The new Luddites

Dan Fox announced his run for president in Washington Square $SQ Park with no donors, no platform, and no phone in his hand.

"This revolution will not be televised," he told a crowd of about 40 people in New York's Washington Square Park, then rattled off a list of everything else it wouldn't be: streamed, emailed, Substacked, tweeted, BeRealed. Fox, who works for a dumbphone company and like many millennials, dabbles in comedy, asked his audience to take out their phones, turn them off, and introduce themselves to a neighbor. 

He led chants of "no platform," joked about not knowing how to actually be president, and waxed nostalgic about the days of AOL, when the internet lived in one room of the house and you left it there when you walked out. He closed with "God bless you, and God bless America," before telling everyone they could turn their phones back on.

If this seems (mostly) like a joke, the attendees were serious about the offline nature of it all. Fox's announcement was one event inside the Summer of Ludd, a weeklong festival in New York's East Village built around a simple goal: learning to opt out of Big Tech, together and in person.

The timing tracks with what economists have started calling a boomcession, a term for an economy that looks strong on paper, with AI-driven productivity and stock prices both climbing, while most people report feeling worse off, watching layoffs and credit card debt climb right alongside it. Big Tech, in that telling, is not lifting people up so much as leaving them behind.

Even some of the industry's own are starting to say so. Microsoft $MSFT CEO Satya Nadella said last month that AI companies have to earn "social permission" from the public, warning that a handful of firms hoarding the technology's value while predicting mass job losses is not a story people will tolerate for long.

A boom the crowd cannot feel

That gap between tech stocks and the mood is the backdrop against which the Summer of Ludd is playing out. The festival ran through July 5 with events like a play about the original Luddite movement, a conference at The New School on AI's ties to the military and surveillance, and a mending workshop, none of it advertised online. Flyers were papered around the neighborhood instead.

At the New School conference, a local named Jonathan said he found the festival through those same flyers and was struck that he could not find a trace of it online. He works in media and said he has grown uneasy enough about how his industry handles data that he is considering a career change toward something closer to digital self-determination. Later, an attendee pulled out a dumbphone mid-conversation and said switching was easier than people assume. Another gave out stickers that said “Yes Birds! No AI.” and “all bots are cops.”

The label "Luddite" gets thrown around as a punchline, shorthand for someone who cannot work a smartphone. The actual Luddites were textile workers fighting to keep a say in their own livelihoods, not machines themselves.

The modern version is shaping up to be the same. No one at the conference was against eyeglasses or indoor plumbing, one speaker pointed out. What they rejected was tech's extraction on people's autonomy, whether over their attention, their job, or their data.

That framing tracks with what is happening across the country. Data center opposition groups more than doubled nationwide over the past year, blocking or delaying tens of billions of dollars in projects, and a 2025 Pew study found that nearly half of teens now say social media has a negative effect on people their age, up sharply from just two years earlier.

None of this means people are actually leaving their phones behind. Every generation has its cause, and it would be easy to write this off as one more, 22 and idealist, gone by August. But the same discomfort keeps surfacing outside the park too, in state legislatures, in city council meetings, in polling on how teenagers feel about their own phones. 

It's showing up in less expected corners too. Chad Whitacre, a longtime open source developer, announced this spring that he was stepping away from tech entirely, AI included, after years of trying to fix open source's sustainability problems. He described the shift as going "neo-Amish," aiming for a life closer to 1980 than 2026. He is not 22. That's harder to file away as a phase.

Fox's run for president will not appear on any ballot. But the sight of 40 people willingly powering down their phones to listen to a man joke about George Washington is its own small data point, one line in a much longer argument about who gets to hold our attention and on what terms.