This Luddite Puppet Hopes You’re Not Reading This on Your Smartphone

Gowanus the media puppet probably shouldn’t even be talking to me.

Made of literal garbage—his origin story is that he was born in a dumpster in his namesake neighborhood in Brooklyn—he’s the media representative for the Summer of Ludd, a Luddite festival that took place in New York earlier this month.

The festival, which WIRED attended, included everything from workshops on how to flirt IRL to an evidence box, where people could submit testimonies on how Big Tech has negatively impacted their lives. Its rules were simple: Be present. No phones, recordings, or photographs allowed.

So, philosophically speaking, it is somewhat contrary to Gowanus’ beliefs to be in a podcast recording studio at Condé Nast’s Manhattan offices. But he’s pragmatic, telling us he wants to reach people, so he’s willing to meet them where they’re at. Still, he has some conditions—presented to me on a handwritten contract. Namely, that we not clip short-form video of the show, in an effort to encourage people to engage with the full interview. In a compromise, we agree to only clip Gowanus explaining the contract.

You might be wondering why Summer of Ludd and its movement are represented by a puppet. It’s a nod to the original Luddites, British textile workers who anonymously organized against being replaced by technology during the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. While the term “Luddite” has since become a derogatory way to refer to someone who opposes technology, there’s a renaissance happening—and it’s surprisingly being heavily embraced by Gen Z. Gowanus offers anonymity to the people behind the growing trend.

I was curious about how being a modern-day Luddite works in practical terms—even organizing this interview was a challenge, because the Summer of Ludd folks weren’t necessarily quick to reply to emails. And I wanted to know why the first generation to ever grow up totally online seems to be leading the charge on having less screen time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MANISHA KRISHNAN: Gowanus, thank you for joining me.

GOWANUS: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

So I'm gonna jump right in and ask, why are you a puppet?

Oh, that is a phenomenal question. Well, you know, we live in a hyper-digitized age. And the original Luddites were completely anonymous. When they were going around in the 1800s organizing people, fighting automation, they sought anonymity because they were facing the oppression of the Crown, of local militias, things like that.

So in the spirit of retaining anonymity and not creating movement figureheads and things like that, we made a puppet, a media puppet. And that's me. Hi, I’m Gowanus.

So you brought a handwritten contract for me today. Can you tell me what it says?

It's essentially an ask for you and WIRED to not make any short-form content of this interview. We believe in short-form content, right? We want people to pay attention and actually commit time to watching the whole interview. You know, we don't want clicks and likes and scrolls past and things like that. So that's essentially it.

I mean, I'm with you on wanting to encourage people to get into long-form, but at the same time, that is how we promote this show. So are you against us promoting it on any form of social media?

Definitely not. Because we wanna reach people, everybody. Most people spend a lot of their time on social media, and the people who particularly need to hear this message often are chronically online. That's totally OK, and we wanna meet them where they are. But there is a practice, right, of the Luddite movement of really taking time and giving your attention to things, right?

If you're gonna engage with something, not, like, scrolling past it, being like, “Oh, this is a little YouTube Short,” right? “I'll look at it,” and then shoop, it's gone into the ether. Shoop, next thing. Next thing, a frog eating a chicken nugget, whatever. Shoop, right? So we're trying to engage people and pull them into, “OK, actually, let's sit down for this 30, 40 minutes and hear the entirety of our critique.”

You've already referenced this, but I feel like most people hear Luddite and they think of people who are against tech or afraid of tech. But actually it dates back to the Industrial Revolution, with English workers who were protesting exploitative working conditions.

So in modern times sometimes calling someone a Luddite is kind of an insult. Do you think that's still the case?

This is a very interesting question because you're right, it's a totally pejorative term, right? Like, a Luddite is somebody who's bad at technology, often doesn't know how to move files around on their MacBook or things like that. Or someone who's seen as anti-tech, right?

It's almost like saying “caveman.” One thing that we really found coming out of the Summer of Ludd is that people started to have a new framework and a new understanding of, OK, what does it mean to be a modern Luddite, right? And we really believe that to be a modern Luddite is to have a deeper critique of technology that's really been lost.

A lot of what's broadly accepted is technology equals progress, sort of by any means necessary, right? The sort of founding mantra of Silicon Valley was “move fast and break things. No matter what we make, the technology will be the progress, and that will forward society,” yada, yada, yada.

I think people are really waking up to the fact that actually a lot of this tech is extractive, is taking away natural resources like with data centers, is actually not necessarily needed in terms of social media. Like, the whole billing of social media was, “OK, let's be more connected on a global scale,” right?

And what we're seeing more and more is actually mass loneliness, atomization, things that just make Gowanus so depressed.

But, sorry, coming back to the word Luddite, a critique of technology, right? A look at technology that is not coming from a stance of neutrality. Every technology is progressive. Every technology is sort of apolitical. WIRED investigates all of these technologies and who do they actually serve? Do they serve people? Do they serve Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Big Tech oligarchs?

Are you finding that the people who are joining this movement are people who are giving up tech, or is it a lot of people who never embraced tech to begin with?

I would say it's a total mix. Tech is so ingrained in so many people's lives, and we also had people come to the Summer of Ludd who have never had a phone. Or have never been online in 20 years.

There's a sort of a range of ways to be a Luddite, right? There's no sort of one-size-fits-all. A lot of the reporting really likes to hone in on “OK, Gen Z, we're getting flip phones,” you know? It’s kind of a consumer-based narrative. But what we’ve shown with the Summer of Ludd is actually what we’re doing is creating an in-person community.

We’re bringing people back into public space, and it goes beyond the current idea, which is really about digital detox. “I'm going to pare down my personal relationship to the internet, to my phone, to social media,” to whatever it is. And the way that we do this is we do a lot of events communally.

We have something called Delete Day, where we acknowledge getting off Instagram, getting off Hinge, getting off whatever it may be, whatever app is ailing you, is actually hard to do. There's a certain reliance that we all have on these things. The best way to do that is to do it with a group of people, right?

And to actually sort of commit to, OK, we're all gonna sit in a circle. We're each gonna delete an app off of someone else’s phone and do it together. And learn about why is Instagram extractive? Or why is Hinge changing the nature of dating and making it more transactional? What's the deal with Spotify not paying artists a living wage, you know?

Are there basic tenets to your move