Inside the Luddite Festival Harnessing Gen Z's Rage Against Big Tech

WIRED 

New York City's Summer of Ludd festival is teaching people how to live offline amid the suffocating presence of Big Tech. A papier-mâché woman is the backdrop to a play about the Luddite movement. On a Sunday evening in the middle of Tompkins Square Park in New York City's East Village, hundreds of people gather in front of a giant papier-mâché face of a woman wearing a crown. She's the backdrop of a play, her body made up of curtains that look like a dress but serve a dual purpose, allowing actors to scurry on and offstage. I'm here to watch a performance called " Luddite Recreations," which is a history of the Luddite movement--a group of artisans and textile workers who resisted the adoption of machines during the early years of the Industrial Revolution in England and whose resistance to being displaced from their work was met with violence by the British monarchy.