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Luddite Teens Still Don’t Want Your Likes

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Biruk Watling, a college sophomore wearing a baggy coat and purple fingerless gloves, walked the chilly campus of Temple University in Philadelphia on a recent afternoon to recruit new members to her club.

She taped a flier to a pole: “Join the Luddite Club For Meaningful Connections.” Down the block, she posted another one: “Do You Desire a Healthier Relationship With Technology, Especially Social Media? The Luddite Club Welcomes You and Your Ideas.”

If Ms. Watling had a missionary’s zeal, it was because she wasn’t just promoting a student club, but an approach to modern life that profoundly changed her two years ago, when she helped form the Luddite Club as a high school student in New York.

But that was then, back when things were simpler, before she had embarked on the more independent life of a college student and found herself having to navigate QR codes, two-factor-identification logins, dating apps and other digital staples of campus life.

The Luddite Club was the subject of an article I wrote in 2022 — a story that, ironically, went viral. It told of how a group of teenage tech skeptics from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and a few other schools in the city gathered on weekends in Prospect Park to enjoy some time together away from the machine.

Readers inspired by their message responded in hundreds of emails and comments. Reporters from Germany, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere flooded my inbox, asking me how to reach these students who were so hard to track down online. Snarky Reddit threads and think pieces sprouted. Ralph Nader endorsed the club in an opinion essay, writing: “This is a rebellion that needs support and diffusion.”

Two years later, I’m still asked about them. People want to know: Did they stay on the Luddite path? Or were they dragged back into the tech abyss?

I put those questions to three of the original members — Ms. Watling, Jameson Butler and Logan Lane, the club’s founder — when they took some time from their winter school breaks to gather at one of their old hangouts, Central Library in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.

They said they still had disdain for social media platforms and the way they ensnare young people, pushing them to create picture-perfect online identities that have little do with their authentic selves.

They said they still relied on flip phones and laptops, rather than smartphones, as their main concessions to an increasingly digital world. And they reported that their movement was growing, with offshoots at high schools and colleges in Seattle, West Palm Beach, Fla., Richmond, Va., South Bend, Ind., and Washington, D.C.

The Luddite Club is better organized these days, they said, with an uncluttered website to help spread the word. Ms. Lane, 19, is in the last stages of turning it into a registered nonprofit organization.

He took Ms. Butler’s hand. “She inspired me to get a flip phone,” he said, “because I saw all the superpowers it was giving her.”

After the summit, the teens headed to Prospect Park. Trudging across leaves, they traded critiques of the new Bob Dylan movie. On arriving at their old gathering spot, Ms. Lane grew pensive.

Ms. Lane has lately become a public face of the movement. In April, she delivered a talk at a symposium examining technology’s effects on society at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Speaking before a crowded auditorium, she painted a bleak picture of her pre-Luddite life. “Like other iPad kids I found myself from the age of 10 longing to be famous on apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok,” she said. “My phone kept the curated lives of my peers with me wherever I went, following me to the dinner table, to the bus stop, and finally to my bed where I fell asleep groggy and irritable, often at late hours in the night, clutching my device.”

Then, at age 14, she had an epiphany.

“Sitting next to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn one afternoon, I felt the sudden urge to throw my iPhone into the water,” she told the MoMA audience. “I saw no difference between the garbage on my phone and the garbage surfacing in the polluted canal. A few months later, I powered off my phone, put it in a drawer, and I signed off social media for good. Thus began my life as a Luddite.”

For the youth of today, the developmental experience has been polluted; it’s been cheapened. ‘Who am I?’ becomes ‘How do I appear?’

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