Nu-Lud is the name I've given to the movement of organized technological resistance I wish to help take shape in our world. There are many trends in our modern world which show a desire to maintain traditional modes of technological interfacing.

Vinyl Records are perhaps the best example of this. A Smithsonian Magazine article on March 16, 2023 noted in a headline and subheading,

"Vinyl Records Outsell CDs for First Time Since 1987. Music lovers in the United States bought 41 million vinyl albums and 33 million CDs in 2022."

This is not to say that digital downloads and streams did not outweigh that by a large margin but the preference towards one kind of physical media over the other shows a couple things. One is that owning a physical object still makes our monkey brains happy and the other is that there are reasons why Albums, while more antiquated are superior to CDs (which can hold more data), the art and liner notes are larger, the act of playing the album feels "special" like a magic trick (as described by Alex Williams in the Ephemeral Podcast) and the experience is more personal, intimate, cozy. Playing an album on a record player has a certian "je ne sais quoi" that throwing a CD in a boom box or walkman cannot match. That's the feeling that the Nu-Ludz are chasing.

Looking into a phone screen watching 12 second verticle video after 12 second verticle video... "doom scrolling"... This is not intimate, cozy, or personal. It's draining. It's hurting us and we have the power to stop it by not only walking away but by changing the way we interact with the technology around us and changing the way we allow that technology to interact with us.

I believe it's a growing trend and have witnessed many individuals who take part in technological traditionalism across many spectrums. This is not a political movement, it's more personal than that, nor is it a Spiritual movement though it seeks to preserve some form of life's sanctity in a growing tide of technological dehumanization. I would best typify this movement as being philosophical in nature. Each individual will have different needs and desires and will create a form of Nu-Lud that works for them. Maybe it's Cassette Tapes and a c64 maybe it's an MP3 player and a digital camera or a retro website and a VHS collection but the Nu-Ludz are out there already and many yet are waiting to be born.

I think we could accomplish a great deal by becoming a known demographic of individuals who seek the technological freedom we once had. The Stop Killing Games movement has proven a powerful symbol against corporate oppression of a specific medium. Video games used to be close to a digital 3rd place but have become a heavily monetized marketplace of digital assets that we could once earn via playing rather than paying. Could digital communities be revived? It is doubtful. But this Stop Killing Games movement seeks to end practice of premature or unnecessary removal of digital communities. Communities live and die their own natural life cycles, it should never be decided in a boardroom that a digital community should die because it's not profitable enough. Not without giving that community the opportunity of self preservation via the ability to how their own servers.

The Stop Killing games movement is not a Nu-Lud movement in and of itself, but it is an example of people pulling together and accomplishing a lot on behalf of their hobby. I don't see this website as the home of a voting bloc or political movement but rather as a resource for helping others fix and maintain old technology as well as advice and recommendations for creating or ludifiying new ways to interface with current technology.

If you know how to fix a broken VCR or How to Jailbreak a 3ds or just have good tips for HTML and CSS coding or a great tip about a good adblocker then we want to hear about it.

This project has been brewing in my mind for a long time, but by it's very nature, I simply cannot do it alone, I hope that I am able to connect with other folks out there in cyberspace willing to share their experiences and feelings on our community forums which I have recently setup.

In the future I will be looking for folks who would make good candidates for a Nu-Lud webring and hopefully setting up a neat "visual map" of the Outskirts of the Internet to make our webring really easy to navigate.

I will also be working on some technology and gaming articles about some of the old tech and software I use and how I use it to fill out the site a little bit more. If you have something you'd like to write and don't have your own site for the webring then let me know and I will likely host it here.

If there is enough interest in writing articles and such for the website I may setup a quarterly newsletter or zine.

Thank you for reading

-SpaceWitch

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Coming soon:

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