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I recently returned from a ten-day digital detox, during a family holiday in Sicily, which not only involved me being completely offline — away from the internet and from all social media — but also involved me having no information whatsoever about the outside world, not watching any news or even glimpsing a single headline in a newspaper.

It was a liberating, albeit brief experience, and not just because summer holidays — unknown to the working class until the 20th century, and not widely involving foreign travel until the dawn of cheap flights and package holidays in the 1980s — are meant to be a time when we take a break from the stresses and strains of our working lives.

In my case, it was an important, perhaps crucial psychological break from an accumulation of often almost intolerable bleakness brought about by the particularly difficult times we’re all living through right now, largely involving the derangement of our leaders, and of almost all political discourse, all of which has been exacerbated by my presence in an often suffocating media and social media landscape.

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Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.

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 on Substack, and my interview with Chris begins around 35 minutes in, after an interview with 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. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.

I’m just back from a fortnight’s holiday with my family in Sicily, and am also just back online after a week with no internet access at all, which was a wonderfully refreshing experience.

Don’t get me wrong. I make a living — or what passes for a living — mostly online, and I know more than many how the internet can enable individuals to become truly independent media sources and activists, and how we can reach out across the world in a way that was never possible before the advent of the world wide web. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last eleven years, and will continue to do so long as there are appreciate people out there who are prepared to support me in what I do.

However, the permanently connected world is not without its pitfalls — and I’m not just thinking about fake news, bigotry, and the horrendous rise of cyber-bullies and cyber-misogynists. Every year, when I switch off, I return to a time when there was space in our lives — space to think, to reflect, even to be bored, which can be a constructive experience. It’s somewhere I try to get to regularly in my everyday life, cycling around London taking photos, with no mobile phone connecting me to the online world (or able to track my every move), but I always return to my laptop, to the blizzard of emails, notifications, status updates and more from the absurdly large number of people who purport to be my “friends,” but who, in reality, are a relatively small number of friends and acquaintances vastly outnumbered by people I don’t know at all. Read the rest of this entry »