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Dundas Faussett’s life to this point would have made an amazing story – it’s what happened afterwards that made it so gobsmackingly unbelievable. How I of all people became part of it and now find myself its storyteller involves the making of medical history.

I had a nervous breakdown. An unusual and rather spectacular breakdown, it must be admitted.

Those who followed party politics back then will have some inkling of its cause when I mention my boss: Prime Minister X, the one whose office set world records for staff turnover.¹ After his fourth speechwriter in less than a year collapsed from overwork, I found myself in the job.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself, so maybe it’s best if I go five years further back, to when it all really began: the morning of my first day working in Parliament House.

I was a typical PhD graduate back then, by which of course I mean I was starved into taking a job I didn’t want. That meant signing on as assistant to one of those ambitious members of parliament destined for either: (1) the outer cabinet, (2) a career in talkback radio, (3) leadership of a new fringe party, or (4) jail; you probably know the type. I suppose it could have been worse: I didn’t end up on an insurance company help desk or selling smartphone plans on commission, like many of my academic contemporaries.

On that first morning, I’d been in the job for barely fifteen minutes, trying to remember my new boss’s name, when the office telephone rang. It was a female security guard at one of Parliament House’s many entrances. Apparently there was someone for me to collect. ‘Claims to have an appointment.’

‘Who is it?’

There was a clunk as the guard put down the handset and, in an annoyed tone, shouted some incoherent question. I remembered her tone because it’s famously difficult to rile those security guards. There was a muffled reply, and she returned to the phone. ‘Bobbie Bellchamber.’

‘Alright, I’ll come and get him.’

I wrote the name, which back then meant nothing to me, on a sticky note and showed it to my boss. The moment he saw it he headed for the door, much as if I’d just shown him the words ‘bubonic plague’. ‘You’ll have to deal with it,’ he said.

Halting at the doorjamb, one foot already in the corridor, he threw a small box at me. ‘Oh, here’s your phone. It was your predecessor’s, so it’s already set up. Stick to it like glue. I’ll be in touch when I need you.’

As our exchanges went, that would prove typical. The man of the people had important powerbrokers to meet.

Downstairs, I handed the sticky note to the security guard. She pointed to the waiting area and wished me luck – a kindly sentiment I definitely wasn’t expecting. It turned out it was a public hearing day, which meant the building was quickly being invaded by an assortment of obsessives needing to be kept out of trouble until it was their turn to testify to long-suffering House and Senate committees. Fearing that I was now a cross between a tour guide and a psychiatric nurse, I looked around for Bobbie Bellchamber.

All I could see at first from behind a concrete pillar was a set of well-polished flat-soled, blue-leather plimsolls – the sort of shoes you associate with ten-pin bowling. They were worn over a pair of bobby socks that obviously belonged to a woman, clearly not Robert Bellchamber. Rounding the pillar, I followed her costume upwards. She was wearing bibbed denim overalls, a floral shirt and a purple synthetic zipper jacket with ‘Milwaukee’ on the left breast. Her red hair was just visible beneath a silvery-blonde bobbed wig, and she sported glossy orange lipstick and glittery makeup on her cheeks. By her side was a small case that carried a line drawing of a pair of rollerskates, beneath which were the gold-embossed initials B.B. I took another look at her.

‘You’re . . . Bobbie Bellchamber?’

She raised her gaze and took a wad of chewing gum from her mouth to stick it behind her ear. ‘My stupid parents wanted a boy. Now, where can a girl get a Coke and fries around here?’

She was American. Not what I had expected, and I was thrown. ‘Ahh, actually, I don’t even know where the staff canteen is. I only started in this job twenty minutes ago, and the building’s sort of confusing.’

She groaned.

We asked around and found the canteen, then queued for food and selected a table at the edge of the eating area. Watching her chug down Coke and shovel in fries, I noticed her security lanyard. Beneath her name, next to ‘Organisation or company’, it said ‘CHUMI’.

‘Does that mean you’re friendly?’

‘It means I represent the Committee on Human Microwave Interaction.’

‘They interact?’

‘We’re against the cell phone.’ She stuffed in another fry. ‘Mobile phone, smartphone, whatever. That’s what your boss’s committee hearing is all about: cell phone safety. Didn’t he tell you? I’m appearing as an expert witness.’

In all the strangeness, I hadn’t thought to ask why she was there.

‘What have microwaves got to do with . . .’

She gave me another withering look. ‘See this French fry.’ She held one up, watching disgustedly as it drooped, and dangled limply in her fingers. ‘As you can see, it’s been microwaved, not fried.’

I suddenly understood why my new boss had run away.

‘Sorry?’

‘Do you know how a microwave oven works?’

‘You close the door and push a button.’

‘It shoots pulses of high-frequency energy through food at the speed of light. It’s what your cell phone does to your brain whenever you hold it close to your ear. It’s a mini transmitter of electromagnetic radiation. Less powerful than a microwave oven, maybe, but the same essential principle.’

I wondered what was coming next. Maybe she had invented a perpetual motion machine.

‘Why do you think your ear gets so warm during a long call? Why do you think you get headaches when talking dirty with your girlfriend?’ She paused. ‘Sorry, with your mom.’ She swallowed the limp fry she had been holding up. ‘A cell phone is basically the same as the machines they use to blast tumours. This device,’ she said, picking up the box containing my phone, ‘is cooking your head.’

‘You mean you don’t have a smartphone?’

‘Do I look nuts?’

I said nothing.

She slurped some Coke and then looked theatrically around the packed canteen. Everyone was wearing earbuds and staring into their palms, which nestled screens. ‘Doesn’t this all look strange to you?’

I looked around. It appeared normal.

‘Look at them. No conversation. None. Listen’ – she dropped her voice to a whisper, inclining her head towards the crowd – ‘silence. It’s meant to be a goddamn canteen, where people talk to each other, bitch about the boss, conduct affairs, be human.’ She sat back in her chair and shouted at the top of her lungs: ‘Hello! I’m taking my clothes off for my lover over here.’ There was no response. ‘I’m bending down now.’

A few bothered to look up curiously, but most acted as if they hadn’t even heard. A security guard came closer and mumbled something into the radio transmitter fixed to her lapel. Another guard appeared from around a corner and watched us.

‘What did I tell you?’

It was a scene I’d witnessed thousands of times – groups of people physically together but their minds each somewhere else. For the very first time, it seemed, well, mildly strange.

‘Everywhere at once,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts.

‘And nowhere at any one time,’ I replied, unconsciously continuing the slogan made popular by one of the Big Tech companies. I feigned a lack of interest. ‘They’re just using their phones. They could as easily be reading a book.’

‘They’re not, strictly speaking, human anymore,’ she said. ‘The computer world has already rewired their brains. It’s doing their thinking for them.’

‘Like zombies?’ I said, sarcastically.

‘Zombies. That’s good. You’re getting the picture. They don’t think, at least not in the sense that our parents used to. They just sift and exchange data instead, giving themselves brain cancer.’ She gave them another vile look. ‘The stupid jerks. Do you know how many people get run over every year crossing the road while sending text messages?’

‘Brain cancer? Really?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘We’d know,’ I said, glancing down at the box on the table. ‘Something like that couldn’t be kept quiet.’

‘How did Teddy Kennedy die?’

‘No idea.’

‘Glioma. It’s brain cancer. The guy spent twenty-five years with a cell phone gaffer-taped to his temple. Sometimes two, like that woman over there.’

I turned and saw a woman who looked to be conducting two simultaneous conversations, a smartphone to each ear. ‘That’s one example, and I’ll bet the jury’s out on what caused it.’

‘John McCain, then.’

‘Okay, two. So what?’

‘Both ran for president. Coincidence?’

‘Not really. Teddy didn’t even win the nomination.’

‘Read the small print on that phone you’ve got. Give it to me.’

She snatched the box, fumbled it open, tipped the handset onto the table like it was vermin and pulled out the small glossy handbook. ‘Here it is,’ she said, flicking through the pages. “‘Do not hold closer than four centimetres from your ear.” Do you think they might know something we don’t?’

‘Standard disclaimer.’

She laughed dismissively. ‘Just being in this building, we’re in a sea of electromagnetic radiation our bodies weren’t designed for. I can’t wait to get out of here, to somewhere without wi-fi. It should be banned.’

‘And you want to ban wi-fi?’

I suddenly understood her costume. She was one of those committed nostalgics. You saw them on television occasionally, explaining how they only bought clothes, cars and furniture from a particular era. Like the Amish, but without the religion. They just couldn’t see their confident sense of style for what it was: the sign of some undiagnosed mental problem. ‘My God! You really are living in the 1950s, aren’t you?’

She put out her arm for me to touch her jacket. ‘Feel it. Go on! It’s real 1950s acrylic bonded to nylon. You don’t see that around much anymore.’

‘And you’re going to say all this, about microwaves and wi-fi and Teddy Kennedy and John McCain, to the committee hearing?’

‘Especially the bit about Kennedy and McCain. Dead legislators! Always appeal to self-interest.’

‘Getting people to give up their smartphones? It’s not going to happen. Believe me.’

‘Getting rid of cell phones is actually quite easy, once you know how.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Watch.’ She picked up my phone with two fingers, as if handling a radioactive pellet, and dropped it, with a splash, into her half-full pitcher of Coke. ‘No more phone.’

‘I only got that today!’

Just then, the phone began to ring. The pitcher vibrated and the black liquid within foamed, frothing onto the table. I pulled out the sticky object and, self-consciously holding it four centimetres from my ear, answered the call. It was the boss. It was time for Bobbie to testify.

I delivered her to the attendants and stayed to watch the show.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Bobbie Bellchamber was being dragged from the hearing room by parliamentary security, streaming obscenities at the watching MPs, senators and lobbyists. It’s difficult to recall exactly how I felt about it at the time. I doubt I saw her as any sort of idealist, just an anti-technology zealot. But the fact that the lobbyists laughed at her nervously made me think she might have had a point. After all, everyone knows lobbyists are paid to cover up the truth.

The footage of her ejection made the evening news, and I dined out on my encounter with her for a couple of days, but it soon blurred into the craziness of life on the hill and I forgot about it. She disappeared completely from the public spotlight after that, although I was sure I saw her on a music video program late one night, way in the background, as the drummer in an all-girl 1950s retro-rock band. Apart from this, I didn’t give her another thought – until five years later, which just happened to be my last-ever twenty-four hours in Parliament House. It’s funny, isn’t it, how your fate can be linked to someone you hardly know.

I had arrived at my apartment block at around 10.30 pm, which was considered early when you worked for Prime Minister X. The trouble began when I tried to stick my key in the lock. To my frustration, it refused to go in. The passageway was dim, so I used the torch on my phone to get a better look. Someone, it seemed, had jammed the lock with superglue. Bastard.

I tried the owner, who let the place through Airbnb, but got her voicemail. I left a message, put it down to a teenage prank and sighed, resigning myself to another night on the roll-up mattress on the floor of my office. I say ‘another’ because sleeping in the office was a regular expectation of those who worked for Prime Minister X, thanks to his late-night habit of asking for new speeches or briefing notes to be on his desk by 6.00 am. I had been looking forward to the luxury of a night in my own bed, and to celebrate had planned a glass of Verdelho and an episode of The Crown (it was the one where Prince Charles gets coronavirus). I suddenly realised, angrily, that I was being denied the only moment of relaxation I was likely to have for the next fortnight. I jabbed at my phone to order an Uber to return me to the office.

As I stared at the app, I felt a small twinge in the left side of my face. This wasn’t unusual; the twinges typically arrived in moments of high stress, usually once or twice a week. I registered it only because it was my second or third for the day – which had been a rather tough one. I had worked for fourteen and a half hours straight on a speech Prime Minister X was planning to give the following day. It was about a coalmine closure, which naturally we were welcoming as way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The fate of the miners, we treated as barely an afterthought. I emailed the draft, which had been going back and forth all day, to him just before 10.00 pm and, after twenty-five minutes didn’t bring a reply, and hearing from the chief that the PM had left for the evening, I took my chance to escape the office. Maybe he’d read it and was happy, I thought, with the sort of reckless optimism brought on by fatigue.

Halfway back to Parliament House in the Uber, we stopped at what I assumed was a set of traffic lights. I wasn’t watching, distracted by responding to the half-dozen emails that had come in since I’d left the office. Then I heard a crash – it sounded like wood on metal. I looked up: a gang of balaclava-wearing women were thumping the Uber with cricket bats. I heard the smashing of glass as they knocked out the headlights.

The driver fumbled under his seat, pulling out a tyre lever, which I figured he kept handy for personal protection. He unlocked the door, pushed it open and jumped out, brandishing the lever. The attackers scattered into the darkness, some fleeing into the nearby bushes. He ran after them, and I got out of the car to inspect the damage. I found a card under a buckled wiper. Printed on it, in characters that looked like they had come from an old-fashioned typewriter, were two words: The Disrupted.

After waiting a few minutes for the Uber driver, who must have continued chasing the attackers, I gave up on him and hailed a passing cab. On telling the driver what had happened, she smiled. ‘Is that so, sir?’ is all she said.

Back at the office, I found a group of colleagues sitting on a couch in dimmed light, watching television. A collage of images filled the large flatscreen, showing incidents that were happening simultaneously across the world. CCTV cameras had captured thousands of incidents of people in balaclavas – just like those I had seen – squeezing glue into the locks of short-stay apartments and bashing in the panels of rideshare vehicles. In one clip, a set of delivery vans had parked in a driverless truck, which moved backward and forward, like a lion locked in a cage that prevented it from turning around. Long queues of people stood outside train and tube stations, unable to use Oyster or credit cards because the swiping panels had been painted over. So had the self-checkout machines at hundreds of supermarkets.

The screen flashed back to the newsreader, who announced that, in a remarkable development, a VHS cassette claiming to be from the organisers of the worldwide protests had just minutes earlier been delivered to the studio wrapped in brown paper, and they would broadcast it for the audience.

Filmed in a basement somewhere, the footage showed a woman standing in front of a sign identical to the card I had found on the windscreen. She too was wearing a balaclava. She held up a clenched fist in an old-fashioned left-wing salute and said, in an American accent: ‘Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your smartphones.’

Those few words were enough for me to recognise the voice as Bobbie Bellchamber’s.

The next thing I remembered was waking up on the office floor as my phone attacked me. I must have gotten to bed shortly after midnight and had briefly entered the darkest realms of sleep when my phone, which I had been ordered to keep switched on at all times, vibrated its way off my desk and landed with a painful smack on my face. I had been dreaming that I was on holiday, snoozing in a beach shack, a pile of books beside me, listening to the waves. The phone had to ring a dozen times before I fully awoke, located it in the darkness and swiped to answer.

‘Wakey-wakey, princess.’ It was the chief of staff, who had already been fielding calls from the PM for at least half an hour. ‘Change of plan. He wants to scrap the coalmine speech and talk instead about this Disrupted group. He wants to say they’re a threat to our way of life. The frame is “contemporary terrorists”. Let’s see . . .’ – I could hear him counting to himself – ‘just twenty-seven main points and fifteen subpoints. I’ll forward it to you. He wants a draft on his desk by six.’ He hung up. I heard my email ping.

I could feel my daily fatigue headache beginning. I ran my hands through greasy hair, dressed in the crumpled clothes I’d folded over a chair and went to the kitchenette. In the dark reflection of the window, I saw the left side of my face give another involuntary twitch. It was the first time I had actually seen this happen to me – it reminded me of old documentaries of shell-shocked soldiers from the Great War. I crept back to my desk with a coffee, hoping no one would see me in case my face twitched again.

My inbox had already started filling with emails. By this time, other staffers had been roused from their cosy office floors and ordered to contribute various facts and figures. The PM sent along thirteen more bullet points, in thirteen separate emails, each generating a thread of correspondence as the policy wonks searched for another statistic or quote they believed would nail their case. I began thinking dark thoughts about the inventors of networking software. What had gone wrong? Speechwriting was meant to involve pacing up and down with a tumbler of Scotch, dictating to a chainsmoking stenographer with a name like Mrs Boothroyd – yet here I was, sitting in a darkened room while glowing email instructions burned themselves into my retinas like lasers. Too tired to resist, I obediently pasted the predictable list of ‘opportunities’, ‘challenges’, ‘inputs’, ‘outputs’, ‘positive outcomes’ and data points into the draft, hit send and braced for more.

I must have fallen asleep, because I awoke at 8.25 with my head on the keyboard, my forehead indented with square pressure marks. There must have been half a million repeated keystrokes on the bottom of the opened draft. The office was alive with people, and I rubbed my face so no one would notice that it looked like a chessboard.

It was then that I made an effort to remember exactly what Bobbie Bellchamber had said in that parliamentary committee hearing five years previously. Recall was difficult in my fatigued state, but I remembered it was something about Big Tech taking over the world – by rewiring our brains to operate the way computers did, algorithmically, and by making us so constantly tired through overwork that we couldn’t even hope to resist their power. I realised she was right. I wasn’t a speechwriter anymore – I was more like a programmed machine, coded to translate data inputs into strings of words that were often completely devoid of literary merit, meaning and sometimes logic. I was even writing a speech to attack a movement that the deep recesses of my mind was telling me I actually agreed with.

These pained, sketchy thoughts were interrupted by another ping. Already a new wave of revisions and data tables was arriving in my inbox. The PM had had a complete rethink and called for more data from the wonks. I felt my face give its biggest spasm yet.

Ten o’clock came and went and still the emails kept rushing in. At two o’clock the speech wasn’t settled, and the PM asked me to watch Question Time from the advisers’ box on the floor of the House – I suspect because he wanted to make sure I was working. He sat there, composing on his laptop, and every few minutes a new email would arrive with another suggestion.

Only when fifteen full minutes passed without another proposed change to the speech did I start to feel the ten-tonne block of concrete pressing down on my head begin to lift. I began to think of sleep. Precious, precious sleep. I stupidly let my mind race ahead of me, into fantasies in which I sank onto the couch, had a bowl of healthy vegetables and that elusive glass of Verdelho and an episode of The Crown. I settled down lower on the parliamentary bench and felt almost happy. It was unrealistic foolishness, of course – a dream that even then I knew would be cruelly extinguished. As some minister stood at the despatch box, sonorously outlining more warnings about The Disrupted – a threat to economic productivity, inimical to innovation, sneering elitists – I dozed off. I must have snored, because my colleague nudged me and I looked up to see the Speaker giving me an admonishing look. Peering drowsily at the PM, I noticed him typing furiously into his laptop. He glanced over his left shoulder at me, then pressed down on the mousepad, in the unmistakable, self-satisfied way of somebody hitting send.

A twitch shot across my face. The spasms were usually singular, but this time they continued, like a tremor. My colleagues looked sideways at me anxiously.

Then it came: the dreadful ping on my laptop. In unconscious obedience, I opened the message. Change of plan. Scrap current draft. New argument: The Disrupted as a threat to financial stability. New draft by 5. 15 points. #1 . . .

I didn’t get to point two. An electrical storm – that’s the term the doctors later used – exploded inside my head. It felt like being inside a police alarm, with a siren sounding between my ears and flashing lights going off somewhere behind my eyes. I let out a low, painful groan, which people later told me sounded like a dog that had swallowed a poison bait. Heads turned my way. As the Speaker called ‘Order!’ I screamed. It was a long, plaintive emanation, half cry, half yell. After that I scaled the box, landed on the floor of the chamber and advanced towards the PM, screaming at the top of my lungs: ‘Let me sleep, you fucker, let me sleep!’ I smashed the laptop down on the despatch box in front of him, before hurling it like a frisbee at the Speaker’s chair. It missed, hit a wall and shattered into several pieces, at which point the attendants crash-tackled me to the ground, pinning me to the green carpet while the House adjourned temporarily. Eventually they strapped me onto a stretcher and towed me to a waiting ambulance, which was pursued to the hospital by TV broadcast vans and a helicopter.

Within hours, footage of the incident had gone viral, and I was the laughing stock of the world.

At least initially. People laughed at first, but the laughter soon stopped. Something surprising happened: many started to take my side. I can only guess the affair must have touched on a deep disenchantment – something the tech corporations and corporate bosses had managed to suppress and my episode finally released. At first most assumed I was mad, but soon some said I was the victim of an unreasonable boss and that any normal employee would have cracked eventually under those circumstances. The PM’s office countered by backgrounding that I was a poor time manager, unable to complete routine work tasks within normal office hours, frequently failing to produce drafts of speeches until well after midnight.

Psychologists and other behavioural experts weighed in, but shed little light. Commentators discussed how technology had abolished the old distinctions between work and rest, resulting in a universal feeling of fatigue. My case, they said, was an extreme example. They put forward the usual remedies: voluntary protocols for limiting technology use outside office hours, apps that help office workers reduce the number of times they check their email, an advertising blitz on social media. This was hardly anything new.

Then a small group of technology sceptics began to publish controversial opinion columns in the few newspapers that still existed. They had noticed something: the curious fact that my anger in parliament appeared to be directed not at the PM but at my laptop. Maybe it was the problem. Had we, they asked, already crossed a vital threshold, a dangerous point beyond which the technology itself was calling the shots, reordering our lives and our societies in ways that the inventors never intended? This wasn’t just about work, they argued; it was about life. Just like Bobbie Bellchamber five years before, they asserted that digital technology and the companies that produced it were now the masters and we their slaves. They dug out her infamous parliamentary committee testimony and quoted from it.

At first they were dismissed as cranks, but their ideas slowly began to take hold. My condition became a lightning rod for disquiet about all sorts of upsets – from the decline of newspapers to the failure of modern technology-dominated schooling and even the undermining of democracy by the spread of race hate and far-right violence via the internet. Maybe, people thought, my collapse would trigger real action, a human fightback, a way out of the digital cage we’d unthinkingly built for ourselves.

I learned all this in hindsight. I was in no condition to follow the debate, except through the occasional physical newspaper article. An image accompanying one such article stood out, and I kept the clipping. It showed a huge public demonstration in New York supporting The Disrupted. Thousands of people were marching, carrying banners that read BAN THE COMPUTER and FREE PAUL RICHEY.

I had become a cause célèbre of the global anti-tech lobby. It turned out that Bobbie Bellchamber wasn’t alone in rejecting the tech companies and what they were doing to the world. The Disrupted had swelled to a movement, of which she was the acknowledged figurehead.

Meanwhile, the government sent me to the best sanatorium in the country under tight security. An election was expected, and they didn’t want me blabbing about what really went on inside the PM’s office. A few journalists did manage to get in, posing as cleaners or nurses, but I was in no condition to talk, and they soon stopped trying. I learned later that my supporters feared a contract may have been taken out against me.

In the sanatorium, the doctors and psychologists got to work. Specialists in digital phobias flew in from all over the world, poking and prodding me, applying electrodes and subjecting me to stress tests to find the source of my problem. One day, after I dived under my bed when a nurse’s phone rang, they tried an experimental treatment that involved strapping me to a chair in a room set up to resemble a politician’s office. On a desk beside me they placed various electronic devices – smartphones, iPads, laptops, desktop computers, even a palm pilot – that they would cause to ring and ping randomly to gauge my reactions, which they observed from behind a two-way mirror. (The digital video cameras they initially tried made me break out in an involuntary sweat.) They alternated the ringtones and alerts, varying the volume, the brightness and the vibrations, to see if superficial changes to the design of devices might solve or mitigate my problem. They didn’t. Even the fax machine they brought in made me begin to shake uncontrollably.

One of the psychologists had an idea. She set an old-fashioned phone – the sort with a rotary dial and a mechanical bell – next to me, leaving my hands unstrapped. The moment it rang, to my own and everybody else’s surprise, I answered it.

Over the following days I was surrounded by every humdrum device imaginable. Kettles boiled, radios played, hairdryers blasted out heat. It turned out that my extreme reaction only occurred when the machines contained digital components – even the small chips that were silent and invisible. For example, an older-style washing machine, with mechanical dials and a clockwork timer, could run a whole cycle without causing the least change in me. But the moment a newer model controlled by databoards was activated, my agitation returned. The same results were obtained with older and newer refrigerators. The scientists visited all the collectables shops in town and outfitted an entire suite for me with pre-digital furniture, whitegoods and entertainment devices. I even watched VHS cassettes they made of PM X giving a speech to parliament and was fine. They were finally convinced: this had nothing to do with everyday mental stress.

The eventual diagnosis hit the world like a bombshell. I was the first confirmed case of something called ‘digital proximity anxiety’ – DPA – which the media inevitably dubbed ‘smartphone shock’. Thousands began to step forward, claiming to have suffered the same thing, which sent employee insurance premiums skyrocketing. The opinion columns talked about little else. Younger commentators called upon DPA sufferers to embrace their analogue identity without shame. Lobby groups sprang up demanding changes, like the introduction of digital-free public spaces and the reinstallation of telephone booths in major pedestrian areas. Enterprising lawyers called for sufferers to join class-action lawsuits. Ironically, the movement got its own hashtag: #unhashtag. Literary agents approached me to sell the rights to my story. People became particularly outraged when the founder of one of the biggest software companies revealed that he refused to let his own children use his company’s products, sending them instead to a preppy private school where wi-fi and mobile phones were banned.

For a brief, glorious moment, it seemed my predicament had spawned a global campaign that might actually achieve something. But, predictably, it soon petered out. People quickly forgot about digital proximity anxiety. The world moved on.

Meanwhile, my life in my special suite was a trial. The months passed, but I just couldn’t get back to normal. Every time I felt close to recovery I would relapse. No one could figure out why, although the answer was obvious all along: like universities, medical facilities had long ago become subsidiaries of the tech corporations. Always somewhere in the background of a hospital there is ringing or pinging or blips marching across a screen, collecting medical data for the ultimate use of medical researchers, drug companies and health insurance firms. This background digital activity couldn’t be fully eliminated, no matter how many layers of wallpaper they stuck in my rooms. I felt poisoned, as if there were toxic chemicals in the air. To aid my recovery, they were forced to move me into a form of medical seclusion, safely away from the internet and mobile phone reception.

They eventually found the right place – an abandoned lighthouse on Bruny Island, on the south-east tip of the last stop to Antarctica: Tasmania. Surrounded by my wind-up mechanical clock, AM-FM radio, vinyl long-playing records, cassette player, books and the weekly printed broadsheet they flew in for me from overseas, my mind slowly recovered. Like a soldier back from war, I still had the occasional nightmare. For example, I would sometimes kick out in my sleep against imaginary robotic vacuums that were cornering me. But the simple therapy of living as my grandparents once had worked wonders. And after three years of such safety – I’ll skip over that almost entirely uneventful period to save the reader – I found myself ready to return, tentatively, to civilisation. I couldn’t yet live surrounded by the digital economy, so rather than send me to a modern city, they sent me to Hobart.

Before I offend any residents of that fine city, now recovering from all the trouble that followed, I’d better explain what I mean.

After Dundas Faussett closed GoFA, it caused the city’s economy to fall like a Concorde with empty fuel tanks. The sort of decline that had taken a couple of decades to ruin the world’s once-great industrial cities wrecked Hobart in a matter of months. Having awoken to the reality that GoFA would never re-open, businessowners started boarding up their shops and heading to the airport, stopping only at the bank to hand in the keys to their mortgaged, overpriced and now worthless real estate. The shopping districts and then whole residential suburbs were emptied. The Chinese Communist Party officials found another city to wash their money in. There was a run on flights to the mainland, which for a while was the only fully functioning part of the state’s economy. But once all the newcomers to the state had left, the airlines shut and people had to take the ferry. That also soon went bankrupt, and the air force had to step in to offer help for hardship cases.

The sole easy way off the island after that was by private plane. Only Dundas Faussett could now afford one of those, and he had completely disappeared.

Infrastructure began to collapse, broadband services became so patchy as to be useless, electronic payment services wouldn’t work, and because paper money had all but ceased to circulate, a type of modified barter economy sprung up. People soon learned how to make do, and after a while the only ones who remained were those who preferred the world that way – simple and quiet, just as it had been before GoFA ruined everything.

This new low-tech, low-stress Hobart suited me perfectly.

1For reasons that will soon become obvious, his name has been suppressed on the advice of lawyers.