Attendees wore hats made of colored folders rolled into points like typical gnome hats, adopting the gnome as a mascot of sorts for its earth-bound and nondigital connotations. The hats had notes taped inside them that criticized tech and encouraged people to join “the Luddite Renaissance.” The rally began at NYC’s High Line, an elevated public park, before marching to a nearby Tesla store, where rallygoers wrote anti-tech messages in chalk on the sidewalk. They then proceeded to a nearby Apple store, where they held a mock trial against the company’s tech products and then smashed a few.
What do people do at anti-tech rallies?
Answer: Dress as gnomes and smash tech products.
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Technology has become so pervasive in our everyday lives that some people are rallying against it. Business Insider’s Lauren Edmonds recently attended a rally against technology in New York City to find out just how some people are standing up to technological overload. Word of the rally was not spread on social media or other digital channels, given that avoiding such things is the whole point, and many attendees reported learning about it through word of mouth. It was officially dubbed the Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience rally, or S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E for short.
Attendees wore hats made of colored folders rolled into points like typical gnome hats, adopting the gnome as a mascot of sorts for its earth-bound and nondigital connotations. The hats had notes taped inside them that criticized tech and encouraged people to join “the Luddite Renaissance.” The rally began at NYC’s High Line, an elevated public park, before marching to a nearby Tesla store, where rallygoers wrote anti-tech messages in chalk on the sidewalk. They then proceeded to a nearby Apple store, where they held a mock trial against the company’s tech products and then smashed a few.
The focus at the heart of the event was to encourage people to step back from their technology and re-examine their relationship with it. “I really believe that the way for us to come back together to have — not just better lives — but better politics, better ways of having community, better ways of being together as a world all comes from having a healthy relationship with technology,” one attendee said.
Attendees wore hats made of colored folders rolled into points like typical gnome hats, adopting the gnome as a mascot of sorts for its earth-bound and nondigital connotations. The hats had notes taped inside them that criticized tech and encouraged people to join “the Luddite Renaissance.” The rally began at NYC’s High Line, an elevated public park, before marching to a nearby Tesla store, where rallygoers wrote anti-tech messages in chalk on the sidewalk. They then proceeded to a nearby Apple store, where they held a mock trial against the company’s tech products and then smashed a few.
