The Gnomes Are Taking Over New York City

And they’re playing marches for the conquer’d and slain souls.

By Abby Owens

Illustration by Selin Ho

A group of five or six 20-somethings stand before the crowd, swinging their arms in ape-like motion, hopping from one foot to the other like sumo wrestlers with no opponent but themselves. They begin violently do-si-do0-ing. Some members of the audience don’t know what the hell to make of it. One girl disentangles herself from another. Her face has gone red and she’s flaring her nostrils and grabbing at the air, urging the crowd to continue their chant. 

EVEN  IF  IT  GIVES  US  RABIES,  WE  WILL  FREE  THE  IPAD  BABIES.

EVEN IF IT GIVES US RABIES, WE WILL FREE THE IPAD BABIES.

EVENIFITGIVESUS RABIESWEWILLFREETHEIPADBABIES.

A girl wearing a red gnome hat over her mass of curly hair makes a nervous, disjointed speech. She tells the crowd that our time is not our own, that it’s been corrupted by a hungry capitalist system that determines how technology is designed, used and imposed on our lives. Technology is the death of bar conversations and casual sex that’s not attached to your star sign or affiliated with your university. Technology is the death of the individual, of the human soul.

Of course, she’s optimistic, because her gnome hat says I AM NED LUDD, which means she’s here today because she’s fighting the impossible machine. Actually everyone is wearing construction paper gnome hats, including me. Naturally, I want her to provide me with an antidote to my shrivelling soul, and this is what she gives me: She tells the crowd we’re people that need to return to the human, humans that need to return to the animal. It seems the only world she can conceive of where we’re not run by our smartphones is one where we leave it all behind; where we return to our caves, hump all day, and communicate in bloody pictographs. And I think it’s funny and devastating  all at once, because a 19-year-old cosplaying as a garden statue is telling me her plan to fix our broken world, and her solution is an impossible erasure of all that’s come before us.

A young man in a green construction paper gnome hat hoists himself onto a wooden crate labeled SOAPBOX and holds a megaphone to his lips. He’s wearing an ill-fitted t-shirt with an upside down rainbow Apple logo crossed out with red permanent marker. His name is Ned Ludd 1, and he’s created this whole thing, which he calls S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E  (Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and The Passionate Hemorrhaging of our Neo-Liberal Experience). There are many Ned Ludds, and he’s just the first one. They insist on being referred to this way because individual labels don’t matter—They are not spokesgnomes. They are a collective, a movement, a point. And he—and his gang of gnome revolutionaries—are the reason almost 100 New Yorkers-turned-coneheads have paraded from the Highline to the 14th Street Apple Store. 

…

The S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. protest felt like a nutty fantasy, something sprung out of an acid trip. It actually makes sense that this whole thing feels like fiction. It comes from a short story Ned Ludd 1 wrote last fall, in which the characters wear gnome hats and burn their smartphones in Tompkins Square Park. When I learned Lamp Club would be part of a similar event on Sept. 27 along with the newly formed Columbia Luddite Club, I knew I had to be there. 

On the way to the event, I did some preliminary research on Lamp Club, mostly to discover what it had to do with lamps. According to their Instagram bio, it is a space to “find significant events for funky people who hate overhead lighting.” Before they announced “WE ARE LEAVING INSTAGRAM FOREVER” this September, they kept a document of all their events since they started lamping in October 2023. 

The only tie between all these events seems to be that they get people out of their homes and interacting with each other in New York City, but it’s obviously more than that. If that was the goal, doing yoga with the moms of Bryant Park would probably suffice. No, these events are distinctly weird. They make you talk about your anxieties, your desires. They put your soul on a platter and prod at it to ensure it’s cooked through. 

We land in the Chelsea triangle and form a semicircle around the head gnomes, who are starting to give speeches and thrash their bodies around. Then it’s time for the main event. The gnomes are putting the Apple products on trial (for ruining our shot at being real humans), and there’s a prosecutor and a defense and the jury is us, the audience. I let out a half-assed “Woo” when the gnome executioner begins smashing the devices with a rock, but get embarrassed because my iPhone is in my back pocket.

After the spectacle, Ned Ludd 1 encourages the gnomes to talk to each other, but my friends and I sense this is not our crowd and leave quickly. Instead we wander through Chelsea trying to find a coffee shop without our cellphones, and I get uncomfortable at how dependent I am on a tiny rectangle to live. Eventually we get tired and give up, and find the nearest coffee shop on Maps.

…

The gnomes seem to know what I am reluctant to accept, which is that there is no outside to technology. For years I have been threatening to ditch my smartphone for a dumbphone, to venture out to where the pavement meets the sand, convinced this will give my life meaning. But I’m always confronted by logistics that stop me in my tracks: How will I listen to music? What if I need to locate a restaurant, buy a train ticket, provide everybody I’ve ever met with proof of life?

It terrifies me that I can’t separate myself from this thing. It follows me everywhere and mediates how I experience everything. Most of the time, the world reaches me before I’ve ever stepped foot in it, flattened into perfect images. My phone is supposed to be good. It’s supposed to allow me to know everything about the world, give me access to any person or place or time. Yet things only feel real when I tuck myself away. Other people have stopped feeling real to me. The only times I feel real are when I’m alone, not performing a digestible version of myself. Maybe that’s why scrolling endlessly through TikTok or Instagram doesn't feel as isolating as it should. Because the “real” world isn’t an escape; it’s just another place where everyone is performing.

This is why the gnomes, despite all their beautiful idealism, frustrate me. Their entire protest feels like a big performance to be consumed. At times it feels like a joke I’m not in on, because in declaring it’s not our fault and that there is no escape, it’s hard to understand why they’re protesting in the first place. How is smashing phones taking action? What does a gnome-centric world look like, if not a bunch of young people unleashing their frustrations on a techscape that is out of their control?

I text Ned Ludd 1 a couple days after S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E, because I want answers. I tell him that he intrigues me. I tell him I want to know all about how Lamp Club came to be and the future of the gnomes. He responds quickly, for a Luddite: 

I’d love to tell you about the gnomes and gnome history.

We meet in between classes at the Hungarian Pastry Shop and he texts me that he’s sitting in the back with the curly haired girl who gave the technology-is-the-death-of-the-individual speech. It’s odd to see them without their gnome hats, but Ned Ludd 1 is wearing a white Pink Floyd Muscle T-shirt, which feels equally off-putting. The girl tells me her name is Ned Ludd 9 and I joke, “Oh, like Revolution 9, like The Beatles.” “No,” she says. 

The Neds ask me not to record our conversation, so I get out my personal journal and begin scrawling on the first blank page I open up to. I start by asking them if this is their first revolution. I ask them about the origins of the Lamp Club and how the gnomes and S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E came into the picture. I get the sense Ned Ludd 1 is trying to figure me out, and doesn’t chime in until I ask them about the name, S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E, and why they’re protesting all information technology instead of just social media.

“Neoliberal is the key term,” he tells me, propping himself up from his slouch. He says we’re part of an economic system that promotes growth over everything, and that social media is only the latest expression of the social alienation that defines modern capitalist societies. “Alienation is the embodiment of consumerism.” he declares. “You are no longer a person, but a list of transactions.” We are alienated because we’ve lost the capacity for authentic interiority. We are enslaved by the demand to perform and produce ourselves, and condemned to feel like shit about it because it's presented as our choice. 

It feels rehearsed. He’s throwing so much at me with such conviction that it’s hard to disagree with him, even though I’m still trying to make sense of it. I ask the Neds what they feel they’re accomplishing. Do they actually expect people to join in and smash their phones? How does this work if they really believe there is no escape? 

Ned Ludd 1 turns to Ned Ludd 9 and tells her to tell me her word for what’s happening with modern protests and today’s activist culture.  

“It’s double exploitation by mimicry,” she tells me. 

“What the hell is that?” I ask.

Ned Ludd 1 chimes in: “It’s like when you have a union meeting, but you’re the boss of the meeting and you’re holding the meeting without giving people breaks.”

They tell me that protests today are ineffective because they are all symbolic, but there’s no direct plan of action, and there’s little communication among the people participating. They rag on protests like No Kings Day, where the photographs mean everything. Then the protesters feel good about themselves and go get brunch and Trump is still president. 

I ask them what makes their protest different. After all, the image of the gnome seems to carry the whole thing, and I’m not convinced you could call Apple product executions a plan of action. But Ned Ludd 9 tells me they do have a plan of action. Ned Ludd 1 produces a yellow manifesto from his bag to help her out. I stare at them, amazed, because even DeLillo or Pynchon or another one of those doomsday intellectuals couldn’t write a character as good as the Neds. 

The manifesto, created by the gnomes and a couple of other Luddite groups in New York City, starts by addressing the issue at hand: Our society is one saturated with images and mediated experiences, making it so you do not have to go anywhere or do anything. “Any experience can be packaged for consumption. For this reason, the event is the medium,” it reads.

At this moment, it occurs to me that the Neds are not merely protesting technology and the isolated rabbit holes humans have nestled into because of it. They are protesting the fact that because of these things, we no longer understand how to interact with human beings in meaningful ways. We cannot save ourselves from social alienation because we do not have the tools to do so. 

In this way, the protest becomes the solution, or at least the start of it. The ends are inseparable from the means. They are hosting events that cannot be easily packaged into a single image or idea. The only thing you can say for certain about the event is that it is free, utilizes public space, and is participatory.

That’s the manifesto’s key word. A world with smart devices and technology that blurs the lines between life and labor is inescapable, but a world where you dull your social experiences, where you watch your life unfold as a series of disjointed events that barely makes sense to you, is not. A return to the human is possible and The Neds believe that play is the way to do it—that dressing up as mimes and gnomes and connecting strangers through dreams and absurdity is the best way to break people out of the image they have made of themselves. It reminds people that their lives are still theirs to participate in. And I think this is beautiful, because their remedy to one of the human race’s most consuming anxieties is silliness. 

Of course, at the end of our two-hour-fever dream interview, there are a lot of pieces I’m still trying to fit together. But what I do know is that what they’re doing feels deeply proactive. They truly believe people can feel whole again in a social context if they relinquish their “sidewalk ego;” if they realize that the point is to play, to tear down the walls of a curated self and feel something real. We cannot eliminate technology from our lives, but we can re-humanize ourselves, and they think a way to do that is to dress up as gnomes and tell people the ways technology has made us lost to ourselves.

When all of it’s over, they walk me to the Amsterdam gates and give me giant bear hugs and I realize I haven’t hugged a stranger like this ever.