Hi! I’m Jess.
Jessica Elefante is a multimedia artist, researcher, acclaimed author, and documentary filmmaker exploring human experience and culture through a critical (neo-Luddite) perspective on technology and digital media.
She is the author of Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (Ballantine, 2023). Jessica’s writing works to open people’s eyes on the topics of technology, capitalism, influence, and motherhood and has appeared in The Guardian, Literary Hub, Huffington Post, Bustle, Simplify Magazine, the Dispatch, Whalebone Magazine and more. As the founder of acclaimed Folk Rebellion and a critic of today's culture, Elefante’s award-winning works shine a light on the untenability of our times and have been featured by Vogue, The Atlantic, Inc., Los Angeles Times, The Observer, Writer’s Digest, Vice, Paper Mag, Wired, and elsewhere. Her short documentary “What Day Is It?” was awarded semi-finalist of Flickers RIIFF and an Official Selection of Beverly Hills Film Festival and New York Shorts Film Festival, for its portrayal of a mother's perspective on the ever-shifting emotional and mental states of lockdown. In her previous life as a brand strategist, she was recognized on Brand Innovators “40 under 40” list for winning her clients industry recognition including Webby, Edison, and AdAge awards. Jess has proudly been a guest lecturer at Columbia Business School and New York University sharing her expertise in entrepreneurship and branding. Currently she’s using her experience in tech and media as a co-chair for Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA). For her work as an artist and writer she’s honored to be a judge for the 2024 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She's influenced by the social, cultural, and technological circumstances of her life, but mostly, of her desire to lead a colorful one. Raised in upstate New York, she now lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Photo: Rich Wade
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mission statement.
My mission is to protect what makes us human in a culture designed to erase it. I use media, advocacy, and real-world experiments to help families, schools, and communities refuse the digital default and build something better. From analog parenting to screen-free classrooms, public space to storytelling, BYPASSING is where we say no—and figure out how.
The systems and spaces I focus on are:
1) Childhood & Family Life
I am a chapter leader and spokesperson for Mothers Against Media Addiction, helped pass first-of-its-kind child tech legislation in New York, and regularly speak to policymakers, schools, and parents about analog parenting, screen refusal, and restoring childhood in the digital age. I write, teach, and design tools for families who want to opt out.
2) Culture & Technology
I created Folk Rebellion in 2013 as one of the first digital wellness media brands. Since then, I’ve become a leading cultural critic of tech’s effects on identity, creativity, and attention. My book Raising Hell, Living Well was a full-circle reckoning with modern life and the machine I once helped build. I now focus exclusively on helping others bypass that machine.
3) Media & Memory
I’ve built analog newspapers, lo-fi zines, video essays, and short-form cultural experiments like OUT OF CTRL. Through the BYPASSING platform and podcast, I’m creating a new kind of slow media network—one rooted in preservation, not optimization. My work documents those who are saying no: the opt-outs, dropouts, and Withouts.
4) Education & Ed Tech Refusal
I actively challenge the use of surveillance-based or AI-driven ed tech in schools. I’ve advocated for books, play, and real-world learning as a mother, a writer, and a partner to aligned organizations like Let Grow, MAMA, All Tech Is Human, Human Change, Common Sense Media, Fairplay, and Project Liberty. My work provides language, tools, and community for parents and educators resisting the default.
5) Analog Future-Building
Through BYPASSING, I’m building an interdisciplinary platform—equal parts podcast, studio, archive, and movement. It is supported by a network of thinkers, creators, and parents who share one belief: that to protect humanity, we have to design a life beyond the screen. And we have to do it together.
6) Third Places, Public Space & Localization
You can’t bypass digital infrastructure without physical alternatives. I advocate for human-scale design, walkable communities, and public spaces that allow people—especially parents and children—to gather, connect, and live offline. From schoolyards to city corners to analog studios, I believe the future must be locally rooted and physically built. Culture can’t be saved in isolation. It needs a commons.
hear me out.
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The backstory.
I’ve been a storyteller all my life. Growing up they called me Mother Goose for the tales I would tell. Like any good fabler I’m sometimes prone towards exaggeration.
In 1997 I was supposed to go to a fancy liberal arts college to study communications but instead packed my bag and dropped a Dear John letter in the mailbox to the Dean of Admissions on my way out west to the mountains of Colorado with the idea that I needed more adventure and experiences.
This began the start of many shitty jobs that taught me invaluable life skills around the arts of persuasion, likability, influence, marketing, selling, and bullshitting—setting me on a path of telling stories to get people to buy things or telling my clients’ stories to get people to buy their things.
What jobs you might ask?
Ski lift operator, ballroom dance teacher, fire breathing bartender, newspaper classified ads salesperson, social media maven, public relations associate, corporate marketer, brand strategist, creative director, media publisher, thought leader, entrepreneur, founder.
You see, when you want something bad enough it’s like the scariest thing in the world. So instead of doing the one thing I really wanted to do (write!), I did that safely for other people instead—trading my creativity, brains, and words for paychecks since I was 18 years old.
I don’t regret any of these jobs or different lives I’ve lived as a bartender and business executive in New York City, an art student in Italy, a lost single thirty year old in Greece, a Kerouac reading bagel maker in Colorado or a girl from Upstate New York who wanted to see the world no matter how she got there.
Each misadventure was imperative to my writing once I finally mustered the guts to stop bullshitting.
I’m happy to report that at 44 years old I am no longer for sale and I am no longer selling.
No more bullshit.
It’s wild what happened once the distractions were put to the side. When I had no more excuses I could be free to create the work I’d always dreamed of creating. Since I said “no more” I created an award winning film, got a literary agent, had my second child, sold my first book, got married a second time, and have finally shed the capitalist version of me. Today I can say, truthfully (meaning I believe it myself!), I am a writer and an artist.
I am a happy and healthy, middle aged writer who’s lived ten lives to write about and now have a big beautiful life filled with two sons, a best friend for a husband, and a big furry Newfoundland pup named Kylian. We eat too much pizza, dance after dinner, and spend way too much of our time talking about sports.
The stories I tell today are mine, but the theme is usually the same—our modern world is a fucking hot mess (and I was quite literally a part of the problem.)
So now, my writing focuses on—exposing the bullshit.
A reformed brand strategist exposes the bullshit of our modern world: technology, capitalism, influence, culture, and motherhood.
