Wednesday, January 22, 2020

To whose benefit is 5G?

Mass media treat the 5G roll-out as a forgone conclusion. It's taken for granted that every sentient person must be thrilled at the extra connectivity it'll bring us.

But hang on a minute. Does anybody really need more "connectivity?" Don't we have plenty already?

Perhaps even more than enough?

So why do we need more of it?


From the admittedly limited reading I've done on the matter, 5G will primarily benefit that sector of the economy that has figured out how to make your personal information into a commodity. It's called data, and apparently it's worth money!

Not to you or me, who you would have thought should be the beneficiaries of any value our data might have, but to the owners of the data infrastructure, your googlefacebookyoutube crowd.

They're the ones who want 5G because they're the folks who'll be reaping the rewards. So much more data to harvest, process, package, and sell.


And please notice that I didn't even bring up any scary stuff about brain cancer.







2 comments:

  1. "sentient"? WTF?!? C'mon, had to look this one up! But probably used it attending SFU in the '70s, spending too much time having fun, rather than attending to reality...regret it.

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  2. From what I've heard a lot of folks graduated SFU with a sentience deficit...

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