Luddites

After the article came out in the New York Times, it was everywhere, and everyone was talking about it. I remember the flood of drawings and letters Ophelia got from new followers of the Luddite gospel. Dozens of news programs scrounged for her school email address, and a young film teacher quit to pursue making a documentary about them. At the time, I was never interested in what the Luddites were doing: it was just something that my friends did outside of school. Suddenly, fellow teenagers who had once rolled their eyes at the Luddites now wanted to throw their phones in bottomless rivers. 

4,000 students wandered the gaudy, bright halls of my high school in the heartland of Orthodox Brooklyn. Less than a quarter found themselves in the close-knit art program to be taught by a militaristic teacher ruling over her subjects with an iron stool. Commanding obedience from the meek and docile paint-covered students. The Luddite club was formed during the early months of the pandemic in the soft grass of Prospect Park. Its mission was to unite the teenagers of New York City who longed for a time not dictated by the whims of social media. They looked for a cure to their screen addiction and to find others who understood and supported them. There had been people who had converted to Luddite-ism but crawled back to endlessly scrolling on Instagram and TikTok. 

Grand Army Plaza was the gathering spot. It's where all the trains and buses stopped in Brooklyn. After school, I would hop on the Q train and hang out in Prospect Park. It was intensely crowded, with vendors selling balloons or popsicles, homeless people sleeping on stone benches, and Orthodox Jews blasting music from yellow buses. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the plush snow of Prospect Park. The sky towered above us, glistening in hues of vermillion and violet. The once rowdy and overbearing Plaza had become a remote sanctum for the teenage girls of Brooklyn. 

I met Ophelia in our American Studies class in junior year. I had no idea what a Luddite was or that she had a flip phone. She still had Instagram when I met her; her last post celebrated a friend's birthday that she fell out with. She talked about the club a lot. At first, I thought she had created and founded it herself. She and her best friend Lacey spearheaded the Luddite agenda in Murrow. Lacey had pin-straight shaggy brunette hair and sewed green patches on thrifted clothes. She borrowed fabric from the claustrophobic art closet and drew elaborate designs in her sketchbook. Lacey was forced to choose between the art and writing programs, and ultimately decided on writing to later pursue poetry in foreign languages. 

They had started a movement in a sense; some admired their commitment to the flip phone life, and others thought they were pretentious snobs. The idea of throwing away your smartphones only appealed to the most committed die-hards. They loaned books from the Central library or the schools, drew in hand-sewed sketchbooks, and spread the message in their zines. Ophelia was the Luddite I was the closest to; she was there with me through all my firsts. She had blue hair when I first met her, and it grew into her natural blonde curls over time. She didn't wear makeup and had a closet full of thrifted clothes. I’d travel to her apartment in Cobble Hill some weekends. Her bedroom had two twin beds pushed together with clothes overflowing from beneath. Her gray cat hid as we painted and played music on her CD system. Her paintings were mostly watercolor and portraits of the other Luddites. She drew them intentionally distorted, having big heads and small limbs. 

She and Lacey drew on their walls murals of people and uncontrolled scribbles of color. Recreations of impressionist paintings, collages of art books. They both had a vast accumulation of books, CDs, and vinyl. They would play Elliott Smith as we drew and talked. I met various types of Luddites; Luddites using Instagram “ironically.” Luddites with smartphones that had screen limits and Luddites who had no phone at all, not even a flip phone. I respected their commitment to the lifestyle. At school, Ophelia’s locker overflowed with jackets, books, and bags. She gave out her locker combination to other Luddites. 

Some days, I’d beg my mother to buy me a Motorola flip phone that I could cover in thick layers of baby pink nail polish. I think if I had gotten one, I’d yearn to scroll on Instagram or Pinterest. Subconsciously, I did want to be a Luddite and have the ego or the confidence of one. Over time, it rubbed off on me as I began to care about what I wore to school. Luddites were known for their laidback, slouchy, and personalized style. I started wearing baggy jeans and distressed tops, carrying a sketchbook and digital camera. I never went to weekend meetings; they were more casual hangouts than discussing the club agenda. They started to have them in the English suite at school, and I cautiously went. A friendly, soft-spoken English teacher was the club advisor. New people would trickle in throughout the year, and the same four people remained. The newcomers would get the same spiel: “Your phone causes all the problems in life, and if you throw it away, they will be gone.” He helped them create a zine featuring a variety of art mediums and writing forms. The soft-spoken teacher implored me to submit a painting of mine to the Luddite zine. The courage to do so never found me. 

They were seen in some people’s eyes as outcasts. Desperate brats who yearned for the attention of their peers. To me, they were teenagers who saw the damage social media and technology had done to our generation. Choosing to advocate for a world not governed by social media likes but by genuine connection.