Radio: I Discuss My Contention That We Should Take a Break from Constant Phone and Internet Use with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

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Regular readers will know that I just got back from a fortnight’s holiday in Sicily with my family, and that, after the second week, in which I was offline for the whole time, I returned to the UK and published my immediate thoughts about the benefits of sometimes switching off from the whole internet and mobile phone world in an article entitled, Switch Off Your Devices and Have a Week Off: Why Headspace, Silence and Human Interaction is Good for Us.

After publishing it, I was very pleasantly surprised when Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, based in Canada, got in touch to ask me if I’d be interested in appearing on his weekly show to discuss it, and I happily agreed. Chris and I have spoken many times before, but always about Guantánamo, so I was delighted to be able to talk about another topic that interests me.

The one-hour show is available here (and here as an MP3) and my interview with Chris begins around 35 minutes in, after an interview William Laurance, an Australian research professor, who has been studying the impact of cars on wildlife, and is the author of an article entitled, Curbing an Onslaught of 2 Billion Cars.

In my analysis of the benefits of balancing our online presence with time off, I acknowledged that I work as an online journalist and commentator, and have no desire to put myself out of a job (or what passes for a job), but I was pleased to be able to express some of my doubts about possible downsides to our relationship with the internet and particularly with smart phones  — hand-held devices that would once have required an entire room to power them, but which are now ubiquitous, even though their advent is so recent that definitive assessments of their long-term impact don’t currently exist.

As well as worrying about the atomizing effects of mobile technology and the internet, I also have concerns about how all this technology also accompanies an increasingly mechanized world, the dangers posed by artificial intelligence (introduced in a guest post recently by my friend Tom Pettinger), and how fundamentally alarming it is that so many creative people are now required to make their work available for free, a shifting business model in which, often, the only people who are making a profit run, work for, or are shareholders of the giant tech companies who are eating up more and more of the world in a generally unchecked manner. People should be more questioning, I think, of the giant corporations at the heart of this supposed Brave New World — like Apple, Google and Amazon, but also other Silicon Valley success stories like Uber and Airbnb. For more on this, check out We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why by academic Nick Srnicek in the Guardian two days ago, Secrets of Silicon Valley on the BBC, and, from July, The billion-dollar palaces of Apple, Facebook and Google in the Observer.

In my article, I was particularly interested in seeing if people have any enthusiasm for the notion of us switching off all our devices every now and then — a week here and there, perhaps one day a week when we all agree to switch off and return to the kind of social interactions that used to exist — and I remain fascinated by that idea, although I’ve had little feedback about it.

Do feel free to let me know what you think about any of the above.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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