#neoluddites — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #neoluddites, aggregated by home.social.
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Oh, the irony!!! NYC activists: “You don’t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun.” TL;DR: You can have fun without social media… if you live in a big metropolis like New York City!! And that’s why I’m no luddite but rather a communist à la Karl Marx.
“This time, the protest isn’t a one-off. It’s part of the “Summer of Ludd,” a week-long festival of free public events organized and advertised entirely off of tech platforms and social media. The Summer of Ludd doesn’t have a website, but you can call a phone number to get a run-down of the events happening each day around the city. The schedule includes everything from an “offline rizz” workshop designed to help you ditch dating apps, a phone-free rave called “Let’s Get Off Together,” internet piracy 101 skill-shares, and an outdoor play that retells the story of the original Luddites. I found out about the Summer of Ludd from a local event mailing list called NYC Off Tech, but other folks I met throughout the week learned about it from posters wheat-pasted around their neighborhoods, paper event guides distributed to bookstores and coffee shops, or just word-of-mouth from friends.
Basically, the whole thing is an experiment designed to prove a single point: You don’t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun.”
https://www.404media.co/luddite-events-nyc-off-tech-summer-of-ludd/
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"Far from the distorted caricature of Luddites as curmudgeonly, puritanical tsk-tsk’ers, the new Luddites attract people to their movement through playfulness and participation."
https://www.404media.co/luddite-events-nyc-off-tech-summer-of-ludd/
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"The conclusion of The AI Con reveals the structural limit of the entire approach. Bender and Hanna propose “strategic refusal” as a political horizon: saying no to AI, drawing inspiration from Luddite movements and feminist struggles. The invitation is suggestive, but the question left unanswered is: refusal in favour of what? If AI is a technology that, as the book itself documents, is already reshaping work, healthcare, education, and cultural production, refusal without an alternative project risks being a symbolic gesture that leaves the field open to those who govern and deploy these technologies. The authors envision specific, narrow-scope tools designed in collaboration with communities; but this vision sets a very low bar and fails to reckon with the possibility that general-purpose language models have already produced widespread, imperfect, and improvable benefits—benefits that a politics of outright refusal would end up surrendering entirely to those with fewer scruples."
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-end-of-algorithmic-denialism/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Art #ArtHistory #Luddites #Neoluddites
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Only a fool would deny that... I'm getting tired of all this anti-AI bullshit. It's just a very efficient automation tool with specific affordances that can be well used or badly used. OK, there are still some hiccups in terms of efficiency but this is mostly an engineering problem together with an illiteracy problem from the part of some users.
"The Star Wars director, George Lucas, has added his voice to the growing chorus of film-makers receptive to the rising use of AI tools in moviemaking.
Speaking in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas, 82, said: “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies.”
Resistance to the technology, he said, was “very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’”
Adoption of such tools, continued Lucas, was an inevitability. “There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Lucas is not the only director of a Star Wars film to have come out in favour of AI. The British film-maker Gareth Edwards, who made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and most recently Jurassic World Rebirth said generative AI “is a fucking genius at helping you”."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Luddites #NeoLuddites #AntiAI #Film #Movies #Cinema
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Student #ReadingAbility Spikes After Removing Tech From Class
"Remove all the #distractions and we can get our kids back."
By Frank Landymore
Published Jun 15, 2026"Would you believe it: a teacher and her students say their reading ability soared after banning tech in the classroom.
"Maureen Mulvaney, an AP Literature and English teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, started the low tech experiment last year after becoming frustrated with plagiarism, distracted students, and plunging literacy rates.
"And so, with the enthusiastic support of parents, she banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done with pencil and paper. The turnaround was quick and resounding, and despite some initial resistance from students, they quickly fell in love with the old, analog ways of doing things.
"In September, before the experiment started, just 46 percent of Mulvaney’s students said they felt confident about their reading ability. By February, that share shot up to 95 percent.
" 'We’re having a lot of trouble in education and I think what my kids told us was that there is a solution and the solution is to go #LowTech. Go back to the old ways of doing things,' Mulvaney told local TV news station KARE 11. 'Remove all the distractions and we can get our kids back.'
"Mulvaney let her students ease into a tech free environment. First, they started with just ten minutes of silent reading and writing by hand. Still, the first day was 'rough,' she wrote in an essay in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Most students quit after just half a page of longhand composition.
" 'I told the kids this is like lifting weights,' she told KARE 11. 'You don’t go in and you don’t start with 80 pounds.' "
Read more:
https://futurism.com/future-society/students-reading-improves-no-tech-class#LudditeClub #NoTech #NoPhones #NoAI #Reading #Writing #Humans
#Smartphones are #DumbingUsDown #SolarPunkSunday #Handwriting #NeoLuddites #SmartphoneBan #Longhand