It’s time to reclaim the Luddite

Delivering the commencement address at Wesleyan on May 24th, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) inadvertently demonstrated the success of a century-spanning smear campaign against a single historically significant term. Murphy had a powerful piece of advice for the graduating class: Resist efficiency.

“Every day, technology companies are rolling out new products that cut the time it takes to do everything in your life, from eating to shopping, to dating, from getting [from] one place to another,” the senator said. “These aren’t products designed to make you happier. These are products designed to make you more efficient . . . Our entire economy is built on rewarding companies that are efficient at making a profit, not based upon how they treat their workers, the social value of their product or the impact they have on the community.”

But Murphy was quick to assure his audience: “I’m not a Luddite.” Because we all know what that means: In history written by the victors, the Luddites impeded technological progress, attempted to halt innovation, and were soundly defeated by the Industrial Revolution. The narrative of Luddites as cantankerous reactionaries has been remarkably durable, and the push to correct the record, as tech journalist Brian Merchant did in 2023’s “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” has had little effect on the term’s epic run of terrible PR. The resistance to efficiency Murphy advocated is the actual legacy of the real Luddites, who weren’t opposed to technology, Merchant wrote, but “were opposed to the way technology was being used against them [by] industrialists who used machinery to depress wages, evade labor laws, and degrade the quality of products in order to profit at their expense.”

Casting Luddites as anti-technology, in other words, has slandered an historic labor uprising as a destructive tantrum thrown by fearful, hidebound cranks, and Murphy’s reference to them underscores that the term retains its power to invalidate objections to and skepticism about the weaponization of technology as a synonym for progress. As Merchant points out, the AI founders who misrepresent objections to their technology as ideological rather than material — such as concerns about environmental impact, inadequate regulation, and the theft of intellectual property — are using a similar playbook, portraying anti-AI protests as the predictable backlash of people resisting progress. The difference is that history is no longer written solely by the winners, and today’s industrialists no longer have a monopoly on shaping the narrative.

Reclaiming the spirit of Luddism was the intention of the artists, educators and activists who organized New York City’s recent Summer of Ludd, a free, 8-day festival meant to get participants off their screens and into community. The event was advertised almost exclusively offline, with flyers wheatpasted to construction scaffolding and guidebooks available at independent bookstores. And though it might not have been headline news even a few years ago, the Summer of Ludd arrived at an auspicious time — there is a growing resistance against the encroachment of generative AI and the environmental threats of data centers, and an ongoing tranche of revelations about how social-media platforms facilitated an explosion of disinformation.

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.Sign up here

The movement to reduce dependence on social media and, by extension, Big Tech goes far beyond recommending phone-free spaces and regular digital detoxes. The Summer of Ludd was a reminder, if anyone needed one, that reclaiming our time, money and attention from an industry that has systematically siphoned them away in pursuit of profit is an inherently political act. The Summer of Ludd’s slate of participatory events — Attention Activism teach-ins, Radio in Public Space (RIPS) workshops, and immersive urban experiences like “New Rat City” (“Come learn more about the rodents we share our city with, and leave with a new appreciation and understanding for how they live — and how they are misunderstood. We will be hanging out with the rats”) — asked attendees to consider what parts of themselves they had surrendered to social media; why productivity has become the primary measure of a person’s value; and how Big Tech has encouraged, monetized, and normalized the discomfort that makes a device-free existence — phones off, AirPods stowed, raw-dogging reality — seem so unthinkable.

Among the organizations who participated in SoL is Friends of Attention, whose recently published book, “Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,” starts from the premise that in a limitless expanse of information, attention has value and tech companies mine it with a process the authors liken to “human fracking: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market.” The Quaker-inspired coalition also founded New York’s Strother School of Radical Attention, which offers courses and workshops on attention as a practice that, maintained and exerted, makes it easier to recognize and refuse such extraction.

The attention economy is often portrayed helpfully by media outlets as an individual problem to be mitigated by reducing our own dependence on screens and devices. One of the goals of the Summer of Ludd and the organizations like Friends of Attention who were part of it is to underscore that the capture and extraction of human attention for corporate profit is a systemic problem that requires collective intervention. Not unlike 2000s-era environmentalism, which shifted the onus away from the industries driving climate change and onto individual consumers urged to reduce their carbon footprints, widespread attention atrophy is framed as a troubling consumer addiction, rather than the evidence of an exploitative industry functioning exactly as intended.

Resisting the attention economy isn’t a human vs. machine battle, but a David-and-Goliath one. Two days after the Summer of Ludd ended, private jets and helicopters descended on Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to herald the start of the Allen & Co. Conference, an annual meetup of the nation’s cultural power brokers that’s colloquially referred to as “billionaire sleepaway camp.” Attendees include Apple’s Tim Cook, Disney’s Bob Iger, Netflix’s David Zaslav, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, Palantir’s Alex Karp and a host of other tech leaders with increasingly unfettered power — people, in other words, whose success requires products’ ability to harvest attention.

As public sentiment sours on these marquee names and animosity toward billionaires continues to rise, the spooky stories shared around the campfire at the cushy Sun Valley lodging will likely be extra scary this year, conjuring the specters of electable Democratic-socialist mayors, looming shadows of legal and regulatory complaints, and growing backlash to plainly unethical AI incursions like Meta’s Muse Image generator. But the overarching goal of the attendees is still to ensure that the attention economy is as robust and thriving as possible, and they have the reach and resources to assure that it does, via everything from consumer-facing prediction markets to ginned-up product scarcity.

“There’s definitely a feeling that the dead internet is here as promised,” says one New Yorker who checked out the Summer of Ludd, showing up for the “flirtation rehabilitation” session on dating without apps. “The more we’re forced to do on the internet, the worse those experiences are.” It’s not just the technological enshi**ification identified by tech writer and theorist Cory Doctorow, they say, but the knowledge that “these rich f*cks knew what they were doing the whole time, and they’re gloating about it.” Even worse, recognizing the long con has degraded offline interactions as well. “It’s harder than it used to be to let my guard down.”

Recognizing that the more our lives are mediated with digital tools the harder it becomes to live without them has catalyzed less explicitly political pushes for offline attention as well. Social initiatives like The Offline Club, whose local chapters (almost all currently in Europe) list regular offline events and get-togethers that aren’t expensive to attend, and which are inspiring others to do the same. Their emergence dovetails with what’s been billed as a fun shortage; according to a recent Bloomberg investigation, spaces meant strictly for social recreation are dwindling; time spent yearly on entertainment, recreation, and social events has plummeted; and activities once accessible to a range of people, like going to a concert, are now prohibitively expensive.

It’s no longer possible to talk about the advancement of tech apart from the consideration of who benefits from it — and how much of that benefit comes at the expense of others. And just as democratizing access to the internet was a policy concern in the 2000s, ensuring that people can easily get offline is becoming a focus of this era. Damian Thomas, one of Summer of Ludd’s contributors and the creator of the hybrid resource Unplatform, talking to Wired, summed things up concisely: “[This] is not a digital versus analog thing. It’s a question of who controls how your community operates itself. Is it Mark Zuckerberg or you?” But there’s an optimism in knowing for sure that the jig is up. “You are not an idle passenger of history. You get to control the impact that technology has on you and your society.”