There's a rule of thumb that will work for as long as WIRED continues to chart the future of ideas. It's this: if it's new and popular, someone will declare it unhealthy. Here we are today, a couple of decades into the information revolution, every one of us using technologies - both electronic and cultural - that are revolutionising and improving every aspect of our lives to a degree so profound they have removed our ability to understand or even remember our lives before.
And yet still we're told this is bad for us. Not just uncomfortable, but poisonous. Toxic. Every moment spent checking messages - or continuing our professional, social and romantic relationships, to put it in the 21st-century context - is one that drives us further away from our state of natural being. Looking at Facebook curdles the mind. Checking Twitter banishes birdsong from our memories. Online friends give you bad breath. Memes will destroy your brain's language centres.
The only choice, they say, is to turn it all off. Travel to this new spa, situated far from 4G's noxious embrace. Practise offline sabbaths, to rid your soul of the succubus of connectivity. Get outside, away from weakening Wi-Fi! Read things, but from a rectangle that doesn't glow! Which is better! Detox! Detox!
This is, I think, nostalgia-laden nonsense. A growing industry of the worried, the concerned and the puzzled by modernity, channelling their confusion with the present and fears about the future into the language of medical charlatans and celebrity diets. Really liking being online isn't the sign of simply living in 2017, but rather it's a mindless acceleration on the slippery slope to barbarism. Things were better before.
This sort of nostalgia isn't necessarily bad, in moderation. After all, chances are you're reading these words in a format invented over a hundred years ago - the glossy paper magazine. But in our case this is for a modern reason. When we launched WIRED in the UK, one of the highlights of the pre-launch talks with advertisers and other such importants was the quality of the paper stock. Hold a white page of the very object in your hand against a white page from another mag, and you'll see: it's whiter and more opaque than most. That makes the pictures look better, which makes for a better product, especially in the days before retina displays. So the yearning for, and nerding over, the thickness, whiteness and tactility of paper wasn't because we long for the simpler times of the past, but because we wanted things to be better in the future.
And that's the issue. Digital detoxes aren't moving us forward. Instead, they make us think that the prelapsarian time before the web, before social networks, before all the possibilities and cultural richness and access to knowledge, before a quarter of the planet walking around with super-computers in our pockets with access to information and understanding and real-time monitoring the likes of which would have been unavailable to even the President of the US not two decades ago, that rejecting all that somehow makes us a better person. It's insanely self-punishing.
So: here's the idea. Over the next year, we'll realise that digital stuff isn't toxic - in fact, it's quite the opposite. That the things we're urged to turn off can actually nourish us. That we're not looking at our phones, but rather through our phones. That embracing the world as it is today is healthy, and that switching it all off, without consideration or moderation, is as crazy and misguided as deciding to live a "purer" life, one without the written word, or cooked food, or the French kiss. We've moved forward.
It was rubbish before. We can say that now.
Ben Hammersley is a contributing editor to WIRED, an author and a TV broadcaster
The WIRED World in 2017is WIRED's fifth annual trends briefing, predicting what's coming next in the worlds of technology, science and design
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
