Stephen Kurczy has taught media law and ethics at The King’s College since 2018 and recently released an acclaimed non-fiction book, published Aug. 3 by Dey Street Books, titled “The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence.” It has already been named one of USA Today’s five books not to miss and a Washington Post top 10 book for August.
Kurczy spent years reporting on the town of Green Bank, West Virginia, which is a technological paradox. It’s home to the Green Bank Observatory, where astronomers “search the depths of the universe using the latest technology, while schoolchildren go without WiFi or iPads.” For the observatory’s radio telescopes to hear the faint whispers of deep space, the surrounding area must remain largely free of radio noise, which is why WiFi, smartphones, and even microwaves are banned at the observatory and discouraged in the surrounding area. Cell service is out of the question. Kurczy explores the characters and subcultures in this town. The New York Times calls the book “a reminder of the simple pleasure of reconnecting with real people in real life.”
Kurczy graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism. He has a degree in philosophy from Calvin College. He has reported from more than a dozen countries for publications ranging from The New York Times to The Christian Science Monitor. He also has functioned without a cellphone for more than a decade. MPJI executive director and JCS program chair Paul Glader asked Stephen some questions about his new book.
Q. How and why did you decide to report about Green Bank?
I threw away my first and last cellphone in 2009. Since then, my initially trivial decision to live without a phone has escalated into an obstinate refusal to tote around a piece of technological hardware that I believe infringes on personal space, invades privacy, and erodes human capacity to focus and live in the moment. Seemingly every day, an article or piece of research is published about the downside of smartphones and how they keep us obsessively (and unhealthily) connected at all times. Yet I remain one of the few people to take the hardline response of abstaining from usage.
In America today, 97 percent of people own cellphones and 85 percent own smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center. I’m an outlier. Is there any place where I still fit in? Is there a place where anyone can still eat dinner, watch a movie, or vacation uninterrupted by a cellphone? Those questions led me to do a simple online search for “places in the U.S. without cell service.” The top result was for a town called Green Bank in West Virginia, supposedly the “quietest town in America,” where cell service was outlawed and WiFi, smartphones, and other modern tech were reportedly banned. To me, it sounded like paradise. Within weeks, I was there.
Q. Who were some of the most interesting characters you reported on in this book?
The book has a diverse cast. We meet one of the world’s foremost radio astronomers, who is also one of the best banjo players in Appalachia. We speak with the woman who oversees the 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone and the man who patrols the area like a cop looking for renegade radio signals. We also interact with the other groups that have been attracted to life in a super-quiet place, including back-to-the-landers, neo-Nazis, government spies, a clown physician named Patch Adams, and a group of people who believe they’re made physically ill by cell service and WiFi.
One of my favorite characters in the book is a drug-dealing ex-convict named De Thompson, who teaches me how to forage for ramps and takes me deep into a cave that is connected to a long-unsolved murder. He is a colorful, complicated figure, which basically sums up the area. Colorful and complicated.
Q. Who are the “electrosensitives” that you report on in this book?
I spent hundreds of hours over several years speaking with the area’s so-called electrosensitives, who believe they are pained to the point of debilitation from cell service, WiFi, smartphones, and almost any other kind of modern technology. Hundreds of these “WiFi refugees” have come to Green Bank from around the world looking for relief from their pain. These people are clearly suffering, though it’s unclear exactly from what. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) is unrecognized by the American Medical Association or the World Health Organization.
I met one woman named Sue who moved to Green Bank from the New York City area—leaving behind her husband and kids—because she felt that living in the Quiet Zone was her only way to survive. Why would she and so many other people uproot their lives for something that wasn’t real? Their conviction brought me to see electrosensitivity as a kind of religion. Just as some people pray to Jesus and others to Muhammad to heal them, Sue essentially prays to the quiet. Who am I to say she’s wrong? And in any case, she’s a great asset to the Green Bank Observatory, as she truly believes in the area’s quiet mission.
Q. And you reported on the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group that was once selling $1 million annually of hate materials around the world?
As I said, the Quiet Zone is a complicated place! Along with being home to the nation’s first federal radio astronomy observatory, it’s also home to what was once the “most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America,” according to the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. The National Alliance’s founder was William Pierce, author of an infamous novel called The Turner Diaries, considered the Bible of the racist right. That book and the National Alliance have been linked to dozens of acts of racist violence over the past half-century, and it’s in part because of the evil influence that Pierce wielded from the Quiet Zone.
In essence, the neo-Nazis came to the Quiet Zone for the same reason as the astronomers, hippies, and electrosensitives: to get away from it all in one of the last great swaths of quiet in America. Pierce took refuge on a secluded mountain where he could pursue his agenda in relative peace, without being bothered by minorities, law enforcement, or civil liberties groups. He was able to thrive in the Quiet Zone in part because of the area’s “live and let live” attitude. Such a view on racism is dangerous, as I conclude in the book, as it also allows racism to fester and eventually erupt into violence. We can’t be quiet in the face of such evil.
Q. What’s the military’s connection to Green Bank?
Most reports about the Quiet Zone only mention Green Bank and its famous radio astronomy observatory. But in fact, the National Radio Quiet Zone protects both Green Bank and a town called Sugar Grove, where the U.S. military has since the 1960s operated its own collection of radio antennas used for communications and surveillance. The facility is today operated by the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence-gathering arm of the Defense Department. Using the antennas in Sugar Grove, the NSA eavesdrops on millions of private telephone calls and emails every hour. It’s a vital part of the military’s global spy operations. And it’s made possible by the Quiet Zone. Just as Green Bank requires quiet for its telescopes to hear deep space, so does Sugar Grove require quiet to listen in on the outside world’s communications.
Q. What role did religion and houses of worship play in people’s lives and in your reporting in Green Bank?
Green Bank sits inside the most sparsely populated county east of the Mississippi River, with about 8,200 residents spread over an area the size of Rhode Island. You can imagine how challenging it is to connect with people when they’re all so spread out, and when many were wary of speaking with an outsider like me. I had to find an inroads, and that turned out to be the houses of worship.
The county has about three dozen active churches, which also serve as community meeting places. I felt comfortable attending them, as my father is a minister and I went to a Christian college. This was a way I could show interest in local culture and respect for locals’ beliefs. In turn, people were more willing to speak with me, invite me for dinner, and point me in the right direction as I searched for answers to what this place was all about.
Q. Will Green Bank ever change its rules against WiFi and cell service?
Yes, but perhaps not formally. It’s already happening with WiFi. As I found over years of reporting, WiFi has become so pervasive that it’s hard to find many homes without it, which begs the question: Is something illegal if everybody does it? I compare it to speed limits. A sign may say the limit is 65 mph, but if everybody goes 75 mph then nobody will get in trouble. Same with almost everybody having WiFi in Green Bank.
Cell service exists as close as nine miles from the observatory, at a ski resort that installed a special low-power system of distributed antennas that allows skiers to stay connected. As such technology gets cheaper, it might become affordable for the area’s towns to consider such investments. Another new technology is low-range WiFi, which might not impact the telescopes. The observatory has also considered building a giant wall or berm around itself, which would essentially shield it from the community’s WiFi.
The world’s growing amount of radio noise may also force Green Bank to abandon its quiet policy. The Quiet Zone is increasingly under threat from overhead communications satellites as companies such as SpaceX and Google launch plans to establish global WiFi through thousands of low-orbiting satellites. At some point, there’ll be no option but to set up a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, a place that is truly radio silent.
Q. What kind of lessons did you find from Green Bank that most interested you and might interest readers?
The Quiet Zone has the power to challenge people to reconsider their tech habits. The absence of cell service and the sparsity of public WiFi is enough to shock outsiders into questioning their reliance on their devices. One visitor to Green Bank told me that he felt convicted to stop sleeping with his iPhone. Others said they felt like they were going through tech withdrawal in Green Bank. The area is a reminder of the virtues of a simplified life.
But I also found that the Quiet Zone is no utopia. While Green Bank initially sounded to me like a modern Walden that held lessons for the good life, I found that people there struggle with many of the same digital issues as the rest of us. They feel tethered to their smartphones, even if it’s just through WiFi. They still feel like they spend too much time in front of digital screens, even if the internet is incredibly slow. There’s no getting away from the tech revolution.
Q. You haven’t had a cell phone for some time? We always have to email you to reach you about class planning for your courses at King’s. :) Tell us why and what experience you have had being so unconnected from the smartphone era?
When King’s College contacts me, I only get that message when I’m at my laptop. It means that work is essentially sequestered on my computer—employers can’t follow me on a smartphone that I could hypothetically check during a hike, a party, a movie. It helps me keep work separate from my personal life. I think it also helps keep me sane, because I get a break from the online world.
From reading a lot of research into the negative effects of being constantly connected and tethered to social media, I’m pretty convinced that life is no worse without a smartphone and that it may well be better. Smartphones have been blamed for falling fertility rates, loss of sleep, lazy thinking, depression and suicide, not to mention a recent surge in traffic fatalities because of distracted driving.
Stephen Kurczy
At the same time, to be honest, I’m personally online a lot even without a smartphone. Like so many people during the pandemic, I’ve been stuck inside, in front of a computer, rarely away from WiFi and my laptop, which has forced me to consider setting new boundaries with tech in my life. This could be as simple an act as closing my laptop at 6 p.m. for the rest of the evening. We all have to create quiet zones within our own lives.