Technology, conspiracies, and control

Kaitlyn Tiffany has a nice piece about “the great 5G conspiracy” in The Atlantic. I was intrigued by the link between feelings about technology and feelings of powerlessness.

Power and powerlessness

“Control” is technology’s middle name. HVAC allows us to control our personal climate, electricity lets us control light and dark. Smartphones give us new ways to shape our image and communications, but they also seem to control us in return. Advertisers and other influencers buy information about us that they use to affect our attitudes and behavior. Technologies give us control, but they are also used by other people to control us.

Wherever there’s control, fear is never far away. We crave control because we don’t like what would happen otherwise: we fear, therefore we seek to control. And when we have control, we fear losing it. 

The Atlantic argues persuasively that a lack of control is one of the drivers of 5G conspiracy theories:

In 2020, the average person doesn’t get to decide whether she wants a smartphone or an email account or a home computer: They’re the default, the instruments we all need to live a functional life. In the case of 5G, the lack of agency is even more obvious. The infrastructure is being built whether we want it or not. So at some level, the conversation becomes not about the technology itself, but about the fact that ordinary people don’t feel as though they had any personal say. And sometimes, in fumbling for lost agency, people grab on to conspiracy theories.

Now nearly every public urban place has Wi-Fi, and we will soon have small cell towers every few blocks. Whether or not you believe this will give you brain cancer, you didn’t have a chance to opt out. Now nearly every public urban place has Wi-Fi, and we will soon have small cell towers every few blocks. Whether or not you believe this will give you brain cancer, you didn’t have a chance to opt out.

EMF exposure, the author argues, is a convenient way to explain a host of modern life’s problems:

[The claimed great capitalist conspiracy is] too big to be true. The science is confusing, but the World Health Organization, noting decades of research, has found no significant health risks from low-level electromagnetic fields. Yet amid a broader tech backlash—against screens, against social media, against power consolidating in a handful of companies, against a technology industry that rolls out new products and protocols faster than we can keep up or argue with, against the general fatigue and malaise associated with a life spent typing and scrolling—it’s just big enough to seem, to many, like the obvious explanation for so much being wrong.

I suspect the profound lack of agency EMF believers feel is compensated for by over-attributing agency to both RF radiation and the institutions associated with it. 

The underlying assumption seems to be of a zero-sum, see-saw world: if I’m completely powerless, someone else must have all the power. We see the same zero sum in the good guy/bad guy dichotomy that animates so many conspiracy theories, politics in general, and mythic narratives.

Countervailing power: amulets

Amulets are an ancient, and still prevalent, technology for controlling, or at least warding off, dangerous forces. Traditionally, amulets are imbued with the power of good divinities to combat the bad; in the Catholic tradition, for example, crucifixes and holy water to ward off evil. Not surprisingly, some people worried about EMF use amulets to address the problem.

Aulterra EMF pendant

Since modern dangers comes from technology not gods, modern charms invoke technology. (Fight like with like: mythos with mythos, and logos with logos.) The Atlantic describes shungite add-ons that can “harmonize those [bad] waves so that you have more of a harmonious energy coming at you.” There’s a huge industry in anti-radiation stickers, such as the Aulterra Neutralizer that can “retune the EMF frequencies of cell phones and other electronic devices into coherent energy” and the Quantum Shield radiation protection stickers that “are made of magnetic negative ions [that] neutralize positive ions (EMF/EMR) when positive ions are present; effectively negating and neutralizing EMF and EMR.” 

Quantum Shield Sticker

Beyond zero sum

What’s largely missing from the article, and rarely part of conspiracy beliefs, is any sense of ambivalence: the give-and-take, the I-both-love-it-and-hate-it dynamic that I see in both tricksters and technology. The article’s quote of the non-profit leader Patti Wood speaking to the activist group NYC 5G Wake-Up Call implies it, though: 

“You have no rights. These are involuntary exposures,” she tells the 30 or so attendees. “But we need it in order to use our fun little toys,” she shoots at the crowd, many of whom have been on their phone the whole time she’s been talking.

We love our smartphones, and dread the downsides. We fear technology, but can’t give it up. We square the circle by taking action and spending money: $658 on radiation-shielding paint (as described in the New Republic article), $486 on an energy pendant, or $24.99 on a phone sticker.