Welcome to the Summer of Ludd. That’s the name of an anti-smartphone festival recently held in New York. It was slightly under the radar for obvious reasons – there was no Instagram, TikTok or website; advertisements were on “wheatpasted monochrome posters”. Those attending followed the rules: “Be present, and absolutely no phones, recording, or photos allowed.”

That’s perhaps why, the Economist reported, “crowds were small” – but they seemed to be having fun, with events including “Google in Real Life” (festival attenders answering questions on their specialist subjects), “flirting rehabilitation” and “hanging out with rats”. I was particularly charmed by the festival’s “media spokespuppet”, Gowanus: more events should be fronted by carpet offcuts with sock arms and button eyes.

A wider neo-luddite movement is gathering momentum. You may have read about gen Z prioritising IRL socialising, “going 90s” and adopting offline, old-fashioned hobbies. The likes of Offline Club and New York University’s IRL initiative are combating smartphone addiction with phone-free spaces and events.

There’s a gentle longing for analogue fun – reading big books, dreaming, making things, being silly. I see it in my gen Z sons: they have paper diaries, CDs and old-school hobbies (playing instruments, embroidery). And they’re much more disciplined about screen time than their parents: one brought his Brick (a device you tap with your phone, blocking access to time-sucking apps) on holiday.

It’s combined with a strong strand of starker techno-pessimism that warns we’re teetering on the brink of AI-engineered oblivion; that smartphones and social media are tools of oppression and surveillance, and tech companies are engaged in “systematic fracking of human beings”, extracting our attention for profit. Hopefully, they’re wrong about the imminent extinction bit, but it’s increasingly evident they’re right about the rest.

So is this the summer we copy the original luddites with automated looms and grind our smartphones to piles of glass shards, copper and lithium? Realising how much of my life is dominated by my phone makes me itch to hang out with rats and dance with Gowanus.

But hang on: I was there before phones, and some of it was absolutely crap – the friction for which friction-maxxers yearn was abundantly, luxuriantly available. If we’re heading back in that direction – and I accept we should – let’s go clear-eyed.

For a start, it was dangerous. Driving anywhere new meant navigating with a giant, floppy map book precariously propped on the dashboard and scribbled handwritten directions on the passenger seat. I’m an awful driver at the best of times, and flailing around with paper at every motorway exit and junction placed me and other road users in constant peril. Another example: when I was working in Normandy in 1995, getting home from an inexplicably popular nightclub located in a field meant riding in a dilapidated banger driven by someone who had been drinking for six hours straight. In both cases – and so many more – I survived thanks to luck alone.

It was also lonely. If you were awkward or socially inept, if your life was restricted by illness, caring responsibilities or geography, if you just never quite found your people, life could feel awfully empty and isolated. I spent years lacking connection (the nightclub trips were a rare exception, and I didn’t actually enjoy them) and thinking I was unlikable – maybe I was! But my life blossomed in the “blogosphere” and on Twitter (as it then was); it was improved and enriched beyond recognition by people I met online.

And God, it was sometimes so boring. That student who said she would “stare at a wall” when the under-16 social media ban came in was accurately describing most of my adolescence. I think you might be less inclined to say “boredom is good for you” if you’d spent every Saturday night for years watching Casualty with your mum (no shade, she was great company, but Charlie Fairhead wasn’t). The tech-shunners may well find that a Summer of Ludd is an easier sell than a winter, when it’s rainy, cold and dark before 4pm.

I still think the neo-luddites are right and fighting the good fight. But switching off will be hard. Maybe hardest for my generation – the people who lived the before-and-after-smartphones eras most vividly, feeling the world open up in wild, digital Technicolor in the palms of our hands.

• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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