Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Attack of the 5G woman

To 5G or not 5G? There is the question.

The other day I asked people on my Facebook what they thought about 5G. It almost melted down. The comments were long and detailed, and the more I read, the more confused I became. After an hour I started fashioning a helmet from foil. After two hours I started wearing it. Whereas 5G offers insanely fast download speeds of one gigabyte per second I was lucky to digest a paragraph in a minute. Human brains just can’t compete. I did establish though that there isn’t any middle ground when it comes to the G war; there are clearly two camps. Those who see 5G as relatively harmless, and those who see it as the end of life as we know it. G-Stinction.

Ironically, all the chatter about 5G is currently being disseminated on 4G. If it were a little faster we might be able to do something about it! Like in the vax debate, it seems that both sides have team scientists. It’s often difficult to establish the efficacy and identity of scientists when researching on the internet. It seems scientists are sluts for funding and they will say anything.

In the ‘5G is dangerous’ corner we have Dr Joel Moskowitz, a public health professor at the University of California who says the higher-frequency millimetre waves used in 5G could cause major skin, eye, and nervous system problems. One person told me that her daughter went to Glastonbury this year where 5G was in use and everyone was getting nose bleeds. This could have been incurred from the digital trauma of vigorous unlubricated picking, or perhaps that is an unfortunate human side effect of superfast internet. We might all have to get used to carrying tissues. You’re downloading so fast, you’re literally streaming. Blood.

Are LED street lamps in northern England causing insomnia, nosebleeds, and still births? The transmitters are outside people’s bedroom windows.

Some researchers believe EMF (electromagnetic frequency) radiation can cause harm by disrupting the body’s nitrogen monoxide system that keeps cells health and controls gene expression.

Back in 2011 the World Health Organisation warned that EMF radiation was possibly carcinogenic to humans. But not everyone agrees. In the ‘5G is good’ corner we have the beloved Dr Karl, who tells us that rats and mice exposed to mobile-phone radiation actually increased their life expectancy. He says that the high-frequency radiation is just a type of electromagnetic wave that’s unable to disrupt or damage atoms. Well if Dr Karl says it’s okay? He’s on the radio so he must be right. We can trust the media… right?

What everyone agrees on is that we need more towers as 5G can’t travel as far as 4G wavelengths and they struggle to move through objects. That means we will need a mini cell tower every 2–8 houses because they transmit data on an entirely different part of the radio spectrum. Basically it will be a small box positioned on lightpoles, tops of buildings, or street lights.

No-one has brought up a key argument against 5G – it sounds really ugly. So if public health isn’t a concern, maybe public art should be. Are we really going to let Telstra whack up an ugly little box in everyone’s line of sight? (If you aren’t in line of sight with your device, it doesn’t work). I guess you’ll know when you’re in line of sight because your nose will start bleeding or your baby will die. But on the upside your virtual reality porn goggles will be firing.

I’m not completely sold on the ‘5G is benign’ belief. We’re still dealing with the effects of asbestos, so I’m not convinced corporations really do have public health at the centre of their business models. What concerns me, and is less in the conversation, is the way 5G can be weaponised. It uses nearly the same frequency as weaponised crowd-control systems… and it’s very, very, very fast. With more transmitters there’s also the issue of constant highly accurate monitoring of where you are and what you are doing. Then there’s AI, the beginning of our obsolescence, timed quite neatly with our impending loss of fertility and human extinction. If anything, 5G might just hurry it up.

Do we really need to download movies faster than we can now? Are our lives being ruined by buffering? Dr Karl tells us that the only side effect we need to worry about is a bit of heating. I imagine 5G being transmitted in hot spaces through my body. I fall asleep with my headphones on, only to have my metadata transform me into megafauna. I awake, my feet have pushed through the wall, my arms draped out the window. I wrap my long fingers around a 5G box just in sight and I rip it off. I am angry. I’m tipping over self-driving automated vehicles, crushing eBay delivery drones with my teeth. My nose is bleeding, my fertility is ruined, I can’t sleep, and even though I can download a movie in a heartbeat, there’s nothing worth watching.

It’s the attack of the 5G woman… Why do corporations continue to have more rights than community? Where may I ask is the public consultation?