Turn Your F*cking Phones Off review – a tremendous takedown of big tech
Last year, Hannah Maxwell laid out three blueprints for an Edinburgh fringe hit. In her show Babyfleareindeerbag, she tested out a series of ideas in a hilarious exercise in market research.
In other circumstances, she might have returned with a full-length version of the one about her father’s teddy bear puppets – something cute and whimsical – but the state of the world persuaded her otherwise. She went for the one about the threat of the tech bros.
“Turn Your F*cking Phones Off” sounds like an instruction, but is actually a note to self. It is her own smartphone she is worried about: not only the hold it has on her, but the data she provides it with. Not for nothing does she deliver chunks of the show via an old-school payphone.
It fuses two narrative lines, intercut in Maxwell’s playful way with mass karaoke and party games (it’s a fun show to be part of). One of them is her first-person account of getting a “money job” with a clandestine organisation specialising in influencing public discourse. It involved international travel, data collection and subliminal messaging.
The other is her increasing concern about her screen addiction and her complicity in feeding an online machine that profits from discord – not just as an accidental byproduct but as a deliberate right-wing policy.
The two strands meet in the middle when troubling repercussions from her old job make her all the more alert to the damaging impact of a life shaped by algorithms. As she goes into digital detox, she retreats from doomscrolling and dopamine hits, but has an even greater fear of what she sees as a fundamental assault on democracy.
In a tremendous show, she delivers this analysis with equal parts fervour and merriment. The connections she makes in the audience are a real-world alternative to the online forces trying to tear us apart.
