‘He’s more in control of his emotions,’ says Andrea Stella
World champion won his first race of season in Hungary
Lando Norris is at the peak of his powers after his win at the Hungarian Grand Prix demonstrated the world champion has a stronger psychological approach to driving, according to the McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella.
Norris took his team’s first win of the season on Sunday with a commanding drive at the Hungaroring after Mercedes dominance for much of the campaign. The Briton has always maintained his team would come back into contention and duly did so, beating the Red Bull of Max Verstappen into second and the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli into third.
Maryam Ebrahimi’s documentary about a home for survivors of the war in northern Syria is tender, gentle and incredibly moving
Speaking over footage filmed at the funeral of a female army commander, documentary-maker Maryam Ebrahimi notes that it’s the first time she has seen women carrying a coffin in the Middle East. As they move through crowd of mourners, she adds: “Their sisterhood amazes me.” Ebrahimi is talking about the women of Rojava, the Kurdish-led autonomous socialist region in northern Syria. At the cemetery, the women dig the soil with their bare hands; it is a tradition in Rojava, a final act of solidarity with their fallen sister.
Ebrahimi’s tender, gentle film is about a home for injured army veterans in Rojava; most are survivors of the war against Islamic State (IS). The house is mixed genders; one of the men living there is Fadakhar, who has had both his legs amputated and is haunted at night by phantom itches and pains. Mostly, though, Ebrahimi’s gaze is drawn to the female veterans, who made headlines a decade ago for their courage on the battlefield. We learn that women started leaving their villages to fight IS in 2011 – though in truth a little more background about the history of Kurdish all-female battalions might have been helpful.
The Hallmark Channel’s ropey version of The Odyssey is going viral for its star-studded cast. Christopher Nolan’s film only looks better by comparison
Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is far from the first committed to screen. As early as 1911, Italian director Guiseppe de Liguoro made a silent version entitled L’Odissea. Readers of a certain age may remember watching the futuristic animated series Ulysses 31 throughout the 1980s. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is based on The Odyssey. So too, if you squint as hard as you can and discount the Goofy Goober song, is the first SpongeBob SquarePants movie.
However, the pre-Nolan adaptation that has the biggest legacy is arguably Andrei Konchalovsky’s two-part version, made in 1997 for the Hallmark Channel. This is the adaptation that has been doing the rounds in recent days, clipped up on social media (the full version is highly discoverable on YouTube) and catching the eye of Joyce Carol Oates, who spent much of Thursday night tweeting very enthusiastically about it.
The offensive potential is no longer theoretical. We need to develop systems to strengthen public health as quickly as AI is accelerating biological design
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the biological sciences, it is pushing the future of biology in two opposing directions. AI can help bad actors generate recipes for biological weapons with just a few keystrokes and computational prompts. At the same time, AI can track disease outbreaks and deliver critical public health information to millions of people in real time – potentially stopping a deadly outbreak in its tracks. What we are dealing with in this moment is profound: a race between offense and defense. Between the proliferation of dark biology, where deadly pathogens are engineered in secret, and the promise of a new era of collective global health.
Every infectious disease outbreak begins with a handful of cases. Public health wins by learning about an outbreak before it spreads wide, before hospitals fill and a crisis starts to spiral out of control. As transmission rates explode, options shrink. One of AI’s greatest values is its ability to compress the timeline between outbreak and detection. Speed can mean the difference between containing an outbreak and confronting an epidemic, or another global pandemic.
Suing his record label and sick of being a sex symbol, the singer spent 1992 working on the Trojan Souls for stars including Aretha Franklin and Bryan Ferry. Now, newly released studio footage shows him in his creative prime
The George Michael album that never was began in defiance and ended in grief. It was 1992. Mired in a toxic dispute with Sony Records, Michael chose to keep busy and declare his independence by making an album of songs to be sung by several of his musical heroes, including Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson and Sade Adu, under the alias the Trojan Souls. Michael worked on the album for months until his Brazilian boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa died of Aids in March 1993 and he lost interest in music. It was never revived.
Tracks from the sessions have since leaked, along with some of the fly-on-the-wall footage filmed by Michael’s close friend and informal adviser Andros Georgiou, who has spent years trying to get unauthorised clips removed from YouTube and TikTok. Now, months before the 10th anniversary of Michael’s death, he is releasing 90 minutes of unedited video as Trojan Souls – not exactly a film but an unfiltered view of Michael in his creative prime. “I thought these fans were making money from my rights so I decided to stop fighting and get it out there,” Georgiou says. He hopes it will open a door on what he calls, with characteristic hyperbole, “the greatest album never made”.
Leaving your blue ticks on used to be a sign that you were trustworthy. These days it conveys a certain ‘pick me’ energy
Genuine question: am I the last person in the world who still has my blue ticks on? In the early days of WhatsApp, if someone had gone into their privacy settings and turned them off, so you could never be sure when or even if this person had read your message, that told you all you needed to know. No blue ticks = red flag. Here was a slippery, sneaky individual, not to be trusted under any circumstances. As opposed to those of us who left them on – honest, noble, open books with nothing to hide. No blue ticks was an indicator that you were probably messaging a serial killer.
But recently the tide has turned. Now everyone seems to have gone all mysterious and switched them off, to leave you guessing. I’m starting to feel like a desperate blue-tick loser, over-keen and needy, falling over myself to volunteer the unnecessary information that I’ve read your message, when you are far too cool to care. Blue ticks on has real “pick me” energy. It’s attention-seeking, the coloured symbol equivalent of sending a selfie of you reading the message in question, while grinning and doing a thumbs up.
Abandoned at the age of two, he pinched everything from birthday cake to raw potatoes. Beneath the comic greed was a much-loved companion who kept us laughing for 12 years
We adopted Morris after he’d been abandoned in a park at the age of two. The shelter named him Kai but it didn’t suit him. An old soul (read: curmudgeon) who tried to pull us into old-school boozers, and who demanded routine and treated walks as a favour to us, Morris was perfect.
Incorrigibly lazy and happiest on the sofa, preferably on top of us, his only real motivation was food. Perhaps he knew hunger in that park, and vowed never to meet it again. Among the countless petty thefts from unattended plates were some truly audacious schemes. There was the sandwich stolen right out of a stranger’s hand. The birthday cake polished off, tinfoil and all, before its intended recipient tasted a single bite. The multiple raw baking potatoes eaten, this last crime caught on video or we’d never have believed it.
International law states only military sites can be targeted during conflicts, but this is routinely being ignored
Twice every day, Liubov Martynenko leaves the underground maternity ward where she works in Kherson and travels by ambulance to collect meals from another hospital in the Ukrainian city’s “red zone”, close to the Dnipro River and the Russian forces on the other side.
On 4 June , just before midday, the vehicle entered the grounds of Luchansky city clinical hospital as usual, but Martynenko, who also works as a midwife, heard a strange sound in the air. “It’s flying!” the driver screamed, as she realised there was a drone nearby.
PYONGYANG (ANP/RTR) - De Noord-Koreaanse leider Kim Jong-un heeft oorlogsmonumenten bezocht ter gelegenheid van de 73e herdenking van de wapenstilstand in de Koreaanse Oorlog. Dat deed hij met zijn dochter Ju Ae, die volgens de Zuid-Koreaanse inlichtingendienst NIS wordt klaargestoomd als zijn opvolger.
De Koreaanse Oorlog eindigde in 1953 met een wapenstilstand in plaats van een vredesverklaring. Kim herhaalde in een toespraak dat het een grote overwinning was voor Pyongyang.
De afgelopen tijd verschijnt Ju Ae vaker in gezelschap van haar vader. Ze is naar schatting ongeveer 13 jaar oud. Het was de eerste keer dat ze de herdenkingen van de wapenstilstand bijwoonde.
BRUSSEL (ANP) - De Europese Commissie heeft geregeld dat er meer blusvliegtuigen naar Spanje en Frankrijk gaan vanwege de bosbranden. In totaal zijn er nu zeven blusvliegtuigen naar Frankrijk gestuurd en zes vliegtuigen naar Spanje, laat een woordvoerder van de Europese Commissie weten.
In Frankrijk gaat het om zeven vliegtuigen en vier helikopters uit Tsjechië, Kroatië, Duitsland, Portugal, Slowakije, Zweden en Turkije. Een vertegenwoordiger van de Commissie is ook in Bordeaux om "de nationale autoriteiten bij te staan", aldus de woordvoerder.
Voor Spanje is geregeld dat er zes vliegtuigen kunnen worden ingezet uit Griekenland, Italië en Turkije. Ook komen 134 brandweerlieden en 41 blusvoertuigen uit Portugal assisteren bij de bluswerkzaamheden in Spanje.
De EU kan in geval van bosbranden een beroep doen op 777 brandweerlieden, 22 blusvliegtuigen en vijf helikopters uit verschillende lidstaten. Landen kunnen daar aanvragen op doen via het zogeheten burgerbeschermingsmechanisme.
MADRID (ANP/AFP/BLOOMBERG/DPA) - De komende dagen worden in Spanje beslissend bij de strijd tegen de natuurbranden die het land teisteren. Daarvoor waarschuwde minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Fernando Grande-Marlaska. "Vandaag en morgen zijn absoluut cruciale dagen, omdat de weersvoorspellingen vanaf woensdag erg ongunstig worden voor de bluswerkzaamheden."
De verwachting is dat de temperaturen begin deze week verder gaan stijgen in Frankrijk en Spanje, waar honderdduizenden mensen zijn geëvacueerd voor natuurbranden. Die grijpen in Spanje om zich heen in gebieden die daar door herhaaldelijke hittegolven en door een gebrek aan regen kwetsbaar voor zijn. Ook zou meespelen dat de begroeiing dichter is dan gebruikelijk, omdat er in de wintermaanden juist relatief veel neerslag was.
Experts zeggen dat hittegolven tegenwoordig eerder in het jaar beginnen, vaker voorkomen en langer duren door klimaatverandering. Premier Pedro Sánchez heeft volgens Spaanse media aangekondigd dat het kabinet dinsdag een panel gaat instellen met klimaatwetenschappers dat de regering gaat adviseren. "Dit zijn geen op zichzelf staande incidenten", verklaarde hij volgens RTVE. "Het is een klimaatcrisis."
Nederland zweet zich door weer zo'n nacht en de ventilator staat, zoals bij miljoenen anderen, standaard aan tot de wekker gaat. Handig, want de airco vinden we milieuonvriendelijk en het raam openzetten levert vooral muggen en brommers op. Alleen: die trouwe luchtverplaatser is minder onschuldig dan hij klinkt. Artsen zetten op een rij wat er 's nachts met je gebeurt als de wieken uren op je gericht staan — en hoe je de bijwerkingen beperkt zonder terug te kruipen in een broeierig bed.
Allergie en astma krijgen een gratis rondje — Een ventilator koelt de kamer niet af, hij verplaatst lucht. En met die lucht: huisstof, pollen, huidschilfers van de kat en het stof dat maandenlang op de wieken heeft liggen rijpen. Voor wie gevoelige luchtwegen, hooikoorts of astma heeft, betekent dat vaak wakker worden met een piepende borst, hoestbuien of een verstopte neus. Bijkomend probleem: de droge luchtstroom irriteert precies de slijmvliezen die zich anders tegen die allergenen zouden verweren.
Stijve nek en spieren die niet meer meewerken — Wie de hele nacht een koele bries op dezelfde plek krijgt — meestal schouder, nek of rug — merkt 's ochtends de rekening. De lokale afkoeling knijpt de bloedvaten samen, spieren verkrampen en omdat je uren nauwelijks beweegt, wordt die spanning gefixeerd. De klassieker is de stijve nek die pas rond de koffie weer een beetje wil draaien.
Verstopte neus door — jawel — droge lucht — Constante luchtstroom droogt neus, mond en keel uit. Je lichaam reageert daarop met méér slijm, niet minder. Het resultaat is een verstopte neus, een schrapende keel, ochtendhoest en soms een dof drukkend voorhoofd. Kno-artsen wijzen op het zogeheten mucociliair transport: de microscopische haartjes in de neus die stof en allergenen naar buiten vegen, hebben vocht nodig. Blaas dat vocht weg en je zet je eigen luchtwegverdediging op stand-by.
Droge huid en prikkende ogen — Wie al eczeem, psoriasis of droge ogen heeft, krijgt van een ventilator die de hele nacht op het gezicht staat een gratis verergering toe. De uitdrogende luchtstroom trekt vocht uit de opperhuid en verdampt de traanfilm sneller dan die aangevuld wordt. Contactlensdragers herkennen het gevoel meestal binnen een minuut na het opstaan.
Zo houd je de ventilator én je gezondheid — Terug naar bed zonder verkoeling is voor de meeste mensen geen realistisch advies bij een tropennacht. Wel kun je met een paar aanpassingen het grootste ongemak wegorganiseren:
Richt de ventilator niet op je hoofd, maar schuin langs het bed of tegen een muur, zodat er lucht circuleert zonder dat je in de directe straal ligt.
Gebruik de zwenkfunctie. Verdeelde luchtstroom droogt minder uit dan een constante bries op één plek.
Maak de wieken en het rooster regelmatig schoon; stoffige bladen zijn niets meer dan een allergeenverspreider met stekker.
Zuig en stof geregeld af, vervang filters van ventilatie of airco op tijd en probeer de luchtvochtigheid tussen 30 en 50 procent te houden — een bakje water op de verwarming of een luchtbevochtiger scheelt al.
Word je wakker met een droge neus, spuit dan voor het slapen fysiologisch zout (verkrijgbaar bij elke drogist) in beide neusgaten.
Zet de ventilator op een timer die halverwege de nacht uitgaat, als de kamertemperatuur dan toch al zakt.
De nuchtere conclusie — Een ventilator veroorzaakt geen blijvende schade en zeker geen ernstige ziekte; dat is de geruststellende kant van het verhaal. Maar hij koelt ook geen lucht. Wat hij doet is zweet verdampen en de illusie van frisheid leveren — met vier vervelende neveneffecten in de aanbieding. Wie de ventilator een halve slag draait, de wieken afneemt en de kamer op een fatsoenlijke luchtvochtigheid houdt, wint aan alle kanten: koeler bed, minder gepiep, minder ochtendkuchen en een neus die tenminste tot het ontbijt meewerkt.
Meer weten?
Longfonds — Wat wel en niet te doen bij hitte longfonds
Gezondheid.be — Slapen met een ventilator, is dat gezond? gezondheid
Linda — De hele nacht slapen met een ventilator aan
This is a rare entry in my "Tokyo Series." This time, I took the opportunity to stroll around the area after attending a live music performance in Ochanomizu. First up is the view from Hijiribashi Bridge, right in front of Ochanomizu Station.
This is a rare entry in my "Tokyo Series." This time, I took the opportunity to stroll around the area after attending a live music performance in Ochanomizu. First up is the view from Hijiribashi Bridge, right in front of Ochanomizu Station.
"The rise of TikTok, Instagram Reels and Amazon storefronts has created a new kind of white-collar exit strategy," reports Bloomberg. Workers ditch office jobs not to become celebrities, necessarily, "but to piece together an income online through brand deals, affiliate links and highly personal videos documenting everyday life."
In many cases, the followers necessary to sustain a living are smaller (and more attainable) than people might assume. A small but loyal audience can now generate enough income to rival a midlevel salary. Welcome to the middle-class creator economy. Last year, 25-year-old Abi Platock balanced a corporate marketing job in New York while posting online in her spare time. She built her audience by posting one or two videos a day, offering career advice, beauty tips and daily vlogs. "I signed my first brand deal in the four-figure range, and for me that was just such a big eye-opening moment," Platock says of her partnership with deodorant brand Secret. She had 8,000 followers on TikTok at the time. "You can totally make it work without having hundreds of thousands of followers." Platock, who now has roughly 25,000 followers across platforms, has signed about $25,000 in brand deals so far this year and expects her annual creator income to reach around $50,000 by yearend.
Her experience reflects a broader shift in advertising. Brands are increasingly moving money toward so-called microinfluencers — smaller online personalities who have less than 100,000 followers. "They are hiring a bunch of microcreators at scale instead of hiring a handful of macrocreators for what could potentially be the same cost," says Ali Grant, co-chief executive officer of the Digital Department, a creator management company. And they perform where it matters most: engagement. An engagement rate of 3% is considered strong, and some microinfluencers exceed 10%, Grant says of the closely watched metric that tracks how often followers interact with content through likes, comments, shares and saves. Microinfluencers average a 3.2% engagement rate, almost triple the 1.1% rate for macroinfluencers (more than 1 million followers), according to growth marketing agency ATTN... A TikTok partnership with a creator who has around 50,000 followers can run a brand more than $3,500 for a single post, Grant says; with 10 times the followers, that fee might just triple, to around $10,000....
The influencer marketing economy ballooned to a projected $33 billion in 2025 up from $1.7 billion in 2015. The segment gained momentum after the COVID-19 pandemic, as dissatisfaction with traditional work pushed many to reconsider conventional career paths, says Brooke Duffy, a professor of communications at Cornell University. "They realized the trade-offs in terms of the investments of time, energy and human capital were not necessarily worth sacrificing so much of one's personal self for," she says. Success online can bring greater freedom — and even higher pay than many traditional office jobs, which have a median US salary of $69,000, according to Glassdoor. But the middle-class hustle still requires constant effort to maintain. The career has no promise of lifetime longevity. And unlike traditional workers, creators have no predictable paycheck or job protections, making career stability elusive. Roughly 57% of 3,000 surveyed full-time creators earn below a living wage from content creation, according to a report last year from Influencer Marketing Hub. Income from social media can fluctuate wildly from month to month, driven by shifts in algorithms, sponsorship cycles and platform trends.
"You could have a month where you make zero dollars, or you could have a month where you make $10,000," Platock says.
The article cites Gallup Poll data released last year that found employee engagement in the U.S. had fallen to its lowest level in a decade [with engagement defined as "the psychological attachment workers have to their work/team/employer]. "Among the hardest-hit groups were Generation Z and workers in finance and technology. Broader workplace challenges, including rapid organizational change, hybrid and remote work transitions, and rising employee expectations are considered drivers of the overall trend."
"For many workers, influencing can seem like a better deal; flexible schedules and independence wrapped in a veneer of creativity and fun. Almost 60% of Gen Zers say they'd become an influencer if given the opportunity, according to a 2023 survey from Morning Consult."
Natuurbranden kunnen het weer lokaal zo beïnvloeden dat het de brand verder aanwakkert. Naar aanleiding van wetenschappelijk onderzoek schreven we in 2023 al over een „intense…
In de strijd tegen de verwoestende bosbranden hebben Frankrijk en Spanje ook de hulp ingeroepen van Nederland. Beide landen hebben het kabinet gevraagd om het Nederlandse leger uit de buurt te houden.
"Wij vragen onze Nederlandse vrienden: blijf alsjeblieft weg", zegt een zichtbaar angstige Franse president Macron. "Wij zouden het enorm op prijs stellen als de Nederlandse defensietop zich in godsnaam niet bemoeit met onze gortdroge natuurgebieden."
Ook de Spaanse premier Sánchez hoopt op een 'cruciale daad van vriendschap'. "Als Nederland ons nu helpt door geen enkele militair naar Spanje te sturen, dan zullen wij dat niet vergeten."
Minister Yeşilgöz van Defensie is trots. "Onze bondgenoten doen een expliciet beroep op ons. Dat is een mooi teken van vertrouwen."
I’m marching across Lower Manhattan in the middle of a heatwave with a friendly mob of Luddite gnomes, and there isn’t a phone in sight.
It’s Fourth of July weekend in New York City, and the brutal temperatures haven’t stopped a hundred-or-so people from donning pointy hats and dancing in the streets while chanting anti-Big Tech slogans. “Fuck, fuck, fuck AI,” the Luddite gnomes – people in colorful, pointy homemade hats – chant as we march, urging the confused spectators recording us to put away their pocket rectangles and join us in our sweaty, phone-less revelry. The gnomes are headed West, towards Washington Square Park, where they plan to carry out a public show trial for OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. It’s the fourth iteration of a theatrical protest event they call “S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E,” which stands for “Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience.”
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 calledNYC 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.
“Google knows next to nothing / My mom knows everything!” the gnomes chant as they hand out gnome hats to random bystanders and implore them to put away their phones. The hats, I’m told, are a reference to aDutch anarchist group from the 1970s known for their impish culture-jamming and absurd carnival humor. It’s also “just kinda silly,” one of the organizer gnomes explains to me.
At the front of the march, two gnomes carry a giant cardboard smartphone labeled “ChatGPT,” which lists off thevariouswell-documentedsocial ills caused by chatbot tools. “Even if it gives us rabies / we will free the iPad babies,” the gnomes continue chanting as they set the smartphone effigy down on a grassy knoll, next to a soapbox that will be used as a witness stand. The crowd is all-ages, but skews heavily Gen-Z — consistent with recent polls showing thatyoung people have become some of Big Tech’s fiercest critics.
Images courtesy Janus Rose
One by one, witnesses take the stand to accuse Altman of numerous crimes perpetrated by OpenAI — from training models on artists’ work, to inducing AI psychosis, to accelerating the climate crisis with polluting and power-hungry AI datacenters. “I used AI to write one of my essays and got in trouble. Now I’m starting a war on AI,” one young person says from atop the soapbox, receiving cheers of approval. “These companies want you to think that you’re dumb, but that is a lie. Everyone here is smart. Everyone here is creative,” says another witness, describing how tech companies design AI tools and social media apps to make people dependent on them — making them feel helpless, alienated, and addicted to the endless scroll. The crowd roars its unanimous verdict in unison (“GUILTY!”) and everyone begins joyfully stomping on the giant cardboard GPT phone. Leading them is a gnome “executioner” holding a hammer that bears the phrase “Enoch Made Them / Enoch Shall Break Them” — an homage to the original 19th Century Luddites, who named the hammers they famously used to smash factory machines after the guy who made both the machines and the hammers.
It’s tempting to compare the spectacle to something from the days of Occupy Wall Street. But what sets the Summer of Ludd apart from what one might expect of a Luddite protest is its lack of cynicism and an overwhelming abundance of raw, anarchic joy. 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. Instead of shaming others for too much screen time, they use public events to make their points for them, demonstrating organically and in real-time that the “indispensable” tech we’ve organized our lives around is not so indispensable after all.
I first met the Luddites a week earlier in Tompkins Square Park, for a press conference hosted by their official spokesperson: a puppet made of garbage.
I joined a small group of journalists sitting in plastic chairs and directing questions at the puppet, who is named Gowanus, after the famously putrid Brooklyn canal where the parts of its patchwork body were found. Gowanus is the Luddites’ “media spokespuppet,” a stand-in created to maintain the organizers’ anonymity while interfacing with digital media platforms and their operatives—including me.
As one might imagine, the Luddites are very averse to any kind of social media. Smartphones are verboten, and they ask every journalist present to sign a “Terms of Service” agreement on a comically long brown paper scroll, which states that nothing we capture may be used to make “short-form video content” like TikToks or Instagram Reels. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I kept my phone stowed away and used nothing but my Hobonichi notebook, a pen, and a small voice memo recorder to do my reporting for this article.
“We are interested in building alternative social infrastructure that allows us to be no longer reliant on Big Tech,” Gowanus told the group of journalists as they dutifully scribbled notes. “All our events are free, and defy any sort of transactionalism or consumption. We’re trying to dispel that transactional element and get people to participate and create the events themselves. That is what the Summer of Ludd is all about.”
On my train ride home, I pondered the irony of being a journalist covering an event series designed to resist digital capture and consumption. When I reached my subway stop, I noticed an ad for the second-hand online marketplace Backmarket, showing a pink Nintendo Game Boy with the text “AB > AI.” Someone drew a heart next to it in black sharpie marker—an anonymous mark of approval that felt like the opposite of the subway ads for the “Friend” AI device that were widely and virally defaced last year.
Almost reflexively, I took a picture of the ad with my phone and posted it to BlueSky with the caption: “Hatred of AI now reaching the level of cultural consensus that becomes attractive to advertisers.” I woke up the next morning to thousands and thousands of interactions, many from people delighted to see their anti-AI sentiment vaguely reflected in a subway ad for overpriced second-hand goods. This made me think about the classic political trap, where capitalists co-opt social movements by channeling their radical potential into harmless forms of aesthetic consumption and feckless identity politics.
How can the neo-Luddites resist these inevitable attempts at co-optation? Can Luddism generate mass-appeal beyond Y2K aesthetic Tiktok trends, where Gen-Z’ers marvel at flip phones, iPods, and other retro tech as a kind of performative false-nostalgia? And how do you build a successful movement while eschewing the most common (albeit flawed) tools of mass-communication?
Members of the Luddite Renaissance—as the loose-knit, anonymous collective that organized the Summer of Ludd refer to themselves—attempt to answer these questions in “The Event is the Medium,” a zine manifesto referencing the famous Marshall McLuhan quote which, naturally, is only available in physical paper format (The Luddites humbly request that none of their work be uploaded to social media). The central idea is utilizing public space to run events that get people to experience—and directly participate in—what Luddism has to offer in 2026, instead of just yelling at people on a street corner.
What should these Events entail? This is where the Luddites become intentionally vague—not for lack of answers, but as a defense mechanism designed to make the Event unpredictable and unmonetizable. If social media’s role is to consume and metabolize human existence into an endless scroll of bite-sized, short-form video content, then the Event’s purpose is to bring people together in ways that defy categorization and documentation. Like the “Happenings” of 1960s performance artist Allan Kaprow, they can be anything and everything—as long as they are free, participatory, and never, ever boring.
“The Event may seem nebulous and surreal to you; this is on purpose,” the Luddites write in their zine manifesto. “DIY shows, teach-ins, art fairs, all come with a preconceived notion of what will happen. This causes people to act in a ritualized or transactional way. Any way that you can break through the monotony of ‘coolness’ to facilitate earnestness and urgency is paramount.”
In other words: If the event is the medium, the message is that being a Luddite is fun again.
I returned to Tompkins Square several times over the next week. Throughout the Summer of Ludd festivities, the Luddites had transformed the formerly-bohemian Lower East Side hangout into a kind of town square. They camped out at the park each day, providing free food, zines, and plenty of ways to plug in to the various happenings throughout the city. Basically, if you wanted to find out what the Luddites are all about, you had to meet them here, in person.
Images courtesy Summer of Ludd
Somewhere in the large crowd that had gathered for the gnome protest, I ran into Motherboard founder and fellow low-tech appreciator Alex Pasternak, along with “extremely online” journalist Taylor Lorenz, whorecently told WIRED that her screen time averages 17 hours a day. Also present was Reverend Billy, leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, whose corporate exorcisms and culture-jamming theatrics have been a staple of NYC protests since the 90s.
“Chronically online culture has become something we’re attached to, even as activists,” Bucky, one of the Luddite organizers, told a crowd of gnomes in the park, just prior to the million-gnome march. “Our consumer habits are tracked, analyzed, and sold back to us. Every time we seek fun in our little light-boxes, we feed a beast which surveils us, which exploits our time and our imagination, and which lines the pockets of big psycho assholes like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesson, and Tim Cook.”
“I want my attention back!” someone shouts in response. The crowd cheers in agreement.
Bucky mentions the 2012 Arab Spring uprisings as a pivotal example of how Silicon Valley extended this capture to the realm of activism. In the heyday of Twitter, tech companies and most of the Western press pushed a narrative that social media platforms were helping liberate people around the world from oppressive regimes. Thanks to these platforms and their beneficent corporate overlords, the argument went, the techno-utopian dream of the 90s internet would be realized, and dictators would crumble under the power of free information and free markets.
Others likeEvgeny Morozov argued that this framing was not only naïve and wrong, but allowed companies like Twitter and Facebook to advance their ambitions and establish themselves as centralized social infrastructure under the guise of do-gooder tech saviorism. At the same time, the ad-powered surveillance networks built by social media enabled governments to crack down on dissidents like never before, paving the way for things like facial recognition, algorithmic manipulation, and discriminatory digital ID laws.
But there was another explanation for the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere that had little to do with tech.
“The reason hundreds of thousands of people went to Tahrir Square is because a million people lived within ten miles of it. That is public space, and public space is where politics happens,” said Bucky. “Public space is the new social media. Running an event is the new activist infographic on an Instagram story.”
With hatred of big tech and AI hitting the mainstream, it makes a lot of sense that something like the Summer of Ludd would emerge in this particular moment. Everywhere I go, there is an overwhelming sense that the Silicon Valley experiment is on its last legs. The companies that once aimed to make good products and postured as democracy-loving and progressive now open ally themselves with fascists, actively enshittify the internet with slop, and force-feed us annoying AI features that nobody wants. In response, the new Luddites seek not to abandon technology entirely, but build new infrastructure that embraces proximity and in-person human relationships, instead of alienation and doom-scrolling.
“This is an activism of the moment,” internet culture theorist and media professor Douglas Rushkoff, who was also present for the Luddite gnome march, told 404 Media. “Even if the whole thing is ending, even if we’ve already lost, we’re gonna go and party. We’re gonna go down having fun. And if we can have a good enough party in face-to-face, non-technological, non-digital interaction, we will seduce the world like Abby Hoffman never could.”
As the person who coined the rise of “viral” media back in the 90s, Rushkoff has been paying attention to tech backlash trends longer than most. His 2016 book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus” captures a pivotal moment where public sentiment toward Silicon Valley began to sour, as companies like Google and Facebook disrupted public infrastructure and reshaped the San Francisco Bay Area in their image.
Over the next decade, the tech companies did away with their vaguely progressive, ‘Don’t Be Evil’ public image, and young people who came of age in the aftermath increasingly found themselves attracted to tech backlash and the neo-Luddite movement as a reflection of their lived reality.
“The extent of the skinner box that this generation is living in is more extreme. We adapted to it as best we could, but they were born inside of it,” said Rushkoff. “Their hearts and their somatic sensibilities have been intentionally disrupted and stymied since they were born. And so they’re a good case study to show that whatever that part of us is, it will seek expression eventually.”
Bleak job prospects and a visibly collapsing climate further explain why some of the biggest moments of Big Tech backlash in recent months have come from Gen-Z—like the series of viral videos showing graduates booing tech CEOs for praising AI during their commencement speeches. But the Luddites are quick to point out that their movement is multi-generational, and their goals for the Summer of Ludd can’t be realized through the medium of news headlines and viral online attention.
So, what am I doing here? Why am I writing this article, attempting to capture the essence of a movement and an event that—by its very nature and stated intention—refuses to be captured? Maybe it’s because journalism is best when it acts as a cultural placeholder, a blurry indication that something happened here, and perhaps will keep happening in the future. It’s also a kind of beacon for others to find—an indication that the “inevitable” future tech companies keep threatening us with is perhaps not so inevitable, and that humans aren’t so hopeless at finding each other and creating new ways to live.
“Part of the concept is: You had to be there,” Rushkoff told me. “It’s like oh, Earth? You had to be there. Life? You had to be there.”
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