It's hard out there for a Luddite. Even in the most serene natural settings, today's cell-signal-bathed landscapes often include some scumbag bloviating into an iPhone earbud mic about the price of bitcoin. OK, yes, that was me.
Artist and coder Allison Burtch has created a new device to save us from our cellphones and ourselves. It comes in the form of a 10-inch birch log that jams cellular radio signals, and it's called the Log Jammer. Packed with about $200 of hardware including a power source, a circuit board of her own design, voltage control components, an amplifier, and an antenna, it can produce radio noise at the 1950 megahertz frequency commonly used by cellphones. It's powerful enough to block all cellphone voice communications in a 20-foot bubble, and its log-like exterior is designed to unobtrusively create that radio-jamming zone in the great outdoors.
"If completely opting out of society isn’t a viable option to give people, then I want to create technology that protects people from exploitative technology," says Burtch, who presented her work at the Open Source Hardware conference late last month. "There's this aspect of us needing a safe space from that constant need to express, to share, to tweet."
The Log Jammer is more of an artistic statement than a true shelter from the tweetstorm. Because of its limited frequency range, it doesn't block cellular data---only voice. It's also illegal in the United States, because the Federal Communications Commission prohibits any sort of cell phone jamming. To avoid criminal penalties, Burtch says she only tested her log's jamming within tiny ranges in a lab, not the full 20 feet theoretically enabled by its antenna.
>"I want to create technology that protects people from exploitative technology."
But Burtch has nonetheless published the schematics for her jammer on Github so that others can recreate it. And she says it would be possible to adapt it to block other sorts of communications, too. She points to an older project by Adafruit Industries creator Limor Fried to build a jammer that could be tuned to block GPS, Bluetooth, or Wifi.
Burtch sees her creation as the inverse of the increasingly common sight of cellular towers disguised as trees. Instead of hiding technology in nature to let people remain connected everywhere, the Log Jammer blends into a natural setting to cut off that constant remote communication---to force people to experience the place they're in. Burtch paraphrases French philosopher Gilles Deleuz: "The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves," she says. "It's creating a needed gap of solitude in which they might find something to say."
