a bit different based on whichever Luddite is writing it. So I think a similar thing will happen with the media puppet. We’ve had different puppeteers take on the media, speak their mind, and there’s always going to be a little bit of a variety. I’m sure some people are gonna focus more on different things. 

We have in Event is the Medium, in regards to events, “no drugs, no drinking, no dogma”—it’s a little tongue-in-cheek because our Event is the Medium pamphlet is a recommendation, so there really is not total dogma. I think you’ll find that the Luddite media spokespuppet through different voices will speak different things. We’re not gonna chop anyone’s head off if they don’t speak the party line. But we are very much trying to refine our verbiage and our message, and I think tailor it to whoever our audience is. We would probably tailor it a little differently to CLOCKED OUT MAGAZINE—my favorite magazine, by the way—than we would to, let’s say, we did an interview the other day with Bloomberg. Bloomberg News. Or, you know, we went on a podcast. Hasan Minhaj. They wanted to talk about some stuff. We can tailor our answers to different audiences because we understand that there are a lot of different facets to the Luddite renaissance that can appeal to different people. 

CO: What do you think readers of Bloomberg News would be more interested in than viewers of, say, Hasan Minhaj or readers of Clocked Out Magazine? 
G: That’s a great question. So, Bloomberg, they were more concerned with campus activism, which I think is a narrative we see a lot coming up in our media requests, or media requests for individual luddites. You know this narrative of “Gen Z! Gen Z! They’re rejecting the technology that they were born on! What does this mean?” It’s kind of compelling for a New York Times magazine reader. And I think with Clocked Out, you guys are Gen Z. I feel like that media push might not be so important for you guys and we can maybe push the boundaries a little bit. Who knows. We’ll see. 

CO: Is the movement primarily Gen Z?
G: So it is true that there’s a lot of Gen Z in this movement—but it’s not limited to young people. We’re seeing a groundswell of all kinds of people reevaluating their relationships to technology in this political climate, it’s not necessarily vanguarded by the Luddite Renaissance. You can look at the graffiti in the subways as an example, like the friend.com, and the skechers girls, the skechers AI girls, AI garbage. There’s one that’s like a therapy site—Dawn. “Yeah, therapy, you can have therapy every hour of the day.” It’s fucking ridiculous, and people are defacing it, rightfully so, and it’s not just us of the Luddite Renaissance. It’s regular people. And we go out on the street and we do our events and we talk to regular people. I can not think of a single instance in which someone has been like “well my relationship with technology is really great and I think what you’re doing is really stupid!” The most normal person walking down the street feels like they can engage in this conversation. It feels like they can empathize. And I think that says something. 

CO: So what, for our readers who are unfamiliar with the Luddites, are the core principles? 
G: I think we like to define ourselves according to the definition that the original historic Luddites used, which is “Against machines harmful to commonality, which tear unduly at the social fabric.” So that’s verbatim from the original Luddites.

CO: Do they have a scripture or something you took that from?
G: They have lots of written works because they were prolific letter leavers on doors of factories. So they would leave a letter, they would sign it “Ned Lud,” or “General Lud.” We can get into some of this history—

    Random Pedestrian: What the fuck?

G: Hi! How’s it going? My name is Gowanus. What’s your name?

    Vee: Vee. 

G: Vee? Nice to meet you. Are you having a good day?

    Vee: Yeah. What the fuck?

G: Are you scared of me? No, I’m a nice guy. I’m friendly. 

    Vee: I like your eyes.

G: Thank you, I’m made of garbage. I was born in Gowanus. You know Gowanus? You know The Big Reuse? I was born from garbage from their dumpster. Where were you born?

    Vee: I was born in Peru. I’ve just been in New York ever since. Fuckin New York for life, you know.

G: Have you been back to Peru?

    V: No I haven’t, I’m gonna go back for the first time this year cause I’m getting my green card. 

Everyone: Congrats!

      V: My husband’s not gonna believe this. I smoked a blunt then went outside and met a giant puppet. So is this like a Times Square thing? Like with tips?

G: This is part of the Luddite Movement. It was a movement from the 1800s started by textile workers.

      V: Oh, you guys are like—

G: This is an interview for a magazine.

CO: They have a puppet as a spokesperson to conceal the identity— 
G: Of our movement. We’re a political and spiritual and joyful movement all around. We’re trying to get people to reevaluate their relationships with Big Tech and their platforms. We’re trying to build offline communities of public space.

    V: My husband was just telling me he hates how addicted I am to my phone and I wanna do something about it. 

G: I think a lot of people feel that way these days, and the thing is that it’s made to be, like addiction, like it’s a personal issue. Like it’s a fault of yours.

        Random Flaneur: Wat is zees?

G: Hi! Are you the husband? 

        Flaneur: Non! Just a randome guy!

G: What does your shirt say?

[shirt says “how am I supposed to live laugh love in these conditions?”]
G: THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! What we’re dealing with is exactly what your shirt is saying. The conditions of humanity right now are antithetical to what makes us feel good in our hearts and souls and spirits. And we believe that to build true community, to build resistance to what is going on right now, we need to divest from Big Tech and their platforms, get offline, build in person communities, and reclaim the public spaces of our city, because we have a lot of good public spaces. 

        Flaneur: It is ze most depressed puppette I have ever seen in my life. 

G: You think I’m depressed? I say depressing things, but it is a depressing situation.

    V: I agree with everything.

G: We’re just trying to get people to think about their relationships with technology and have a great time in a public space. We don’t need to use Silicon Valley's platform to have active and fulfilling social lives. Silicon Valley collects and sells your data. But what happens in person is so much greater than the data they can sell and collect. When they sell things back to us, it’s limiting our capacity for human connection. And experience.

    V: That is so true.

           Random guy: I don’t mean to interrupt but can anyone help me get something to eat?

[Gowanus gives him a few dollars.]
CO: Okay we gotta get back to the interview.

[Back to The Interview:]

CO: That was interesting, because I wanted to ask you how you think the spectacle of using a puppet, or wearing the gnome hats might prevent you from being taken seriously. But after that interaction, I suppose I can see how the theatrical aspect of these things can draw people in who might not otherwise have known about the movement.
G: Exactly. I think a lot of the work of the people in the Luddite Renaissance stemmed out of a certain concern about social alienation in organizing spaces, and how it was hard to get people to open up and honestly interact. Our relationship to technology was eroding them. The gnome hats are a sort of anti-alienation tactic that invites participation. When you offer someone a gnome hat, or even if you’re just wearing a gnome hat, and someone comes up and they don’t know what’s going on and they ask you a question, that’s an in for engagement. If I was a regular guy sitting here, nobody would care or be interested to start the conversation that we had. How can we find ways that open up social interaction that are novel and effective? 

One event that we do is something called S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E., and we’ve done three of them, which stands for “Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neoliberal Experience.” And it’s essentially a trial, where people put technology on trial. You have a judge, jury, executioner. People on the jury have the opportunity go up and talk about an experience they had with technology and they or the executioner can go and smash it with a rock, we have live music, and S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. 2 for example we had a giant iPad baby pinata, and we took the giant iPad down and there was candy and flowers inside and we destroyed it and everyone danced. That’s an example of a kind of thing we do. And everyone is wearing gnome hats, and we’re handing them out, and we have soap boxes and that type of shit. 

CO: So going back to the history behind the movement, who were the original Luddites?
G: The Luddite movement was a labor movement of the 1810s in England, during the birth of the Industrial Revolution as we know it. For the last 200 years in England there had been these new technologies, specifically related to the textile industry (like looms, and spinning jennys) that had been developed over this time. And what was happening in the 1810s was that the entrepreneurs, the naysay capitalists, the big tech giants of the time, were using this technology to create new social arrangements that allowed them to profit massively and displace a lot of these workers. They were building huge factories outside of the town,—and whereas beforehand textile workers could work in their own homes, set their own hours and could in some ways be on equal footing with some of the merchants, they now became wage slaves in a factory. And it totally disrupted their way of life. So Luddites are textile workers who began to organize. The thing they’re most known for is the smashing of the machines. And that comes from—now we can get into the history of the word Luddite.

So Ned Lud is this kind of mythical figure from the 1770s. There was this story of this boy who was being abused by his overseer and rises up and smashes the machine and escapes into the Sherwood Forest. There’s some similarities there with the tale of Ned Lud and that of Robinhood. There’s no evidence that there was ever a Ned Lud that existed. He became this mythological figurehead for the Luddites that they could use, so when they, let’s say, post a letter on the door of a factory, they’d sign it Ned Lud or General Lud or King Lud. They had all these pseudonyms playing with the idea of Lud so that, like us now, they could maintain their anonymity. And so that’s where the word Luddite comes from. 

And an important thing to mention here in getting into the very dramatic act of smashing the machines is that their destruction of machines was a very strategic move—you could call it collective bargaining by riot. They weren’t concerned with the technology by itself. The technology could be a site of protest where they could be most effective in their smashing of the machines as a bargaining chip. These were not people who were technologically illiterate. These were some of the most technologically literate people of their time. They were trained, skilled labormen and artisans protesting the conditions that were forced upon them by the Industrial Revolution. There was mass starvation. There were kids dying in the streets. It was dire, graphic stuff. So when they say they’re against “technology which is harmful to commonality,” they are against the social reorganization that allows for their displacement and starvation via this new machinery. 

Another thing that’s important to mention is that labor organization at the time was illegal. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 in England mandated that any combination of workers who got together to try to improve their conditions was totally illegal. So that’s why they’re resorting to these clandestine bands in the middle of the night who are organizing in secret and are staying anonymous and going out and smashing the machines. They’re forced into a situation where their only recourse to protect their humanity is to resort to this. They were targeting machinery, not people. I guess it depends if capital is human and you want to call that violence or whatever, but they were suppressed by the largest domestic occupation of England that has ever occurred until now. They were afraid of a revolution, like had just happened in France, and America. The Luddites even took inspiration from these two Revolutions. This was a very serious movement that dealt not just with nascent technology but really the liberty of all the people in England at the time. And these Luddites were hung, they were killed by the Crown. 

The factory owners paid a bunch of money to the king so that they could get private militias put in their factories to kill workers when they tried to do a raid. The threat of these Luddites was so dramatic that the factory owners themselves organized to suppress them. Organizing was illegal for the workers, of course, but the factory owners could all organize to hire a bunch of mercenaries to try and stop them. But my point is that this movement—Luddite as a pejorative term—really comes from the fact that the Luddites were defeated, and forces in power were able to maintain their power until today. So we see a relation between the Industrial Revolution and the big tech giants of that time, and the big tech giants of today. That lineage to me materializes in this idea that “technological progress, NO MATTER WHAT, is beneficial for humanity, and anyone who stands in the way of that narrative is wrong, is stupid, is a simpleton.” Luddite kind of means caveman. It means you’re a fucking idiot—you don’t know how to use a landline phone, you don’t wanna know how to use it, and you’re kind of a laughing stock. 

The reason that the symbol of the Luddite is also so resonant today is because there’s this demystification of life that has just continued on and on and on since the Industrial Revolution, where everything about you, your most ineffable qualities, your desires, can be turned into data and can be fed back to you. And now you have these LLMs which can perfectly replicate human speech, human writing—everything is being taken away. What the symbol of the Luddite is, is of a mythological figure. Kind of a beast, in some way, who is able to—through means which are unquantifiable and magical,—defy the machine. It’s basically the idea that there is something that is inherently unknowable and spiritual and magical about being human. And that is powerful enough to defeat the large forces which have machinery, which have wealth, and which have data that completely dominate our way of life. The symbol of the Luddite is hope, really, is agency. That we can change that. We’re always trying to instill agency, be participatory. The event is the medium because it is the site where you can instill hope and agency within people and take the reins of their own lives and do something about our commonality, our community. 

CO: We have our own rich history of labor organization and subsequent repression in the US as well. For the NYC Luddites of today, is there a line beyond which technological progress has gone too far, and where would that line be? For the original Luddites, as you’ve explained, that line was drawn within the textile industry. Today, would the line be found within social media, smartphones, AI?
G: Think of this in terms of the original Luddites. What you could say is that actually none of the technology was too far. If they had those new power looms, and what they did with the powerlooms was say “hey, we’re gonna automate half of your work, and give you half of the week off, and you’ll get paid the same amount,” we’d have no fuckin problem with that. That sounds great. The technological development—there’s not a line where it’s too far, it’s the social reorganization that’s the issue. We’re not so concerned with having a rule book. Our goal is developing a culture within the general populace that is critical of technology writ large, which acknowledges that technologies are never neutral so we should always analyze who they’re serving, who they’re benefitting and who they’re exploiting. But more importantly it’s about not just criticism, but offering this alternative, which is why we focus on public space. You can understand that shit is bad, and data privacy—nobody gives a shit. It’s all a meme, you got a CIA agent watching you, all this shit, you know, Snowden, NSA, everyone saw this stuff. The issue is not necessarily education. The real focus is on showing people that the alternative to having your life organized by Silicon Valley and digitally, is more fulfilling in every way. It’s something you won’t understand from reading an infographic or, honestly, from reading an essay probably. The organization of community is how you really feel it. 

CO: The original movement was a labor movement, and this is more of a social movement against the idea that technology has completely taken over everyone’s entire lives. It’s hard to physically topple conceptual and internal oppressors like phone reliance as the Luddites smashed machines. What would the result of the movement look like now—how can this revolution be adapted, and what would the ideal outcome look like? Does it serve the NYC Luddites to remain a social movement, or do you see a future—especially in light of the artificial intelligence automation of jobs—in which the Luddites return to their original form as a labor movement?
G: Short answer, yes. I don’t know if this is diverging, but quick note: there is widespread dissatisfaction in regards to our relationships with technology. We believe that there is really fertile ground for a large-scale social movement that is untapped because people don’t think there’s any alternative. The reason why Luddism in the modern age is very attractive is because there are so many intersecting issues. This is why it’s a great site for radicalization. You can talk about the social elements, like what you were just talking about, which is that essentially our free time becomes labor time for Silicon Valley. It’s a situation where we’re both the mine and the miner, where our desires are the data, and then we extract it for them. Everytime we go on Instagram we’re doing work for Silicon Valley and making them hella money. So that’s the social sphere, which is where a lot of us come from. But there is also the labor sphere. There was a Luddite conference at Columbia where they were very directly focused on labor organizing.

The labor element of this is still just as important as it was back then. You also have the environmental element of it. This crazy influx of data centers is going to be putting immense strain on the electrical grid. This Silicon Valley idea that (laughs) AI is going to create a solution for this environmental catastrophe so we shouldn’t worry about keeping destroying shit—yeah, it’s ridiculous. But you can come in through that outlet. You can come in through an anti-war, anti-imperialist lens, the corporate role in the genocide in Gaza and how these corporations like Amazon and Google are offering cloud service that Israel has where they’re just using these mass data webs of the civilian populace to generate targets, like probabilistic targets where it measures the percentage you might be a militant and boom, you’re dead. There are these programs in Israel: “Lavender,” “Where’s Daddy?”. AI can generate targets at a much more rapid rate than humans were able to. We’re automating warfare so that we can kill more and more civilians. My point is just that the most apocalyptic scenarios that you can imagine are already playing out right now in regards to American multinational corporations’ complicity in horrific crimes against humanity. So a need for a modern Luddite movement is not a luxury, it’s essential. So we’re fun, we’re goofy, we’re trying to make social interaction beautiful and build in person community. It’s because we think these things are integral to our survival and, hopefully, thrival as a species. 

CO: Nice.
G: Yeah, I like thrival. That’s my word. So it’s important that we begin to critically reevaluate and that we divest from these companies as quickly as possible. Because the trick they played is that they made it so that their infrastructure feels so intertwined with who we are that it’s inextricable: your phone is an extension of yourself, like glasses. “My algorithm knows who I am more than I do.” We become cyborgs—people say this stuff all the time. But we don’t have to be like this. We don’t have to accept these multinational corporations encroaching and encroaching into every sacred moment of our lives.

CO: So rather than a revolutionary moment like the ancient Luddites, you see the future of this movement more in terms of general divesting, and soon enough maybe everyone will stop having phones and go back to the way it should be.
G: The original Luddites were in quite a different situation in that they were starving—they weren’t really actually insurrectionary. They weren't trying to topple the government—

CO: Would you say they were billed as “insurrectionary” for the benefit of the corporation?
G: Yes, exactly, and the corporations had spies for the movement to make them seem like a bigger threat against the crown. But yeah, they were a labor movement under more duress to act. Now I think you might find people with different beliefs in the Luddite Renaissance as to what this builds towards. And I think the commonality of what everyone in the Luddite movement has is that we at least know where to start right now. This is a problem, and whatever future we’re trying to build, we need social infrastructure that exists outside of Big Tech, so that we can organize to create new institutions. I think you’ll find that people have different beliefs within the movement…

Yeah, I might say, me, Gowanus, that wouldn’t it be fucking great to bury these fucking companies in the ground? Wouldn’t it be fucking great if there was no more Amazon, no more Google, no more fucking Palantir. Obviously, that is a very difficult thing to do with the way that they are so embedded in our society. And they’re surveilling you, everything you say, yes, Jeff Bezos, hi, hi, (into the phone) I’M GONNA COME AND FUCKING KILL YOU!!!! I’M GONNA COME TO YOUR HOUSE AND FUCKING FIRE BOMB YOU AND KILL YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!!! IM ON MY WAY WITH A FUCKIN MOLOTOV COCKTAIL RIGHT NOW, BITCH!!! Alright so I’m a puppet and that’s a joke, for the sake of the interview. 

Fiona: You were talking briefly about some people who might say “the algorithm knows me better than I know myself,” and outsource their own agency to the device, willingly give up their data in order to have a better understanding of themselves that removes their own individuality from the equation, and maybe that’s easier for a lot of people but I think it’s kind of a pervasive sickness—a disease, a chronic disease that is inflicting more people in this country than obesity, perhaps. 

G: Fact check, but yeah.

F: I think that’s true. Anyway—if 50% of Americans are obese, and there are 3 billion active monthly users on Instagram, that is definitely more people. That’s more than the population of America.

G: I believe you. I believe you. I believe you.

F: Anyway, my question for you, Gowanus, as the spokespuppet of the Luddite movement: I think that the people who need the movement the most, their souls starving for in person connection,—

G: Yes. Yes. Yes.

F: —are probably not gonna find out about the Luddite movement from the way you guys are advertising yourselves. How do you contend with that, as a movement that is off of social media and is committed to in-person flyering, how do you reach the people who might need you the most?

G: Excellent question. You’re saying if someone was like an Otaku and never goes outside.

CO: Or just like a 9-5er, normal people who spend their days working and then go home exhausted from a hard day's work doing nothing at a job that is about to be taken over by AI. And they spend their nights recovering and vegging out or at the gym or getting drunk.
G: Getting drunk, getting built, whatever our vices are. I want to start, to be annoying, with a tangent. A quick little reframing of something you were saying, which was social media addiction as a chronic disease. I think it’s true, I think of it as legitimate addiction. But to contextualize it a little further, you can look at it in the framework of “social media is a kind of social experiment on a massive scale.” It’s a hijacking of people’s minds and desires, it’s a—What’s the word I’m looking for…

Zoe: Psyop.

G: You could say psyop. 

F: Capture?

G: This is dramatic, but you could call it an extreme act of warfare on a civilian population. I’m saying this because—Peter Thiel explicitly doesn’t believe in democracy. He believes that people are too stupid to organize themselves, and you should control the lanes through which they express your desire so that you can shape their desire to protect them from the bad parts of themselves so, there’s an urge to pathologize and diagnose this as a sickness when in reality it is an intentional manipulation of our desires to have an intended affect for these corporations. 

Z: You get hooked on it in the same way as with heroin, which was also a conspiracy.

G: There’s a conspiracy with heroin?

Z: Like the War on Drugs.

G: Oh yeah—wow that’s a pretty great comparison. I never thought about that. To start off, I wanna say that the target audience of the Luddite Renaissance, or the event, is always the person who is right there at that time who happens to be walking by. I think New York City is such an incredible site for this branch of the Luddite Renaissance to develop because you have these places where all different kinds of people from all walks of life are passing by and interacting. Whenever we do an event, yes we flyer, but our target audience is always to get whoever is walking by to stop and maybe have some fun and to engage. Of course you’re gonna have different demographics in different spaces. 

The idea with the Summer of Ludd is that it’s a place and a space where things are occurring where anyone who is walking by in an instance may be interested to stop by. We do a lot of our events on the weekends so there are more people out. It’s a really important point you bring up, and it’s the essence of what we’re trying to do—the Luddite Renaissance, we don’t want it to be a niche countercultural thing. We want something that is able to tangibly help every single person on the planet. And I think for us the way to start with that is simply reinvigorating our public spaces and social infrastructure because if we can provide things that are helpful to anyone of any walk of life, then people might be more willing to engage. Pushing what is allowed for what you can do to gather in public space—for example, bike-locking a bunch of chairs to the street so there’s more seating for people to hang out. That’s a horizontal form of building public infrastructure that would benefit everyone. And those are really the kinds of stuff we’re most interested in, as opposed to getting everyone off their social media. If there’s a chair, anyone can sit in it. 

CO: People are walking down Bushwick Ave and joining in, but in Tompkins when you have these events people maybe like us would stop and talk to you but would a tech 9-5er take seriously the goals of the movement, and is it necessary that they do? 
G: Yes, a staple of our events is the Soap Box. We put up—it’s a soap box, I don’t really need to explain it. But anyone who’s walking by can come up and say whatever they want. Usually it ends up being people talking about their relationships with technology. We did this event called “Friends of Friend AI”—you remember those Friend.com ads that were all over the city? We did an event, we had a giant life size Friend AI necklace and we said “We’re testing out if you wanna meet the necklace you can come here,”—

CO: You had a real friend.com necklace?
G: It was made of cardboard, it was human sized. There was a person in it giving answers, it wasn’t a robot. And we had a long line of people and made them sign all these waivers, sign away their rights to us saying we could put them in a dungeon and all this kind of stuff. And when they came up to ask their questions the AI was like, “you should kill yourself,” or whatever, sort of glitching out. It escalated to this whole event where everyone chased the AI down the street and graffitied it. And then someone on the West 4th basketball courts challenged it to a 1v1, and then the AI battled the guy, who’s a West 4th street legend—his name is The Messiah. So the AI battled The Messiah and then he lost and everyone started chanting “AI can’t hoop” and then destroyed him. Point being of this story is that the CEO of friend.com came to the event.

CO: What!
G: Yeah, the CEO came and he was there for all of this, and after the AI got destroyed we go back to the park and we have the soap box and he gets up and basically just gives a little ironic speech like “yeah, your tech overlords, dadada…” he was just trying to be funny but it wasn’t really landing. And I remember someone in the crowd shouted “what’s the most sentimental moment you’ve ever had!” and he said “getting head to radiohead.” and everyone was just like, “ugh…”

CO: Getting head to radiohead?
G: Getting his cock sucked while radiohead was playing. It was a joke, he was joking around. But everyone sort of groaned like, really bro? And that was his opportunity to speak his mind and that’s what he said, and—this kind of sounds not true but it’s what happened—then everyone gave him a giant hug, like “we still love you,” or whatever. It was ridiculous, but everyone swarmed him and gave him a hug. It was a little sad. I don’t know if you wanna put it in print, but he was on his phone the whole time. And he had his necklace on. He was struggling to interact with people. 

And then we met with him after in the park and had a wide ranging discussion about his technology. He admitted to us that he learned about some of the environmental impacts of data centers from the graffiti he was seeing on his ads, which I thought was crazy. But yeah, this is to say there is value in making your events accessible to the passerbying tech bro. This guy, obviously we all hate his fucking app, but somehow he felt comfortable enough to then come back an hour later in the dark to talk with like 20 people, which I think says something about the tone of the event. And I don’t think he’s gonna fucking change his mind, or have a “come to jesus” moment or anything, but I do think there is real value in it. A lot of the people who are entrepreneurs or CEOs in this way are also really affected by this stuff and a lot of them are weirdos and don’t know how to socially interact with people. And we try to open up a space where we can have that discussion with him.

CO: So what do you say to critics who might say that Luddism, or criticism of technology in general, is somehow ableist to those neurodivergent folx who like, perhaps, the friend AI founder who is possibly autistic, and lacks the ability—needs the wheelchair, so to speak, of an artificial intelligent support—

G: Okay. It’s interesting, I haven’t heard this one before. 

F: It’s out there.

Z: It’s out there, and with like, UberEats delivery.

G: Okay sure. ANOTHER CLOCKED OUT WITH THE HARD HITTING QUESTIONS. 

F: We signed a contract to challenge your beliefs.

G: Challenge them! We of the Luddite Renaissance, and me, Gowanus, personally, love autistic people in every way.

Z: in EVERY way?

G: What, you don’t think autistic people can have sex? Clocked Out Ableist—cancel them! I think it’s kind of sad—you can look at some of the ads on this “Friend AI” website that have been coming out recently, they’re really upsetting. Really upsetting. And I think they’re rage bait, and I think he’s been rage baiting the whole time, but it’s reaching another level. The people in the ads were poor people who were either lonely, like you’re saying, have maybe mental illness or developmental disabilities or physical disabilities who don’t have people to talk to or interact with. These ads were focusing on these people and following them, and to me it just read like a really sad tale of exploitation. I feel like no matter the level of your ability, everyone is better served having a human interaction than interacting with a robot. I guess what you’re saying is “what if there’s nobody for them to talk to and they can only talk to a robot.” I don’t have an interest in refuting these cases and being like, “no you should rather talk to nobody than talk to an AI,” that’s not really an argument I’m interested in making. The argument I am interested in making is the emotional exploitation that is occurring with this kind of AI revolution or whatever you call it—

[Better Off Alone by Alice Deejay presciently begins blasting from a car]

Everyone, singing along together: Do you think you’re better off alone?

G: Such a good song.

These companies and corporations are getting shovelfuls of venture capital money shoved down their throats and asses—these corporations are being incentivized to make products that make it harder for us to socially engage. So, okay, if someone has no other option and wants to speak to an AI that’s fine, I want humans to survive. But what is the societal cost of this social revolution that’s occurring? People are acknowledging that they feel de-skilled, that their social skills are eroding, and community is being lost. This is the core, really pressing issue that is essential to be dealt with head on for all groups of people regardless of their ability. 

CO: So what do you want to happen in the ideal progression of the movement?
G: One, you could build towards large-scale coordinated boycotts of these corporations that are actually effective. I think we’re a way out from that now. But another is just building a really local, tight community that is really strong without relying on big tech corporations. It’s kind of simple and stupid, because it was just like this 30 years ago. But it’s true. Something we haven’t talked about yet is anti-surveillance architecture. Data privacy—bringing that back into public consciousness. Now that the US is descending into fascism, it’s really a techno-fascist flavor which is that this is being aided and abetted by these massive webs of surveillance which, like I was saying before, in Gaza are being used to slaughter civilians, in the US we’re at the stage where people are realizing ICE is training bots to scrape your social media and put you on a database or a watchlist. They’re subpoenaing Meta to try and get your information if you’re a private account or whatnot. And people are kind of waking up to the fact that these systems that we’re relying on for our social lives are not neutral and are weaponized against us. And I think that’s the world we’re interested in seeing. Just a revitalization of culture in public space, really. A mass social movement—the US has not really seen this since the anti-war movement of the 60s. And I think there’s a lot of passivity in American culture. I could get really bleak, but I feel like we’re lambs walking to the fucking slaughter. The repression on these revolutionary movements is crazy, but also there’s an overstimulation of information that our bodies are not able to deal with. There’s an influx of terrible news every day that we don’t know how to process. We need to train ourselves to be able to assess our media diet and reskill ourselves to the things we lost with automating our lives. I think a mass Luddite movement is essential to a political struggle in the United States. 

CO: Meta just announced it’s gonna lay off 10% of its work force today, which is about 8000 people. Some people are saying that in the next two years these AI layoffs are going to keep happening, and the 2028 presidential election may be a kind of AI reckoning. What kind of candidate, Gowanus—I don’t know if you’re registered to vote—
G: No. But I’ll vote anyway. I’ll vote a million times. 

CO: What kind of platform would compel you in 2028?
G: Haha… it’s funny because the Luddites are kind of not involved in electoral politics. Not that it’s not important, but that’s not really our sphere, and there are people doing this work on other fronts. There’s a guy running for NY-12, Alex Bores. He’s running an anti-AI campaign. And he’s an ex-Palantir employee, funny fact. So there is a ton of money being poured into attack ads on him from this super PAC, “Leading The Future,” funded by tech corporations calling him out for working for Palantir,—but the ads are paid for by Palantir. They’re weaponizing anti-AI sentiment to not vote for the anti-AI guy because they know that’s what’s gonna work. I think this is going to be the center of a lot of races going forward. 

And I think it’s a pretty bipartisan thing—Luddism cuts across political lines. Silicon Valley has captured the political apparatus. Basically we want to push the Overton window so far that electoral politics needs to catch up to us. Politics is downstream of culture. Luddism can undercut a lot of narratives that we’re being fed, on both sides. I think it would resonate with a lot of people across the board. I don’t think everyone will be like “I wanna act goofy and gay in a public space and do this,” but hopefully we can get lots of people to resonate with the message and start thinking about these concerns, and believing that we can make a change in terms of data privacy and our social infrastructure.

You want to treat everyone you interact with as a human. Everyone has their own perspective and is special in their own way. And a lot of people feel alienated, and like everything is terrible and there’s nothing they can do, and even if it’s something goofy, like you’re surrounding the Apple store on Fifth Ave and you’re placing a curse on it, or you’re smashing an iPad with a giant rock, there’s something spiritual and cathartic and ritualistic about acting, about agency. And I think that’s why we’re interested in stuff like puppetry. Because puppetry, if I can get philosophical, is a mask you can wear. It’s something you can embody, and you can take off, and our lives are full of moments where we’re just putting on different masks for different elements of life. And if we can put a certain mask on—it’s the Luddite mask, it has a lineage, a mythological beast that transcends generations—and we can feel that energy within us, it actually does something spiritual. It activates something within you, where yes you’re playing, but you feel like you can do something. When you get 200 people to storm the apple cube and there’s the security guards and they’re the terrorist task force, or whatever, NYPD, and you totally surround them and bewilder them to the point where they have no idea what they can do, it makes you feel like anything is possible, you know what I mean? And I feel like that’s really important for the future of our culture and our nation. Agency that we can make this world.

CO: You’re capturing something that is really well done by social media, putting on a mask and creating a character of yourself. You can be one person on Instagram and change your profile picture and be a different person on Twitter. It makes a lot of sense that your movement is interested in reinvigorating a space for this “play,” that might be in some way monopolized by social media, in the physical world. 
G: I hadn’t really been thinking of what we’re doing as a way of reclaiming something from social media. I thought of it more as an essential part of the human experience, and maybe you could say it’s part of the goal of social media to alienate you from yourself, but I do think play and performance and ritual—you can think of it in the most ancient sense of pre-civilization of shamans doing rituals for having a good hunt and catching an animal tomorrow. The feeling that play and masking performance is not something in your personal identity that you can commodify, like we see on social media. Instead of persona being utilized for that, it can actually help you harness elemental forces and tap into something deeper and more unknowable. Experience in life is so unknowable and so magical, the fact that we’re somehow alive on this planet. When you’re experiencing an event, your life opens up. It’s essential to activate the imagination for whatever world we’re trying to build.

This summer we are doing a festival called “Summer of Ludd,” where we take our free public participatory events and we turbocharge them into a week of programming to really make the Luddite movement known in New York, and to really showcase through action that you can create a week long event that is fun, educational, building community, and works and is offline, not advertised on any social media platform. That way people can see that it isn’t necessary to use these online platforms for everything. We can live great social lives and organize outside of it. It’s gonna be centered around Tompkins but all around the city. It’s gonna be free food, music, theater, workshops, teach-ins, there’s gonna be a conference at The New School. It’s gonna be the 250th anniversary of America, so we got programming on July 4th.

We think that we can’t be apathetic, we have to be actively trying to build this new world. We need to be really cognizant of our American multitech organizations, and for the wars we are participating in imperialistically, how these corporations are integral in the war machines. We want it all to be free, all to be off social media, and all to be as participatory as possible. Summer of Ludd, 2026, Gowanus media puppet, I’m saying it now, it’s gonna be fun, it’s gonna be beautiful, and I love you. I believe in you. June 28th-July 5th.

CO: Okay, thank you so much Gowanus, it’s been a pleasure.
G: Boom. A pleasure. Okay I’m gonna go into sleep mode now.

Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity.
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