An Interview with Adele Walton, author of Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World (Coming June 2025)
'Logging Off is a life-saving book' - Mikaela Loach, author of It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World (2023)
Towards the end of my interview with Adele Walton, author of Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World (Coming June 2025), Adele said she hoped that the book ‘gives [readers] the tools to build a more broad and active tech justice movement beyond just regulating our screen time’. It was a powerful statement that has stuck with me in the days after the interview, especially as I just finished Onyi Nwabineli’s Allow Me to Introduce Myself (2024), which is fiction about the destructive impact of content creation and family vlogging on children. In Nwabineli’s book, it’s not enough that Aṅụri, our protagonist, merely stops following her stepmother on social media; instead, she realises that she needs to call for a change, in this case to the legal systems that do not currently adequately protect children from exploitation. This is just one human cost of our digital world: in Adele Walton’s Logging Off, testimonials, both from Adele and others, show that there are many, many more.
A journalist, author and activist, Adele’s work is so important, and her determination to make change happen is catching. Most recently, Walton has interviewed Esther Ghey for Glamour UK. She’s also campaigned with Bereaved Families for Online Safety and Ctrl + Alt + Reclaim and is a youth ambassador for People Vs Big Tech, as well as a Connected by Data fellow. Walton’s work as a journalist and activist - and now author - is all intertwined; she describes Logging Off as an ‘activist-type book’ as much as ‘a journalistic [one]’.
As I listened to Adele talking about her work, I thought about my own relationship with social media more. Like Adele, I grew up with a strange, carefully curated version of myself existing online; as a bookstagrammer, I, in some ways, continue to play this role. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), we ‘have [...] grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double-a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed’. We have a collective responsibility to listen to the voices of those who have lost more than just their ‘real’ selves to the online world and its abuses. Adele’s work not only highlights the very real, devastating cost of this, but has also made me more aware of the tools I might have at my disposal to change not only my own relationship with social media but continue to protest against its power in more meaningful and lasting ways.
It was an enormous privilege to speak to Adele about the book’s origins, the process of writing the book, the harms the digital world can and does inflict, the Logging Off Club and more.
I hope you find her words just as inspiring as I did.
The Origins of Logging Off
The idea came to me in 2022. I had just moved to a small town in a semirural part of the UK and my boyfriend and I got our first local newsletter through the door and there was an advert in the back that said ‘intelligent pensioner requires smartphone tuition’. I thought that was quite funny. It was bold of him to call himself intelligent! I rated that confidence and the courage that it would have taken to advertise in your local newsletter looking for help with something that a lot of us assume you just pick up.
I reached out to him and within a couple of weeks, I was in his flat! His name’s Tony. He’s now 89 - at the time he was 86. For a year, every other week, I spent an hour or so at his flat teaching him how to use a smartphone. The experience of meeting Tony really pushed me outside of my bubble. I knew how I experienced the digital world, but I began to ask, what about people who aren’t me? What does their experience look like? I assume certain skills are inherent because I’ve grown up on social media. But there are people who find social media more challenging, or who are not physically able, or who are digitally excluded in some other way.
That experience got me thinking a lot about digital exclusion and how technology is not actually the great equaliser that we’re often taught it is. In fact, it reinforces those same hardships, difficulties, and inequalities such as ageism and ableism.
That was the initial encounter that caused me to think of Logging Off. It triggered me as a journalist to ask more questions about who is losing out in our digital world, and why. I thought, why aren’t enough people talking about this? And if they are talking about it, why is it not centred in the conversations about technology and progress?
In October 2022, about four months after I’d met Tony for the first time, and I was already asking those questions, I sadly lost my sister to online harms. At that point, I thought, this is something I really have to do, something I have to pour myself into. Writing the book became a channel for my own grief, frustration and anger that the loss of my sister was allowed to happen, and that it was allowed to happen because those safeguards that we have offline are not in place in the digital world, and certain people - tech bros - profit from those lack of safeguards, the lack of red tape, the lack of regulation, etc.
Until writing this book, I was definitely more biased towards seeing social media in an optimistic light. As someone who has grown up using it and is dependent on it as a freelancer and a creative, I never questioned its role in my life in a serious way because I do depend on it in many areas of my life. I met my partner online on a dating app, I’ve made so many friends from social media, and I’ve got pretty much all of my work opportunities as a journalist from connections I’ve made online. It would be hypocritical for me to say that these platforms don’t play a huge part in my life. However, in saying that, writing Logging Off has taught me that social media is a double-edged sword. It can be a useful tool but, because of that dependency ingrained in me, I now lack the infrastructure around me to fill the gap it leaves. If I deleted my social media tomorrow, I would lose a lot of my professional networks, a lot of my community, and the cultural content I engage with on a daily basis. That’s a challenge for us as Gen Z and millennials. We grew up using these platforms and now we’re looking around and realising we might not have the offline community we would like to.
As much as social media has been a brilliant tool in my personal and professional life, we collectively need to unlearn our dependency on social media platforms. Overnight, the way these platforms run can change, as can the interests they are geared towards and how safe or unsafe they are for marginalised communities. We’ve seen that with Elon Musk taking over X. The same goes for other platforms run by companies or CEOs, which is most of them. That process is really destabilising if these platforms provide our only sense of community, connection, socialisation, education, news. Our dependency on them is risky, and precarious.
The evolution of Logging Off
Initially, Logging Off was a lot more statistics- and fact-heavy. Personally, I love non-fiction. Non-fiction books have always been the ones to change or reinforce my perspective and make me feel like I can make sense of the world better. When writing the book, I was focused very much on presenting the evidence, hoping that the reader would be easily persuaded. I thought if you just present all the evidence to someone they’ll believe it or understand what the problem is. But I soon found that whilst facts and statistics might be what I really engage with, the vast majority of people learn from storytelling and from connecting to the writer.
In the editing process, the book became a lot more personal. I had to weave in a lot more of my personal perspective as a Gen Z, as someone who grew up using social media, as someone who's now a campaigner with lived experience, as a young woman who exists online.
Interestingly, in writing the book, I recovered memories that I had either forgotten or repressed. I realised that experiences I had had online - negative ones, harmful ones, ones that put me at risk as a young woman online - were part of a bigger picture. When we talk about online harms, whether cyberbullying or image-based sexual abuse, we often frame these experiences as something to grow through, cope with, or just be resilient about, reducing these harms to an individual level. We have to recognise there are larger forces at play here, as there are with climate inequality, for instance.
Writing about grief
Writing about grief in Logging Off was difficult but it was at the same time very cathartic, not only for grief but also my frustrations at the way those in power right now are profiting from our vulnerabilities and from the catastrophe that is being unleashed on us through these platforms. Whether it’s young people’s mental health or the destabilisation of democracy, all these things are being exacerbated by tech companies that put profit over peoples’ lives, so it was a cathartic experience to write about that and also weave in my own experiences of grief.
The quote at the start of the book is, ‘grief is the way to transformation’ (Yuria Celidwen). I stumbled across it in the early stages of the writing process, and it really spoke to me, because, without feeling the grief, we can’t envision the alternative. My grief has made space inside of me for the energy I need, energy I can channel towards building something better.
Going from freelance author to journalist
Writing the book has helped me gain more confidence in my voice as a writer because I thought I was just good at gathering information and delivering it to the reader in an accessible way. Weaving in personal experiences was not something I knew I had the capacity for, but I was encouraged by my editor and agent. I did struggle to get to grips with finding my voice. I was so not used to writing from a personal perspective! As a journalist, the articles I’ve written most recently and have had the best response from the widest range of people have been the more personal ones. That’s proof that my writing is not terrible, but it was a fear that I did have until I wrote the book!
Activism, Logging Off and the fight against tech companies
Logging Off is just as much an ‘activist-type book’ as it is a journalistic book.
I finish the book with multiple calls to action to the reader, and I give them a blueprint for how to move forward. In each chapter, I present the human cost of the digital world and I share the testimonies of those who’ve experienced the worst things at the hands of tech companies and because of their lack of care. I’m hoping the reader comes away empowered knowing there’s more tangible things they can do. There are multiple actions they can take. In terms of the tech justice fight and movement, there’s a bit of a disconnect. Often people don’t yet know what the steps are that we can take other than logging off, which in itself is an individualistic action and a means to an end. That’s not enough.
Whilst I believe that we should all be detaching from these platforms and these devices that have harmed us, I also feel that we need to apply the same methods that we do to other fights and other movements to this fight too. I’m hoping Logging Off helps readers, giving them the tools to build a more broad and active tech justice movement beyond just regulating our screen time.
The writing process
I wanted to write my first book in a memorable way and not just be at home with my parents writing in the spare room, because I didn’t find that space that inspiring. I decided to download the app Trusted Housesitters as a way of spicing it up a little bit and doing something I’d never done before. I found a couple of housesits across the country - five in total. I think I’m someone who draws a lot from my surroundings and a change in routine. It was so fun being in different places. My writing didn’t become stagnant, and I was always finding new things to be inspired by. When I wasn’t writing, I could explore my surroundings. It was a memorable way to write the book! Now I’ll look back and I’ll have fond memories - I’ll remember what chapter I was writing in each place and at different times. I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend to other people to download the app and have a go and switch it up, maybe look after some nice pets!
Logging Off Club
Logging Off Club is a community that hosts fun free events. My friend India and I started it, and you can join by subscribing to our substack.
We always put our events on there so you don’t have to be on social media to find out about the events. We realised that even though a lot of young people want to get off social media and their phones and spend less time on social media, it’s also their main form of finding out about events and things to do with friends. We switched over to Substack because of this. You get a few newsletters a month if you sign up. We don’t want to bombard people with notifications - that’s the whole point of getting off your phone and being part of a club with other people who want to decentre social media in their lives.
We have done one event in Southampton, one in London and we’re doing one in Brighton soon, and we definitely want to do more across the UK.
Book recommendations from Adele
How to Stay Safe Online: A digital self-care toolkit for developing resilience and allyship by Seyi Akiwowo
Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Dr. Joy Buolamwini
More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech by Meredith Broussard
Data Grab: The new Colonialism of Big Tech and how to fight back by Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry
Pre-order Adele’s new book here: Pre-order Logging Off
Find and order Adele’s recommended reading (and some of my own recommendations too) here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/thehungrybookreader