A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
New York —
At my local coffee shop a couple of weeks ago, I overheard one 20-something woman say to another: Could I ask, what kind of phone do you have?
The other woman replied: Oh yeah, it’s a Jelly Star…
I started Googling while they gabbed.
The conversation was brief, but they talked about the phone the way you might when you compliment a stranger’s boots: So cool, are they comfortable, where did you get them, I want a pair.
Jelly Star is a credit-card size smartphone that runs on Android. It does all the things that feel required in modern life: emails, calls, texts, GPS. But the 3-inch screen is so tiny — about half the size of the average smartphone — there’s almost no point in trying to stare at it for longer than a few seconds, according to fans on Reddit.
“It’s too small to get addicted to, and using it even gives me a headache—perfect for negative reinforcement,” a commenter on r/dumbphones, a subreddit that encourages members to “join the revolution and enjoy the simple life.”
That revolution — more of a collective “no thanks” than a mass organized campaign — isn’t limited to scaled-down phones.
There is a genuine, Gen Z-driven Luddite renaissance building as some people reject the tech platforms that have clamored for our attention (and money) over the past two decades — a movement that seems to get stronger as those platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, are flooded with increasingly sophisticated AI-generated content.
The original Luddites were textile workers in rural 19th century England who rose up against the rise of automated machines that threatened them with joblessness and starvation. And while the term today is often lobbed as a kind of insult for someone who doesn’t understand technology, the modern Luddites are redefining it.
Like the Industrial Revolution-era insurgents, the new Luddites are not anti-technology but anti-exploitation, the tech journalist Brian Merchant tells me. Far from being uninformed cranks, many of the people embracing Luddism grew up with smartphones and know all too well how enticing (and overwhelming) the technology can be.
Last month, several dozen people gathered in New York for a “Luddite Renaissance” rally. The Luddite Club, a nonprofit founded by a team of “former screenagers” in Brooklyn, has expanded to more than 20 chapters at high schools and colleges across the US.
Dumbphone sales are surging, my colleague Tom Page noted last week, citing research around screentime contributing to poor sleep and mental health, especially among children. This week, a Wall Street Journal article declared “Young People Are Falling in Love With Old Technology,” citing Gen Z’s fondness for flip phones and point-and-shoot cameras. Vinyl, CDs and even cassette tapes have made a comeback. The comedian Caleb Hearon, 30, regularly riffs about how much he hates his phone: “I turn it off, put it in a drawer, leave the house. I do that multiple days a week,” he recently said in a podcast interview.
It’s been a slow burn, Merchant said, but “a lot of people are just reaching the breaking point now.”
“I think it ultimately comes down to a frustration within with a profoundly undemocratic development and deployment of technology for profit,” said Merchant, author of the book and Substack “Blood in the Machine.” “They’re not against the very idea of having a screen in your pocket … their gripe is — and it’s a justified one — that it’s filled with all of these addictive and toxic apps that are developed by Silicon Valley companies to serve a narrow set of interests.”
These days, we are all workers in the internet factory: We supply the images, write the copy, engage with the ads, promote the products. That labor sustains an inequitable tech economy in which a handful of companies, including Meta, Google and Amazon, rake in profit and enrich their shareholders. In return, consumers get a product designed to keep us scrolling.
It’s not to say those sites don’t provide any value — it’s nice seeing your friends’ faces on their trips to Italy or crossing the finish line of their first marathon or getting married or whatever. But real-people content is a shrinking portion of the social media pie. Over the summer, the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka argued we may be “heading toward something like Posting Zero, a point at which normal people — the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses — stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction, and the exposure.”
Without all of us normies posting anodyne updates about our breakfasts and workouts, “there will be only dry corporate marketing, AI-generated slop, and dreck from thirsty hustlers attempting to monetize a dwindling audience of voyeurs,” Chayka wrote.
Social media executives aren’t shying away from that future.
Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Meta laid out a vision of a future in which AI “friends” outnumber our human companions. “You’ll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it, and it talks back, or it changes what it’s doing. …That’s all going to be AI.”
And that just might work, if working means keeping enough users hooked on the platform. But it’s also possible that generative AI images and chatbots further blur the line between reality and misinformation, fueling what has already become a backlash against the invasiveness of tech.
“If AI generated misinformation is just everywhere,” Merchant said, “it will make it that much easier to say, ‘to hell with it’ and just opt out stuff all together.”