Suzanne Harrington: Is this really the ideal time to join the Young Luddites?

Adult Kid One cannot conceive of a pre-Gen Z world, where people simply hung around, never quite knowing if the other person would turn up

Melting in the station shade, Adult Kid One and I allow our imaginations to run wild.

Waiting at a sleepy Provence station in the flattening August heat, the train bearing Adult Kid Two from Marseille glides to a halt. Scanning the straw-hatted passengers disembarking onto a white-hot platform, he is not amongst them. 

Yet only an hour earlier, he’d sent a WhatsApp — “on train, phone about to die”. He’s not on the next train either, or the one after that. In our era of hyper-connectivity, this disappearance assumes a mystery of Marie Celeste proportions.

Melting in the station shade, Adult Kid One and I allow our imaginations to run wild: He’s boarded the wrong train, and is en route to Helsinki; he’s been arrested/abducted; he’s changed his mind and gone home. Joined the Foreign Legion. Eloped. Gone underground.

How, she wonders, did anyone manage before phones? She cannot conceive of a pre-Gen Z world, where people simply hung around, never quite knowing if the other person would turn up. Where if plans changed when you were on the move, there was no way of letting other people know. I tell her how I once sat outside a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City — population 10.5 million — for two days, hoping my sister might walk by. (She did).

My firstborn has questions. How did you get around before smartphones? How did you know what was happening? How did you book things? How did you pay for stuff? Her voice rises in incredulity. How did you get anywhere without Google Maps?

We muddled along, I explain. We got lost. We stood in queues. We went into physical spaces with physical money. We wrote letters. We did word of mouth. We didn’t leave reviews. Our influencers were magazines. We didn’t have dating sites, just Lonely Hearts, which were for saddos.

Jesus, she whispers. That all sounds horrific.

She has not — yet — joined the Gen Z backlash against tech, dubbed the Summer of Ludd by young New Yorkers who recently held a small festival publicised only by postcards and word of mouth. Smartphones and social media were banned.

Participants at the festival chanted “No Gemini, no GPT, no Grok, no Claude” and “Free the iPad babies”, presumably alluding to the infants given digital screens to keep them quiet, rather like infants were once given whiskey/brandy for the same reason.

The young Luddites of Manhattan, as they call themselves, are fed up of tech controlling their lives. In 2024, a Harris poll found almost a quarter of Gen Z wish smartphones had never been invented; a Pew poll showed over half supported a social media ban for under-16s. 

While not adverse to all digital tech, young Luddites are not keen on tracking tools, algorithms, the impact of social media on their social lives, or the idea of their careers being replaced by AI. 

As a result, there’s been a spike in purchases of old-school dumbphones and vintage tech such as cassette players. Luddite clubs are springing up, encouraging people to be more analogue, at least temporarily.

At the French campsite where my friends and I spend August, we oldies have been observing the semi-Luddite behaviour of our adult kids. Instead of phone-focused preening, uploading, and sharing, they’ve been playing noisy offline card games and devising fiendish hand-written trivia quizzes. There was even talk of a jigsaw. They’ve barely looked at their phones.

Which is great, unless you’re waiting at a hell-fire hot train station, your WTFRU messages going unanswered. Is this, I wonder, really the ideal time to join the young Luddites?