On this week’s episode of The Big Interview podcast, WIRED’s senior culture editor Manisha Krishnan talks to Gowanus about eschewing Big Tech, going outside, and rejection in the age of dating apps.
If you’re gonna engage with something, not, like, scrolling past it, being like, “Oh, this is a little YouTube Short,” right? “I’ll look at it,” and then shoop, it’s gone into the ether. Shoop, next thing. Next thing, a frog eating a chicken nugget, whatever. Shoop, right? So we’re trying to engage people and pull them into, “OK, actually, let’s sit down for this 30, 40 minutes and hear the entirety of our critique.”
You’ve already referenced this, but I feel like most people hear Luddite and they think of people who are against tech or afraid of tech. But actually it dates back to the Industrial Revolution, with English workers who were protesting exploitative working conditions.
So in modern times sometimes calling someone a Luddite is kind of an insult. Do you think that’s still the case?
This is a very interesting question because you’re right, it’s a totally pejorative term, right? Like, a Luddite is somebody who’s bad at technology, often doesn’t know how to move files around on their MacBook or things like that. Or someone who’s seen as anti-tech, right?
It’s almost like saying “caveman.” One thing that we really found coming out of the Summer of Ludd is that people started to have a new framework and a new understanding of, OK, what does it mean to be a modern Luddite, right? And we really believe that to be a modern Luddite is to have a deeper critique of technology that’s really been lost.
A lot of what’s broadly accepted is technology equals progress, sort of by any means necessary, right? The sort of founding mantra of Silicon Valley was “move fast and break things. No matter what we make, the technology will be the progress, and that will forward society,” yada, yada, yada.
I think people are really waking up to the fact that actually a lot of this tech is extractive, is taking away natural resources like with data centers, is actually not necessarily needed in terms of social media. Like, the whole billing of social media was, “OK, let’s be more connected on a global scale,” right?
And what we’re seeing more and more is actually mass loneliness, atomization, things that just make Gowanus so depressed.
But, sorry, coming back to the word Luddite, a critique of technology, right? A look at technology that is not coming from a stance of neutrality. Every technology is progressive. Every technology is sort of apolitical. WIRED investigates all of these technologies and who do they actually serve? Do they serve people? Do they serve Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Big Tech oligarchs?
Are you finding that the people who are joining this movement are people who are giving up tech, or is it a lot of people who never embraced tech to begin with?
I would say it’s a total mix. Tech is so ingrained in so many people’s lives, and we also had people come to the Summer of Ludd who have never had a phone. Or have never been online in 20 years.
.jpg)
