Meet Gowanus, the Garbage-Born Puppet Fronting America's New Luddite Movement

Key points

• The Summer of Ludd, a Luddite festival held in New York in July 2025, banned phones, photos, and recordings at its events.
• The modern Luddite movement borrows its name from 19th-century British textile workers who organised against being replaced by machinery.
• A puppet named Gowanus acts as the movement's public face, protecting the anonymity of its human members.
• Gen Z, the first generation to grow up entirely online, is one of the largest groups joining the movement.
• The festival's "Delete Day" asks attendees to delete social media apps from each other's phones, together, in a circle.

A puppet walked into a recording studio, handed a journalist a handwritten contract, and started explaining why you should spend less time on your phone. That is not a joke. That is the Summer of Ludd.

The Summer of Ludd is a Luddite festival that ran in New York earlier this month. The word "Luddite" comes from early 1800s England, where textile workers, people who wove cloth for a living, organised secretly against factory owners who wanted machines to replace them. Today the word is often used as a light insult, meaning someone who is bad with technology or afraid of it. The movement wants to reclaim it.

The festival, first covered by Wired AI, kept things simple. No phones. No recordings. No photographs. Workshops ranged from how to flirt in person to an "evidence box" where attendees could submit written accounts of ways Big Tech had harmed their lives.

So why a puppet? The original Luddites stayed anonymous to avoid arrest by the Crown and local militias. The movement follows the same logic today, and Gowanus, a puppet whose backstory is that he was "born" in a dumpster in Brooklyn's Gowanus neighbourhood, gives the group a public face without exposing any individual member.

Gowanus agreed to the podcast interview on one condition: no short-form clips. No YouTube Shorts, no ten-second reels. The idea is that a quick scroll past a clip is the opposite of the attention the movement is trying to encourage. He put it in a handwritten contract. The journalist agreed to clip only the part where Gowanus explains the contract.

The critique here goes beyond "phones bad." The movement argues that technology is not automatically progress, and that the people who built social media sold it as global connection while delivering, in their view, mass loneliness instead. Data centres strip natural resources. Algorithms make dating transactional. Streaming platforms do not pay artists a living wage.

Is this just a digital detox trend with better branding?

Not quite. Gowanus is direct on this point: the movement is not just asking you to put your phone down for a weekend. It wants to build physical community, bringing people back into shared public space on a regular basis.

The clearest example is Delete Day. Attendees sit in a circle. Each person deletes an app from someone else's phone, not their own. The group talks through why each app works the way it does and what it takes from the user. The point is that quitting something you are genuinely dependent on is easier with other people beside you.

The mix of people showing up is wide. Some have never owned a smartphone. Some are chronically online and know it. The movement is not prescribing one way to participate.

For ordinary people watching this from the outside, the practical takeaway is modest and entirely voluntary: the next time you feel the pull of an endless scroll, you might ask who built that pull, and why.