So it’s a hard cognitive jump to be like, “OK, I’m not gonna use these certain technologies,” but in that sense, I have to make my own new structure, right? What we found personally is that there’s actually a lot of joy and interest and experimentation that comes from that.
Your movement is based in New York. Do you have ambitions for it to spread beyond the city?
Absolutely. For the Summer of Ludd, we had people coming from all over the country, and we had people from Canada, and people from Australia. We had people coming from Iowa, from Santa Cruz; we had people coming from North Carolina.
So there is already sort of a Luddite network out there. People just don’t know about it ’cause it’s not online.
So the festival just wrapped up. Are there any other events that you have planned?
Not immediately, because we all need to rest our weary bones. However, if you do want to learn about events in the next month, there’s the NYC Off Tech calendar, which is essentially like a newsletter. You can sign up for it. You’ll get like 60 events in a month essentially. Also if you’re in New York, keep your eyes peeled.
I mean, we do huge poster campaigns, right? And we do in all different types of neighborhoods. Our guidebooks for the Summer of Ludd that we gave out reached bookstores up in the Hudson Valley. We mailed them to people in different states.
Keep yourself open to, “OK, I’m gonna look around. Is there a Luddite poster here? I’m at my local bookstore. OK, is there some information here?” It’s this idea of social infrastructure, switching people over from the idea of, “OK, I’ll look at an Instagram page, and here’s all the events” to the idea of, “I actually have to leave my house.” Be on the lookout. We’ll be out here. Tompkins Square Park, probably, other parks, privately owned public spaces. We have events all over this city. It’s amazing. Knicks in five. I love New York.
Gowanus, we like to play a little game on each show.
I love games.
We’re very proud of it. It’s called Control, Alt, Delete. So I wanna know what piece of tech you would love to control, what piece you would alter or change, and what you would delete, or vanquish from the earth.
Wow.
Are you ready?
Control, Alt, Delete. OK, great.
Let’s start with control.
This is so funny that you’re asking me this. I would say the servers for the internet.
The internet was billed as something that was, OK, we are going to have a free exchange of knowledge across the world. It’s going to help diversity and globalization and all this stuff, and then, boom. Military technology, right?
We saw this with Ed Snowden, essentially.
OK. And now alt.
I’m trying to think about which technologies do I feel have a real positive impact, but have a negative sort of profit incentive.