Ready to Burn the Gospel of Big Tech? Super Connected™ Live at Byline Festival
Tim Arnold explains why he will be performing his brilliant show that fuses film, theatre and live music to tell a story we can no longer ignore at Byline Festival on 12 July
We are pleased to announce that Tim Arnold is bringing his Super Connected™ rock opera to the Byline Festival on the Saturday evening, 12 July. Here he sets out what to expect.
When Carole Cadwalladr exposed Cambridge Analytica in 2018, and Chris Wylie showed how data firms used algorithms to whisper something different in everyone’s individual feed to influence outcomes, I realised something.
The songs I wrote for my album Super Connected™ were already responding to that same manipulation — not in the language of journalism, but through story and song.
That’s why the Byline Festival feels like the natural home for me. Super Connected™ fuses film, theatre and live music to tell a story we can no longer ignore — about the cost of attention, the breakdown of communication, and the invisible algorithms shaping our lives. It belongs in spaces that still dare to ask the difficult questions.
When I began writing the lyrics for the album, it almost felt blasphemous — like I was challenging something sacred. All the so-called kings and queens of the future, (as I sing in ‘Where Am I In All of This?’ ) were becoming the hollow idols of a generation raised on disruption instead of connection — no one seemed to be questioning it, and in the UK, the few who were questioning it were often writing for Byline Times. I could not have guessed how many fellow heretics would eventually rise — now mobilising for a book burning of the gospel of Big Tech.
Super Connected™ is a retro-futurist concept album wired for the now — a sonic rebellion against Big Tech’s dopamine traps. It dives headfirst into the algorithmic dark arts that hijack attention and erode mental health by design. At its core is the slow rot of social media and the ‘enshittification’ of music itself — as tech giants devalue sound, strip meaning, and sell back silence as content.
When I wrote it, I was ringing the alarm. Now the building's on fire.
I thought: if we binge screens, could we use one to binge a whole album together? So I built a film drama out of the album — a myth for the algorithmic age.
Then the world caught up to the warning: everyone started to see what I’d written — kids locked in, minds hijacked, dopamine sold by the scroll. Super Connected™ began with the true story of one screen-addicted teenager. I thought it was a one-off glitch — but it was a signal. Now it’s everywhere: families breaking on one side of the screen, tech bros cashing in on the other. The crisis is the business model.
Actress and director Kate Alderton has now fused the album and film into a hyper-meta piece of in-the-room theatre that asks one urgent question: where does our attention really go when we look at our screens?
With Radiohead’s live sound producer Jim Warren mixing us live into the album’s full progressive rock production, the show feels massive — and of all the albums I’ve brought to the stage, this is the live performance I’m most proud of.
With me performing both on screen and on stage, and Kate dismantling the fourth wall with a Brechtian rupture, Super Connected™ is more than an album show with a film — it turns the audience’s own relationship with screens into part of the story. Super Connected™ steals attention back from the feed — and gives it to each other.
Now we’re on tour — and Byline Festival is the next stop.
Carole Cadwalladr’s TED Talk lit the fuse for this project — her name’s in the album sleeve notes — so this feels like a return to source. But it’s also the start of something bigger: a rebellion against a world built to distract us. This isn’t just art. It’s a call to stop scrolling, look up, reconnect with ourselves — and with each other. Remember the others, before they got othered? We ARE the others.
We just need to reunite in-world, off-screen. When we step away from digital binaries and share space — human to human — something shifts. That’s what people experience at the Super Connected™ events: a beautiful remembering of how naturally united we are, beyond the unnatural bullshit of tech-bro dreams and their mandatory disenchantment of everything that makes the world magical.
Super Connected™ is more urgent than ever. I was on this before it had a headline — before “digital detox” became a buzzword, I’d already scored the crisis. I just thought I was writing a satirical fiction. But here we are. Grateful to bring it to Byline — where truth still has a signal. Join us. Rebels and Dreamers welcome.
Book now for Super Connected™ at Byline Festival
See more tour dates and join the rebellion.
