Luddite Club

The Luddite Club began around 2021 when Logan Lane, a Brooklyn high schooler, deleted her social media accounts, traded her iPhone for a flip phone, and started gathering friends in Prospect Park to read, draw and talk — no screens allowed. The group took its name, half in jest, from the 19th-century English textile workers who smashed the machines threatening their livelihoods.

From park meetings to a movement

A December 2022 New York Times profile — “Luddite Teens Don’t Want Your Likes” — made the club famous, and local coverage captured its ethos: members described escaping the over-saturation of online life and rediscovering boredom, reading and unmediated friendship. The club has since incorporated as a nonprofit and expanded to more than twenty chapters at high schools and colleges across the country, including one at Oberlin, with events that court the “Ludd-curious.”

The club’s target has always been broader than phones: it rejects the algorithmic, engagement-optimized layer of modern tech, and as generative AI spread it has been embraced as the youth wing of a wider Luddite revival — invoked in coverage from CNN to The Nation as evidence of a Gen Z backlash against AI and screen-mediated life. Members frame the position as anti-exploitation rather than anti-technology, celebrating what they see as irreducibly human: art, community, play and presence.

The Oberlin chapter made that turn explicit in September 2025, publishing an open letter to college president Carmen Twillie Ambar — typed on a 70-year-old typewriter — demanding she terminate Oberlin’s contracts with OpenAI and Google Gemini, and circulating an “AI-Opt-Out Letter” for anyone who agreed. Signed by six members including founder Logan Lane, it warned that even one semester of encouraged chatbot use would send the student body “down a lazy, irredeemable tunnel of intellectual destruction,” and objected to data centers that “guzzle water and precious energy sources.”

Critics note the irony that renouncing the feed became a media phenomenon through the feed, and that opting out is easier for teens with supportive schools and neighborhoods. The club’s answer is that it asks nothing of anyone except to try being unreachable for an afternoon.