So it is frustrating and I totally understand why people feel like you can or that these companies are trying to force us to use the tech in the way they want because, yes, they are.

They have a lot of control, but we also don't understand our own agency most of the time. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Amanda Hannah McLear and Lucy Jackson.

Amanda is a writer, educator, and director of the forthcoming Luddite Club documentary, and Lucy is an early member of the Luddite Club itself.

Maybe you've heard of the Luddite Club, or maybe you haven't. It came on my radar in, I believe, 2022 when news stories started

to be published about this group of teenagers at a high school in Brooklyn who had created

a group called, obviously, the Luddite Club. This was a space where they got rid of their phones.

Some of the members even went to flip phones instead of using smartphones and just kind of like

got together to read, to discuss things, to, you know,

explore the city.

It was really about getting out of the digital world

and back into the physical world among people

and, you know, kind of enjoying each other's company,

getting off of social

media in particular. And obviously this caught a lot of people's attention, not just mine, and now

there are Luddite clubs in many different states, many different schools, even outside of the United

States as other teenagers have taken up this idea and made it their own. And to me, this is really fascinating and also really hopeful to see people,

especially younger people, pushing back on these technologies that have become so dominant

over the past number of decades, but which also have a lot of drawbacks to them, right?

A lot of things that we don't generally like about

how they work, a lot of areas where we recognize that they have moved society in a negative

direction. And, you know, I think there's a growing movement about trying to take that back, right,

...