There is a Black Mirror element to this show that highlights the darker side of modern technology. How has this project changed your own relationship with technology?

I’m someone who has

a very hateful relationship with technology. I throw my phone in a drawer when I go away for the weekend or something. I literally lock it in a drawer and don’t look at it. I really don’t like it. I don’t like what it’s done to our brains. I don’t like how it’s affected the way I read things or how it affected my attention span, in general. I am very appreciative of its merits and of its strengths. We are experiencing that now. We have a vaccine. It’s a miracle of technology and science. On social media, I’ve been able to access voices I may have otherwise not had access to, and that has been life-changing. But I am wildly distrustful of big tech. The fact that there are no regulations, the fact that they are making apps that are designed to be addictive, and the spread of misinformation, obviously. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. I am very distrustful of it, so the show had already found me in a spot where, I mean, this would be my worst nightmare having something like this implanted. I am, at any moment, ready to throw my phone out the window, so maybe it increased that. 

As someone who is comfortable unplugging, what is a good way to quell tech addiction?

One thing I like to do is I have a dog, and I take him for walks and will often leave my phone at home. I’ll take him around my neighborhood, and I’m always shocked because in the first couple of minutes, I’m a little bit like, “Gosh, what if I miss a phone call?” Or, “What if something happens and someone needs to get ahold of me?” And within two minutes, it’s gone. I don’t have anything to distract me. I don’t have music. I don’t have texts. I’m just walking, and I notice so many more things. Honestly, I feel—and this is just me—I feel a real calm take over. I find myself growing calmer with each step. 

Something I try to do too when I’m at dinner with someone, I used to leave my phone on the table as a habit, and now it goes on silent at the bottom of the bag, and I’m with the person. I think [technology] has given us this terrible sense of urgency to respond, which sometimes, at least for me, translates into being so overwhelmed that I actually end up falling behind with that stuff. It’s like there’s no respect anymore for, well, my phone goes off at 7 p.m. You could send me a work email at 11 p.m., but that’s my time. There used to be such a clearer boundary with that. Technology has eroded our boundaries a bit. I think that’s an understatement. Yeah, it generally makes me pretty nervous and sad, I would say. Not to be a bummer. 

I understand that. Even working from home these days, it’s more difficult to set those boundaries.

Oh, sure! How do you do it? When do you shut off? And then the things that used to give us relief from that, like the human-to-human interactions, are gone, and it’s all based on Zoom. I have this very naïve hope, but when it’s safe for us to be back in the same space together when we are back in office buildings, I am hopeful there is a bit of return, that people will be so sick from staring at screens. It literally makes me feel sick sometimes. I hope there is a real zealous return where we sit by the water cooler and we talk about what we watched last night or something. Or we go outside for lunch. All these things that we used to take for granted.