On tin foil hats and surgical masks

excerpts from an anonymous conversation starter

There have been several reports in these recent times of a wave of attacks on 5g and telecom installations, taking place in the UK, in the Netherlands, and probably in other places too. The media has described them as related to the diffusion of conspiracy theories linking the covid-19 pandemic with the deployment of 5g networks. Concerted efforts were made by state, telecoms and social media corporations to remove the pages supporting the attacks and urging to stop the spread of anti-5g propaganda under the banner of fighting misinformation concerning the pandemic. It is also reasonable to think that they have stopped reporting further attacks that might happen. While we do not know the motivations of the attackers that set the radio masts on fire, what we know for sure is that the narrative aiming at depicting all forms of attack and critique on 5g as the result of crackpot conspiracy theories, has been going on from long before the advent of coronavirus.

[…] The debate around 5g has so-far successfully been polarized in a binary opposition between scientific/rational/progressive and non-scientific/irrational/conspirational, a polarization that reinforces the picture of an inevitable and objective technical progress unassailable by any resistance or concern.It is not even two poles battling, it is normality, society, economy, i.e. the unquestionable, against a dissent shaped as abnormal, crazy, bigot, emotional, superstitious, and so on. A dissent which is opposed by questioning, debunking, and psychologising its reasons - thereby marginalizing and excluding its actors - rather than by confronting its questions and intentions. The 'unreasonability' of certain claims is taken to represent the whole spectrum of 5g opposition - which comes to be framed as an uneducated and/or delusional movement. Belittling all dissent as non- political (dealt with fact-checking and ridiculization rather than political confrontation) has the effect of dissuading other political forces with a reputation from taking serious the heterogeneous and unpredictable anti-5g resistance. Meanwhile, in mainstream media, the political questions on 5g deployment are limited to the fears for chinese tampering with western infrastructures.

In face of this polarization, it is appropriate to reconsider the current centrality of the supposed health risks of electromagnetic radiation in the 5g debate. While it is an important question that should be asked and researched upon, it also stands upon an ambiguous relation to science and to technical progress. A similar discourse applies to the forefront role that has been given to people who are hyper sensible to electromagnetic radiation. Hyper-sensible people suffer from a condition of distress in relation to the density and intensity of electromagnetic fields. Framing the 5g debate solely on the health risks and on the effects on hyper-sensible folks, results in being cornered in discussing what can be scientifically demonstrated and what can be considered a reasonable trade-off in exchange for technical progress. Can scientific research demonstrate an increase in brain tumors caused by EMR, and is the incidence high enough to stop this technical advancement? Is it possible to consistently describe the distress caused by electromagnetic radiation on hyper-sensible people clinically, and is this common enough in the population to stop this technical advancement?

There is a need of critically addressing the whole complexity of this supposed technical advancement, or one will be always caught in the polarization: either one is against the 5g project as such, just opposing technological progress and is therefore technophobe-antiscientific-irrational, or one is against the 5g project because of its health effects, which insofar as they are not scientifically reckoned, makes one also an antiscientific-irrational-technophobe. Instead of struggling to answer the requests to provide sufficient justification for a possible halt to technological progress, the health arguments need to be reconnected with an articulate critique of the whole frame of technological progress. // Joint statements were made by governments, scientists, telecommunication companies, and social media sites, to clarify the fact that there was no relation whatsoever between the deployment of 5G and the spread of coronavirus. While indeed there is no hidden causal relation between the installation of 5G networks and the Covid- 19 pandemic, this doesn't mean that there is no relation at all, and it is not surprising that the attacks happened right in this period. For example, one can read some form of indirect - and much more visible -causality in the opposite direction: the current confinement at home has made everybody even more dependable on communication infrastructures, with many practices moving online (one above all, work). Companies have released excited statements on the perspectives for an acceleration on 5G developmentin the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. “The climate is probably right to get more people online, do a 5G connection. ... We’re going to need faster connectivity to be able to perform the fundamental tasks that need to be done to keep people safe, informed and healthy.” […]

Other relations between 5G and the current situation can be established, as these are times of suspension of the routines of everyday life which reveal a set of ongoing changes to how life is understood and managed, and accelerate some of those changes. In this period of forced confinement and general uncertainty, we also experienced the diffusion of arguments for generalized phone and device tracking, a general increase of governmental control, and the extension of state and police powers beyond the usual boundaries of the law; finally a general turn to online work from home, the substitution of physical encounters with video-calls of various type, a further push towards contactless payment and a generalized explosion of  ́new ́ digital solutions and opportunities . All these are things that the development of 5g will directly or indirectly facilitate and intensify. As the digital and networked regime presents itself more than ever as the safe and contactless cure to modern society problems, it is easy to see how 5g starts appearing essential besides inevitable.

These relations have of course not be pointed out by the voices that repeatedly interpreted the recent attacks as a coronavirus side-effect due to panic and conspiracy. In the general virus emergency rhetoric, 5g development itself has becomes a victim of the corona crisis: not just slowed down in development by the general crisis, but also victim of sabotage and harassment by a bunch of crazy individuals. Rather than an irrational response to the diffused societal fear, the current wave of attacks can be seen as a response to such de-politicization of the debate on 5g deployment. If it was already considered lunatic and unreasonable to oppose such technological progress before the pandemic, now that public and private governmental forces are unitedly fighting the invisible enemy, it is a crime that only ill-minded people would engage with.

Bringing attention to an urgent societal question / in perhaps the only possible way in this moment (i.e. arson) - means distracting from the single focus/concern / hence acting against the interest of all. Governments and corporations express their surprise and despise for the turn to direct action of a movement previously considered ill-conceived but innocuous, we should rather see this as an understandable and perhaps necessary transformation. […] Different texts have been written, on how this period offers the occasion to respond some questions on the form of life we want to live, on how we want to act about it. This takes different forms according to the situated contexts, but it is not the exclusive privilege of the ones that enjoy a domestic and financial situation that allows a 'pause of reflection'. It is a political urgency to articulate responses collectively, developing critical discourses that explore these questions in their complexity, keeping virality from taking precedence over all political discourse, and strengthening solidarity networks notwithstanding the currently enforced distances. While we don't know the life situations and motivations of the individuals responsible for the acts of sabotage, in this situation they chose to attack the technical infrastructures that they deem responsible for intensifying certain life-changes for them and others. It is urgent to develop a deeper analysis and critique on what do those changes consists of, and on how 5g networks constitutes the infrastructural element underlying a series of proposed re-organizations of the city, work, health, in short of society and life as such.