BACKHAUL

As Buaphan stood there, pan in hand, staring at the strange trail of lights crossing the pre-dawn sky, the ‘pandemic’ was already on the horizon, a couple of thousand kilometres to the north in Wuhan, China. Two and a half months later, the lockdowns would come down like a great suffocating blanket across the planet, as weak, incompetent or complicit politicians shut down their economies under pressure from the WHO and the WEF. All ‘non-essential’ human activity — work, business, education, health-care, travel, worship, leisure, performance, sport, social interaction, political activity, protest — was suppressed. Small towns, here and there, turned into reverse zoos as animals — deer, wild pigs, monkeys, depending on the location — wandered the deserted streets while humans cowered in their homes.

Interestingly, however, the co-ordinated roll-out of fifth-generation internet infrastructure across every country, rich or poor, only quickened pace. The towers continued to go up. There were reports that schools, hospitals and public buildings standing empty were being retro-fitted with the phased-array transmitters of the new system, the deployment of which was clearly and categorically considered essential by someone.

It is usually assumed that the 5G and Starlink systems will compete with each other in the lucrative market of internet provision, but that is not necessarily the case. The headlong  deployment of both systems might suggest, to some, a race to get ahead of the competition, but it is just as likely that the two infrastructures, terrestrial and celestial, will be complementary, with the satellites providing a ‘backhaul’ network for the towers.

There has been much speculation about the potential applications of 5G beyond internet provision — questions which Starlink seems to have been spared. These questions, derided and suppressed as ‘conspiracy theories’ by mainstream and social media companies, are perfectly justified, since there has been no safety testing of 5G, which can be used as a weapon system — as Frank Clegg, former President of Microsoft Canada, has revealed it was designed to be: an ‘active denial’ crowd control technology. 

In any case, in the twenty-first century, is there any longer a functional distinction between communications and surveillance systems? 

‘Connectivity’ works both ways. 

Marshal McLuhan, with inexplicable prescience, pointed this out more than half a century ago.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. 

(The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962)

As we access the internet, the internet accesses us. 

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