5G hype seriously misplaced
Manu Caddie was right: 5G does belong in the Entertainment section. The childish ravings of its promoters breathlessly tempt us with faster movies and faster games. They are loaded with emotional language, extolling such dubious virtues as 'smart' homes, 'snappier' machine control, robots, drones, self-driving cars (which we are all supposed to be longing for), high-definition movies, fewer manual jobs (so our bodies can keep deteriorating and we have to keep taking expensive cars to expensive gymnasiums and sports centres); in short, a whole new world of wonders.
Well, if it did happen it would not be a whole world, just a small privileged one.
It's hard to decide how unaware of the world the developers of such technologies are, myopic geniuses though they might be. Their devotion to speed, fetish for hoarding information, and pursuit of growth and an undefined 'efficiency' is little short of pathetic.
In a world that desperately needs to shrink its destructive activities and abolish many of its industries, these preoccupations are seriously misplaced.
The tech industry alone is responsible for 4 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions, and threatening to increase. Its escalation and ongoing planned obsolescence combine to undermine its potential for shrinking the carbon footprint and making life more relaxed or creative.
Clearly the technology can have good uses, but they are tiny in comparison, and hardly appear in the publicity, which appeals to a (real or unreal) gullible, bored, and consuming public disengaged from real forms of both activity and activism.
To me the above arguments overwhelm the arguments about radiation danger, and should make it unnecessary, as the toys themselves are unnecessary, when there are big problems to solve, and solutions — shrinking and sharing instead of expanding and competing — to hand.
However, to dismiss its opponents as conspiracy theorists, and their evidence as merely anecdotal, as I did until reading more, is debating of the laziest kind.
Gavin Maclean
Great to see a Green Party member take this enlightened approach. Or is he a former Green Party member? Takes me back to the days when I took my copy of UN agenda 21 down to the Greens and was refused speaking time. The Greens regarded me as a conspiracy theorist and refused to read more. Debating of the laziest kind LOL.
Unfortunately there seems little to be gained, and a lot of time wasted, from engaging with those who think they know better than the scientists at the World Health Organisation’s EMF Group and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, the International Electrotechnical Commission, the EU Scientific Committee on Health, Environment and Emerging Risk, the NZ Ministry of Health and most recently, the NZ Prime Minister’s chief science adviser.
Of course the conspiracy theory is that these organisations are in fact dominated by a small group of self-referencing scientists and studies that have recommended too permissive limits based on obsolete evidence and we should instead take a precautionary approach.
I’m all for a precautionary approach in principle, the trouble is the evidence for the safety of current limits seems like those advising regulators have in fact taken a precautionary approach and not the myopic risks 5G sceptics continue to claim.
Yes, let’s not ignore the science.
“Dr Cherry was invited by the Ministry of Health/ Ministry for the Environment of New Zealand to carry out a peer-review of the proposal to adopt the ICNIRP guidelines for cell sites in New Zealand, in November 1999. The ICNIRP guidelines were covered by a published assessment in 1998. This review shows that the assessment had ignored all published studies showing chromosome damage. It was highly selective, biased and very dismissive of the genotoxic evidence and the epidemiological evidence of cancer effects and reproductive effects. The assessment gives the strong impression of being predetermined in the belief that the only effects were from high exposures that cause electric shocks and acute exposures that cause tissue heating. For, example, they cite two studies saying that they do not show any significant increased effects of Brain/CNS cancer from microwave exposures when the actual published papers, Grayson (1996) and Beall et al. (1996), both do show significant increases of Brain/CNS cancer.”
https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/handle/10182/3933?fbclid=IwAR2Yat7y9iSDUBihJl7WMiefpfH6_DgHrIlMq5xXNgBdi9G2sR3diBDeCRc
Well written Gavin Maclean. I totally agree that the majority of us don’t need or want what they are pushing. The future picture of the way the telcos say our lives will be . . . frightens me. Unfortunately the fact that we don’t want what they are developing is not a strong enough reason to stop it. There’s no way we can win that argument. Giving you something you don’t want is not a crime but it is a criminal offence to expose people to scientifically-proven harmful radiation.
Well said, Gavin. The way the telcos are promoting their new toys is enough to arouse suspicions. There is so much scientific evidence throwing doubts on 5G that we should be warned. So far Social Credit has decided to observe the precautionary principle, opposing 5G until no harm can be proven. Besides – we must avoid the extra pollution from the manufacture of new cell phones and the disposal problems of the old ones.
– Heather Marion Smith – Wanganui