EC Stories: My experience with WiFi by Steve Miller aka Afterlife

EC Stories: My experience with WiFi by Steve Miller aka Afterlife

As an artist that has spent a great deal of my life travelling to work and perform it’s essential to me to stay fit and healthy in order for gigs not to be cancelled due to some minor illness such as a cold or feeling under the weather. I have met many far more well known artists and sportsmen who have all given me the same advice. “Eat plenty of fresh fruit , vegetables, fish and chicken, very little red meat and all should be organic or free range whenever possible and regular exercise”. I have followed this advice and consequently I don’t even have a GP these days as I never had to go to the doctors. I don’t do class A drugs and only drink alcohol moderately but do a drink a lot of water every day.

Over 2 years ago I visited a friend’s recording studio for an 8 hour session but within minutes of sitting in the control room I felt dizzy and a nasty headache came on very quickly. I don’t have headaches normally so was concerned. I walked outside into the car park to get some fresh air and wondered what the hell was wrong. My friend followed me out and said he had installed WiFi the previous month and joked that it could be “frying our brains like a cell phone mast”. I suggested he turn it off which he did. I still felt lousy for about 30 minutes and then returned to normal. I went back into the studio and completed the session with no problems and felt fine. I then suggested he turn the WiFi back on as we needed to send some emails and I wanted to see what happened. The same symptoms returned very quickly so I had to leave. I would like to note that I had never seen my friend so tired before but thought he had just been overworking. He continued to run WiFi for several months and simply felt exhausted and found the simplest tasks difficult to complete. He has since removed it and is a different person, his energy has returned and he’s his normal cheerful self again.

A month later I was asked by a friend to configure his brand new laptop as he’s not too computer literate. His wifi transmitter was sat on his desk. I had to go on line to download some drivers and immediately I turned the router on I couldn’t think straight at all, it felt like my brain had turned to jelly and I was incapable of even typing in the correct search words in Google. I had to immediately turn the router off. I told my friend that I would take his laptop home and finish the set up there and meanwhile it would be a good idea to get his installer guy to disable the wifi and supply him with a cable for the router.

6 months later WiFi started being installed in bars and cafes throughout my local town of Falmouth. In one particular pub one of the staff told me that since WiFi had arrived all the staff had started bitching at each other, he and his girlfriend had nearly split up but they could not understand why. Whenever my girlfriend and I went to one of our favourite restaurants we would always start arguing about the silliest trivial things yet we hardly ever argue normally. The restaurant was next door to the same pub and also had wifi in the office. We stopped going there and now only eat at one place on the beach that refuses to have wifi on the premises and we don’t argue anymore. I started to ask myself why I didn’t always get a headache but had experienced being argumentative and irritable so decided to buy a wifi detector and try an experiment. The detector has a scale of 1-5. What I found was that a wifi signal anywhere between 1-2 caused me to feel depressed and irritable but between 3-5 gave me a splitting headache which starts as a dull pressure on the top of my head quickly followed by dizziness and slight nausea. It’s a cheap detector designed to find hotspots so people can use their laptops so its not super accurate but sufficient to show approximate strength of signal and fits on a key ring.

If I walk down the main street these days I feel light-headed and can’t stop or go into any of the shops so have decided to give that part of town a wide berth. At first my friends used to rib me about being a hypochondriac and I found that depressing so occasionally I would venture into the favourite bar only to have to leave my pint on the table and make a swift exit. One day I wondered around the town scanning every bar and eventually found what I believe to be the only wifi free pub and asked the new landlord if he intended to install WiFi. He said he had been asked by other people too and wanted to know more. I told him about my experiences and we both started looking into the wealth of scientific information on the internet. The more we found the more he was convinced that it was a bad thing. Since then I have used this pub as my local and have to say whilst many other bars in the town have lost a lot of trade this pub is doing a roaring trade, a lot of my friends now use it as their local too commenting that it “feels a happy pub” and that, “the other bars in town have lost the vibe”.

During the last 18 months I have been invited to DJ at various venues in France, Spain, Russia, Italy etc and have requested that the promoter would find me a WiFi free hotel and to ensure that the venue turned any WiFi off. For either reason this has resulted in me not be able to do the gig, mostly due to the promoter being unable to find a WiFi free hotel.

Earlier this year my new album was almost complete so I started thinking about a name, a friend suggested “Electrosensitive” as he knows I’m not into the recent fad of electro house and was aware of my problems with WiFi. It felt like a good idea at the time and everyone at the label liked the name so we went with it. I was shocked when The Sun picked up on the story and even more amazed when it went global within 2 days of The Sun printing the article. I have had hundreds of emails showing support from private people that have similar problems and many scientific organisations and anti EMF campaigners have also contacted me as well as the BBC and RTL for interviews. Obviously I have been ridiculed on some website forums but what I find interesting is that not one person “having a go” at me used any logical reasoning but merely were abusive and quite angry. Last night I received an email via the contact page on my website saying he wished I would die and that this was all a publicity stunt. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?

Why bother taking the normal route of doing lots of promotional gigs which I love ( I have been a professional DJ for 10 years) when I could stay at home, lose thousands of pounds in fees and risk all my album promotion on a story in a tabloid newspaper. It took me 4 years to make this album; I think it’s the best one to date and wanted to give it my all.

I have had to turn down some amazing gigs which has been even more depressing and could not even play Glastonbury this year as Somerset council had Wifi’s the whole town. I am pleased to say that they have now turned it off after a major campaign by the town’s residents.

Strangely enough the label and I had planned a launch party in Ibiza during Radio 1 weekend with a view to me playing the sunset live on Radio 1. I was horrified to learn last week (after the article had been printed) that all UK airports are WiFi’d so I’m grounded. There’s a possibility that I could drive all the way to Valencia but would probably have to sleep in my car some of the time and catch the ferry to Ibiza. I can stay at a friend’s villa in the north that does not have wifi installed.

It’s a long haul but might be worth it.

Many thanks to Steve for sharing his story with us!

http://biodwellblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/ec-stories-my-experience-with-wifi-by-steve-miller-aka-afterlife/