Adele Zeynep Walton is a writer, journalist, and online safety campaigner based in the UK. Her debut book, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, will be released on June 5th 2025.

By Laura Kiely & Orla Mahon | Feb 25 2025

Logging Off approaches the problems of our digital landscape from a holistic lens, focusing upon the structural, systemic reasons why social media has become so intangled within every aspect of our lives. “The title was like a bit of a trick,” Adele says, “I sort of chose that title to get people that maybe wouldn't pick up such a critical and political book to actually buy it, thinking that it's like, digital wellness, live, laugh, love, self care . . . But actually, it's a political call to action - disrupting the industry and taking on Big Tech.” Adele continues, “I think it's going to take some readers on a journey similar to what I went through, of starting out with a lot of self-blame for the way that I feel addicted to social media and the way that our digital world is, and actually ending the book with a feeling of wanting to fight back and wanting to disrupt this... Because this is not going well, and no one is enjoying this except a very, very few handful of companies and tech bros, and it's not in our interest to keep enabling it. So how can we create a movement that will actually challenge that at the heart?”

Adele always enjoyed studying English at school, but really found her passion for writing when she began university. While studying International Development at the University of Sussex, Adele started a blog called ‘A Note of Despair’. “It was basically where I could rant about capitalism and politics, and get out my frustrations through writing,” she explains. “That very much started when I was in uni, because I was learning all of this information about the world... things about British imperialism and colonial history and why global inequality is not a natural thing, but a product of these historical factors and economic systems that now exist.” 

The International Development BA course at the University of Sussex receives high praise from Adele. “Sussex was brilliant, the first module that we learned was ‘Colonialism and After,’ - it threw you right into the deep end of, ‘forget what you've learned about global inequality from the poverty porn that Comic Relief push out every year, to the paternalistic tropes and narratives that we have around the so-called third world and the first world,’” she says. “It kind of shook me out of my own misconceptions and out of my own white saviour beliefs - I was like, what am I doing? I need to be doing the work here, educating my peers, challenging other people's narratives in the UK, and shining a light on the forms of inequality that are within our own country and within our own political system, rather than putting ourselves on this pedestal that the UK often loves to do.”

“It's not to say that I wasn't already political, because that's absolutely not the case - my parents are very left-leaning, and they've instilled those values of treating people equally, and treating people how you would want to be treated, and working for good, not for money and self-interest,” Adele continues. “I was definitely predisposed to coming out of a degree like International Development and feeling the way I did . . . If anything, it's made me into more of who I already was at my core. That's how I feel - I don't feel like it changed me, I feel like it just asserted who I already was.”

From the success of her blog, Adele began branching out into freelance journalism. “People would message me and say, you should write for a publication. Because I didn't have any background in journalism, or connections to the industry, or at least my parents and relatives aren't in that space - I was sort of like, ‘oh, you can do that? I can just email a publication and tell them I want to write for them? That's crazy.’” 

Adele began pitching articles to newspapers and other publications. “It was basically like, throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Adele laughs. “And in a way, through doing that, I sort of carved out a space for myself as a journalist, mostly reporting on global inequality, social movements, progressive movements, and activism.”

“And then in 2022, I lost my sister to online harms. When that happened, I threw myself into critiquing and looking at Big Tech industry through the same lens that I had looked at the capitalist, global economy on a wider scale. It's the same problem, but just a different situation.”

“I just felt, I need to channel all of my journalism, all of my freelance efforts into discovering more. What is going on under the surface here? Because I think those of us individually in our own lives are not happy with the way things are in the digital world . . . No matter what background we come from, no matter where we are in life, whether we're elderly, whether we're a parent, a teenager, we all have something we're not happy with. And it's a connecting thread and the thread of that is big tech, and that industry putting profit over people's lives and people's actual experiences.” 

Do I want to give so much of my free labour and emotional impulses to these platforms that I cannot control, and that only want to keep extracting from me? And the answer was obviously no.

Adele continues, “What I've tried to do with my book and with my freelance journalism is connect all of those dots - sort of build a collective consciousness of, you, and the parent who's worried about your teenager, and the teenager, and the elderly person in your community who's digitally excluded. We're all in the same boat, and we need to be fighting for the same thing.”

According to the Royal Society for Public Health, the vast majority of young people say four of the five most-used social media platforms actually make their feelings of anxiety worse. And yet, social media remains an integral part of young people's lives. As a young person who grew up with social media, Adele understands this apparent contradiction completely. “When you've grown up thinking that compulsive social media use is the norm, seeing yourself and others through the lens of your social media channels feels like normal life,” Adele stresses. “It takes something quite significant to shake you out of that. And I think that for me, writing my book was the thing that shook me out of that, and made me actually interrogate how I spend my time. Like, do I want to give so much of my free labour and emotional impulses to these platforms that I cannot control, and that only want to keep extracting from me? And the answer was obviously no.”

“We laugh about brain rot, we laugh about doom scrolling. We laugh about how exhausted we are, and how we can't bear to reply to our friends' messages for two weeks because we're so totally overwhelmed. We joke about it to the point of not recognizing how serious it is, but when you actually start to understand the forces at play, and how much these companies are profiting from inhibiting us, from living our lives - that's when you're like, okay, no, I want to do something about this.”

Social media has taken such a fundamental role in our social lives to the extent we feel we don’t exist without it. When we want to take social media breaks, or a “detox” literally, we have to undergo the risk of missing out on so much important stuff. We’re not shown events, we’re not informed of social outings that are often planned in group chats (for those who don’t use WhatsApp), and we’re not up to date with what’s topical or “trending” which leads to feeling left out in conversations with friends, colleagues, family members etcetera. We are completely dependent on these platforms to exist “fully.”

Adele highlights this dependence. “I think this is something we most tangibly relate to; how dependent we are in terms of communication on these platforms. It's in every area of our lives that we're like, Oh, wait! Hang on a second, how would I get through Uni if I didn't have Instagram to be part of all these groups and societies? How would I get through higher education if I didn't have really good internet access and a great laptop to do all of my work? It's just endless.”

While it’s extremely clear that social media is not going anywhere, we can strive to work on regulating our exposure to content overload. Adele talks about the app Opal. “Regulating my screen time by using Opal meant that I could have a much more critical reflection of my relationship with social media and digital technology that I wouldn't have had access to before.” When installed on your phone, Opal guides you through reducing your time spent on specific apps while providing you with insights on how much excess was used on particular social media.

The Opal website highlights: “5 to 6 hours. That’s the average time you’ll spend on your phone today – often without realising it. It’s time to fight back.” Additionally, if you click into a certain app that you placed an Opal time limit barrier on, a message box pops up on your screen urging you to “Work on success, not Instagram” (Instagram as an example). The app’s main goal is to help people gain focus on what truly matters in their lives.

Adele says her debut book Logging Off would not exist without the regulation Opal gave her. “I was juggling so much then that I knew the only way I was going to meet this deadline of 80,000 words in 8 months was if I cut something major out, and at the time I was using social media a lot because of how normalised it was in my life.”

“But also - because I hadn't announced my book deal yet, I kept thinking, shit, I need to be getting way more followers so that people are going to buy and read my book. I was like right, let me just carry on posting 5 times weekly on TikTok so I can be exposed to new audiences and readers. Actually, in the book, I write about how much of a burden this is on creative workers. The fact that we have to be so chronically online with our fingers crossed that it might all pay off. The amount of hours I've spent creating content on social media and never knowing where it will go is exhausting.”

for years we've been sold this dream, this lie by tech companies, that everything they release is inherently going to be good for society. It's going to progress our lives. It's going to empower us. But we know now that this is not true.

Adele continues, “Whether you're a writer, an artist, a musician, you have to do so much relentless free promotion on these platforms because we have generated a sort of creative economy now that is so dependent on social media. And again, that goes back to Big Tech, the main argument of my book. They have created these dependencies in every industry.” Essentially, whether or not you want to be even semi-freed from social media, you end up tied to it if you want to succeed professionally.

Adele stresses how paramount it is that we collectively engage with the fight back today. With Trump back in the White House and his liege of Big Tech billionaires who have been given free reign over American politics and democracy, we must prepare for unprecedented times. Adele asserts that we need to challenge the fabricated notion that “regulation is inherently a barrier to progress.”

She stresses that “for years we've been sold this dream, this lie by tech companies, that everything they release is inherently going to be good for society. It's going to progress our lives. It's going to empower us. But we know now that this is not true.”

She also highlights how essential it is to reach out to government officials. “Your MP is more powerful than you think. A lot of MPs that I’ve spoken to through campaigning and interviewing for my book are totally in the same boat as most regular people in terms of their worries and anxieties towards pervasive technology. But they are being pressured by tech lobbyists, and if we’re not counter-pressuring, as in us the general public, then MPs are going to fold and cave and give way to those tech-centric voices.”

The pace at which generative AI has infiltrated the digital sphere has been so fast that no one had a moment to address it before it was suddenly everywhere. Adele says “If we just look at the scale of environmental harm that AI and ChatGPT and all those adjacent tools are unleashing – if we just pause and think ‘hang on, have any of us been consulted about if this is the world we want?’ Because I definitely was not. I never asked for this. No one I know asked for any of these ‘tools’.”

She continues, “This space race for AI dominance is so clearly a huge money grab. AI is being sold as the solution to our problems; problems in every area of our lives. There’s this buzzword energy attached to ‘AI’ that we have somehow managed to equate with being good. I’m hoping that my book Logging Off will demonstrate through the harms I’ve documented and the people who have been negatively affected that I’ve interviewed, that it will show how this is all a façade, a marketing ploy, and we need to get really real with calling out and recognising what the truth should be.”

For every chapter in my book, I try to capture personal experience and expert knowledge and infuse them both to offer a substantial understanding of precisely what the problem is, and what are the practical solutions that we can employ, because there are solutions for those willing to engage.

She continues, “The thing is, Big Tech are brilliant at marketing because they have so much money and power. They can create effectively striking campaigns and adverts that instill a sense of manufactured trust in us.” 

Adele tells us of a chapter in her book that focuses on worker’s rights, “Algorithms are now becoming the new managers, AI and algorithmic management are negatively shaping worker’s rights and eroding them.” She continues, “For every chapter in my book, I try to capture personal experience and expert knowledge and infuse them both to offer a substantial understanding of precisely what the problem is, and what are the practical solutions that we can employ, because there are solutions for those willing to engage.”

But what Adele really wants to stress is how Logging Off is not intended to scaremonger, the last thing she wants to induce is crises-related apathy, but rather enthusiasm for action. She says “I didn’t want Logging Off to be a trauma dump of all the bad news that is going on, because we read enough bad news every single day. I want Logging Off to incite a call to action. I’m hoping that readers will come away feeling refreshed and empowered in their own lives to take individual action.” 

Adele prompts the reader to challenge how they can build up their own community with this collective aim for action. Logging Off functions like a guide on how to  “reclaim the digital world from the very minority interests that have managed to monopolise it, it's a book that takes on the Tech Bros.” She says that “if you have any grievances with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. - you'll enjoy this book.”

Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World by Adele Zeynep Walton will be published on 5th June by Trapeze, and is available to pre-order now.