Could a Technologically Regressive Social Sect Exist In The Modern World? The Amish and Ted Kaczynski are what most people think about when they consider Luddism in the modern era which is ironic because neither is tied to historical luddism in any meaningful way. The luddite congress is something that happened and smaller clubs exist but these isolated cases have not made much of an impact on the publics consciousness. What people don't ever think about is historical reenactors who live-in their chosen time as a form of historic preservation attempting to act as public interpreters for a specific era. This is just as much a form of Luddism as Ted's Rampage or the Amish shunning and seeking independence from the modern world on religious grounds. But there is a potential fourth estate of luddism, and that's the social luddite communities. These exist in theoretical terms and in a state of semi-praxis in our modern world. In our world today there exist old-folks homes that specialize in the illusion of independent living but in a time more familiar to those suffering from cognitive decline later in life. There also exists within Fiction, most notably as a plot twist device in a film I won't spoil, communities of people who choose to live within a specific period of history for personal or social reasons not stemming from religion or a desire for historical preservation, in fiction it's usually the loss of a loved one, or a desire to start anew, but I think there exists a desire to return to a simpler technological time among mostly millennials whose lives were greatly impacted by the proliferation of smart-phone technology and it's impact on social media and society at large. As stated previously, to my knowledge, there exists nothing like this in praxis in the United States at least not intentionally. There are places trapped in time due to social, economic, and often geographic conditions which inhibits it's ability to advance technologically at the same pace as say a large metropolitan area. In this essay I will pontificate on how such a social sect could function successfully and ways in which it would need to avoid becoming a techno-cult or some kind of weird company-town. Okay, The first thing to consider when putting something like this together is figuring out what it is really, how far it's going to go, and the scale. I haven't done a mental exercise like this since I was working on a Sci-Fi novel and I gave myself an infinite budget for that. For this I am going to try to lay out a framework for how something like this could be put into praxis using currently existing technology, social, and economic structures. So, what do we want this to include, let's look to a reddit thread's top comments based on a (Twitter/X/Bluesky/IDRCDY?) post made by internet user wittyidiot "Thinking of starting an Amish-Like community where we only use technology that was available up until 1997." Now we are going to for the sake of this exercise we will ignore the fact that this was most likely reposted by a bot to a website that is a PSYOP factory for the elite and we will instead focus on what the hypothetical needs or expectations of a community like this might need to contain. I will not be giving sources for the poster of this thread nor the responders as I don't respect them. -AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) -Video Store -America Online -A desire to have the tech-cutoff be 2007 -No emails / Texts from work -'07 cutoff for Halo Lan Parties -Windows 95 PCs -Someone brought up MeshCore (research for future article) -Continuous asks to push the date back to 2007/8 in order for Smartphone and Social Media to be what is removed from the community Okay, so what I am gathering is that the real desire is to exclude Smart-Phones and the modern social media landscape with some high drive for nostalgic practices such as PC ownership and AOL but with the connection speed of modern DSL networks. This actually makes the creation of this sort of social sect much more manageable. It doesn't need to be an entire community built from the ground up around the idea of technological regression. It can instead by a loosely affiliated social sect organized around the rejection of smartphone and social media technology by individuals. The biggest barrier to entry would be the desire of modern businesses to hire smartphone users for various reasons and the barrier to employment that would come with adhering to the tenant of refusing to use smart phones for business related maters outside of working hours. I view this as a very real barrier to success for such a social endeavor. In the United States Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) prohibits employment discrimination based on religion, which includes traditional organized religions as well as sincerely held religious, ethical, or moral, beliefs. The exact wording is found in definitions subsection J and I will include it here. "The term "religion" includes all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief, unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate to an employee's or prospective employee's religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer's business." Not being able to respond to an email outside of business hours unless one is sitting at their immobile home PC is not an undue hardship as many businesses operated with this level of employee reachability and far less for hundreds of years. However, just because your belief is sincere and personal does not mean you cannot be harassed/discriminated in the workplace in the US as an example in the US vegans who are atheists can be legally discriminated against. US vegans who are practicing a form of ahimsa are a protected class. So, Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists vegetarians and vegans are a protected class under US law but the blue haired kid you went to high school with and was also an edgy atheist is not. So if a social sect was to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the law to protect against the workplace discrimination that it would receive in the modern age for refusing to be reachable by smartphone outside of working hours, it would need to receive tax exempt status as a religious institution from the IRS. Which brings me back to my original thought at the start of this exercise. The idea That "It doesn't need to be an entire community built from the ground up around the idea of technological regression. It can instead by a loosely affiliated social sect organized around the rejection of smartphone and social media technology by individuals." is wrong. It DOES have to be an entire community built from the ground up around technological regression and records of EVERYTHING must be kept if ever the organization were to be officially recognized and it would need to be organized on explicitly spiritual grounds. So that puts us at a potential choice. a.) The organization is an officially recognized spiritual sect within the united states is exempt from paying taxes and its members and adherents are protected against discrimination by law. b.) The organization is not an officially recognized spiritual sect in the united states, and is a de facto business that must pay taxes and whose employees and adherents are not protected against discrimination by law. In the next section I will explore how a physical community could be built around these principles both as a business and as a federally recognized religion. When looking at existing structures I think we should consider the Amish as well as live-in historical reenactors and what their unique social and cultural exports are. The Amish are able to help support their communities by both selling goods they produce, their unique cultural circumstances provide a more traditional and in the case of some goods like butter a version of a higher quality than it's modern counterpart that they can sell at a great profit. They also work regular jobs in a lot of cases in order to provide for their communities. There are several sects of Amish and I am simplifying and generalizing here but this is a thought experiment and not a dissertation on the Amish people themselves please seek more academic sources than the undereducated likes of me. All that I really know is that the depths of my own ignorance is simply incalculable. Since not using smart phones and spending your free time playing NBA JAM isn't exactly going to give you a culturally unique way of making butter, and unless purple ketchup comes back in style I can really see no other cultural export possible in terms of our hypothetical modern luddite community. So let's turn to live-in historical reenactors and cultural imports or in a more modern business terms, tourism. Yeah, it's not hard to imagine a town stuck in the 1990s with a 50's themed diner, and a few other period appropriate tourist attractions, maybe an arcade, a picnic ground, or museum of some kind, would attract outside attention, as the Amish communities also do but that live-in historical reenactors are there in the service of doing. However the relationship of reenactors to their employer would be very different from adherents to a social belief system to employers within their own communities. However the desire would and SHOULD remain between the two, that is, not to isolate the community from the world at large but rather deal in cultural imports / export in the form of tourism and educational tours. This could take the form of evangelizing if a religious angle were to be taken. So let's consider a corporation of some kind, on it's smallest scale a Boutique Hotel with CRTs in the rooms, a no smart-phone policy, a VHS library, and in a best case scenario a Computer Lab for LAN parties could and likely already does exist in some form out there. This would not support multiple people living on-site. Which while the goal of our exercise currently is to create such a thing if we are going a fully corporate path we must begin with a single individual or family of adherents to this belief being able to sustain themselves long-term while maintaining their beliefs in the face of employment discrimination, of which they have no protection and tourism seems to be the best way to profit culturally from this social belief system. A chain of such boutique hotels operated by adherents of a shared belief system could generate, if run well, a high amount of profit for this group. If they were untied by business interests they could pool resources and invest in a hypothetical resort property with attached restaurant and attempt to improve their profits as well as buy additional land and create a sort of planned living subdivision on property not at all dissimilar to a home owners association or gated community in this case catering to adherents of this social belief structure. This would create natural friction with the citizens of the town the property was located on if they did not profit in some way from the increased tourism to the area. Allowing non-adherents of this belief system to be employed at the resort property would likely have to take place legally if the property was being operated as a business and not as part of a tax exempt religious organization. In other words many of the employees would be social media and smart phone users from the nearby town unless extreme nepotistic practices took place and while legal this would cause friction with the town the resort and housing properties are placed in. At this point the resort could build a video store and a computer repair and supply shop to service the members of the social sect living the subdivision and then we would have accomplished the goal of our thought experiment if we were rushing through this. But since we are not let's consider what all this means, the restaurant, resort, subdivision, video store, and computer shop are all going to be separate business entities working under one conglomeration, they will be taxed separately. This is unavoidable even if the spiritual route of this belief is taken as just because your church is tax exempt does not mean that the businesses your church operates are not. So without diving in too far down the spiritual rabbit hole let's break down some components a little further of this business strategy. The Resort / Boutique Hotel model is built around the preservation and continued use of old technology. This would require special consideration for additional and unique overhead costs such as repairs and parts manufacturing for the VCRs and VHS tapes as they degrade from continued use. As well as repair and parts for the CRTs. The reality of using VHS tapes is that they will inevitably be unusable and the likelihood of additional tapes being created at a cost effective price point for continued use is not impossible but unlikely for long-term without some kind of on-site tape production or manufacturing deal being made. In which case I think the consensus of using 2007 technology was a good idea. DVDs can be produced in-house at scale and have a MUCH longer half-life than VHS tapes. I think tapes could still be used in the boutique hotel model but perhaps VCRs and VHS tapes should be an option and not the rule. At this point we have to kind of begin asking ourselves WHY these limitations are desirable in what ways are they most reasonably to be utilized within the model and how a small business could utilize them for long-term profit. One idea I keep coming back to is the production of a TV channel similar to hotel of the 1990s each hotel had a channel dedicated to nearby sights and things to do, I think it's likely this still exists in hotels somewhere although not where I am located currently. I think offering the production of commercials for local business using period appropriate gear or an approximation thereof in between reruns of period appropriate shows on a dedicated hotel channel piped into the rooms, would be a great way to ingratiate guests of the hotel to an area and residents of an area to the hotel. A resort that offers DVD rentals is not subject to additional taxes for the DVD rentals. They usually don't charge. If DVDs someday go the way of the VHS and begin to become unplayable or unlikely to be a long-term form of resort media rentals or people steal the DVDs as souvenirs and replacing them becomes untenable then it would be possible to use the local commercials as well as classic commercials for modern products in-between classic TV and Film episodes from the period. While there might be some legal restrictions with this motels and hotels offering curated viewing experiences are usually allowed and groups interested in media preservation may be willing to provide the ephemera for free so long as they are credited in some way. In this case the resort / housing property could potentially serve a tv signal of some kind to guests such a service provided to residents of the housing center would likely, while important to the general idea of the community, be subject to strict FCC regulations as a public utility and not as a service of a private resort. This property could be built someday using the business model. But the business model is weak for several reasons and is unlikely to obtain the goals of our thought experiment. -All businesses would be separate entities. -Subject to legal regulations regarding copywrite. -Need to have antique technologies repaired on-site. -Subject to the desire of the general public to engage in the limitations of the social sect to survive. -Video Store and Computer Parts Shop may operate at a loss -Separate privately owned boutique hotel owners need to pool resources in order to create the resort and residential property. -Zoning would likely separate the two properties. -FCC would limit ability to provide local TV services off resort property. I believe this could be a successful series of boutique hotels for a few decades even, until material and economic conditions change in such a way that such a vacation would no longer be profitable for the owners or desirable for the customers. I doubt it be able to form a movement of likeminded individuals to put profits aside in the name of bettering society through imposing limitations on customers and employees within a capitalist society in the name of the preservation of those beliefs. When times get tough the business will change models or die. In a generation the philosophy of eschewing smart-phones and social media will be lost forever and the human race fully at the whim of an AI controlled algorithm. I do think however that a religion or spiritual organizations would do exceedingly well at this task under the current economic conditions in which the world and my home nation operates. I think that a religious organization could sidestep a lot of the hinderances that a business would suffer causing it to change over time, a religious sect will change over time as well, but the changes are less likely to impede the original goals of the organization in the long term if the goals of the organization are what are being striven for instead of the need for profit. A religious organization is able to operate businesses and charities at a loss though the use of tax free ownership and donations during religious services and observances and a feeling of obligation to the mission goals that the members have. Using the business model we have previously created as a guide, since our organization will still need some kind of cultural export in the form of tourism. Let's go through the IRS's 14 criteria for the definition of a church and see what we already have checked off, even though the IRS has never officially committed itself to the criteria. And yes, a church can own a resort property and even residential property and if used correctly may be eligible for property tax exemptions but still required to comply with local zoning laws but that gets interesting more on that after this.