Jack White is well known for banning cellphones at his concerts in search of a more “human experience,” but he’s never explained his aversion to them in as much depth as he just did in an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.

For one thing, he revealed that he’s never owned a cellphone and that he finds it “pretty funny to walk down the street and see everyone [looking at theirs].” He wondered if “maybe this is the way everything is going to be from now on…Maybe it’ll turn to implants. Probably it’ll turn into a microchip behind our eyeball or whatever.”

He explained that when he banned phones from his shows he “thought it was a big art project at first, to see if people would think it was funny or cool or just a new experience.” He wondered if people would be “mad enough to demand their money back.”

Now, more than a year since he instituted it, to his shock and surprise he feels like “people love it. It brings up these real big questions like, ‘So you need someone to tell you that you can’t use it to actually not use it?’” That led him to compare cellphone users to alcoholics, saying “If you can’t choose to stop drinking for a day, it’s got that much of a hold on you, that’s a sad thing. If you can’t just put your phone down for an hour and experience life in a real way, that’s sad.”

Finally, he attempted to explain the phenomenon. “A good portion of it, 90 percent, is ‘Look what I’m doing that you’re not doing.’ It’s this competition, voyeurism, jealousy – those are really shallow human characteristics…It shows that if it’s not happening in the moment then it’s not worth it to them. A lot of that is really nonsense.”