Ms. Edwards lives in Vienna and was an editor and trainer for intercultural writing at the United Nations from 1999 to 2017. On 6 February 2019 she wrote exclusively for Kla.tv her call for a public debate on the 5th generation of telecommunications, 5G for short, which we now present in abbreviated form. . "I’m not in the Luddite camp - rejecting all technology. On the contrary. (I was the first editor at the UN to adopt on-screen editing, 10 years ahead of its general introduction. I taught a course at the UN on electronic tools for writers. I’ve always been keen on making work more efficient). So when I heard about an informational evening on 5G, I thought I would go and find out the good news. . We were ushered into the plush offices of a major telecoms company and greeted by a large screen announcing 5G - The Future. An affable middle manager enthusiastically showed us a series of glossy videos with beautiful people giving glowing accounts of the wonders of 5G (with titles such as): Why China is so excited about 5G and Go Allwhere. (In otherwords, it’s there wherever you go) What? Huh? (And) these were all complemented by brightly coloured slide shows studded with concentric circles, arrows and bolded buzzwords. (Buzzwords like:) A Game Changer. Low-latency. Speed. Fourth Industrial Revolution. Core Cloud. [explanation box: "from any location only personally accessible memory of personal core data"]. Cool! . We were told that “smart” cities would be superseded by megacities. There would be autonomous cars, remote (controlled) surgery, robotisation of humans, hologram presenters at conferences, [explanation box: "presenter not physically present, only visible on screen"] virtual reality video gaming, close-ups of the action at stadiums. 5G would be more revolutionary than steam was, than electricity or (todays) IT. (But,)Do most people care about cutting the time for downloading a film from 6 minutes to 1 second? Would they prefer to be operated on remotely or personally? Are they keen to inhabit megacities? Do they want to be robotised? In the US people have been attacking self-driving cars. LIDAR* technology [explanation box: „a surveying method that measures distance to a target with pulsed laser light”] on self-driving cars could cause blindness. A Surrey University study implies that millions of trees would have to be cut down to ensure continuous signalling for self-driving buses, cars and trains. . The presenter was disarmingly honest when asked questions by the minority sceptics in the small audience. (Can anyone) opt-out? “No, that won’t be possible.” “What about security of data? “ Well, I doubt it.” Regulation? “Well, laws to govern this will have to be developed as we go along.” What about our freedom? “We will have to kiss it goodbye.” Health implications? “Biologists will have to decide on those.” . A breakout session revealed the divide between the techies and the sceptics. A “smart” meter programmer had never heard of dirty electricity or the home fires and deaths caused by “smart” meters in North America and reported on Youtube and elsewhere. A water expert promised better water management and frowned in irritation as the sceptics cited Gerald Pollack and his “Fourth Phase of Water”, wondering if the water would be fit to drink after exposure to electromagnetic radiation. . 5G enthusiasts shrugged off the rise in cancer rates as “inevitable”, affirming that “you can’t buck progress”. An electrical engineer reassured me that he had spent decades working with 400,000-volt electrical fields and was in fine fettle. “But what about the beam-forming, laser-like aspect of 5G?”, I asked. “And pulsations?” “Oh, you don’t understand”, he despaired. No one had heard about the 20,000 satellites due to be launched soon - to “blanket” every inch of the earth’s surface with 5G, from which there would be no escape, even in the very remotest areas. Very few people know what’s in store from 5G. But whatever the case, it looks set to produce a dystopia, i.e. an unprecedented reversal of everything normal, that oppressively reminds one of Huxley's "Brave New World", updated (though) with a large measure of sci-fi zombie apocalypse . Isn’t it time for a public debate on whether anyone actually wants a brave new 5G world? . Since September 2018 Claire Edwards, together with the mathematician Arthur Robert Firstenberg, has published the international appeal "Stop 5G on Earth and in Space" which has now been translated into 23 languages and signed by more than 50,000 people. In the credits we show the link to the appeal. . https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/the-appeal https://www.facebook.com/Stop5G/videos/1959562090810922/?v=1959562090810922
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