Prelude
Another part of what is coming, stated plainly.
The sixth generation of mobile networks — 6G, which will replace today’s standing cell towers — is now being specified. And part of 6G’s expanding specifications is to sense.
Not simply to carry signal. To sense.
At the frequencies 6G will use, in the millimeter-wave bands and at the top of them what are called the sub-terahertz bands, radio does not simply travel from one point to another and deliver a message. It strikes whatever is in the room. It comes back changed. So that what comes back can be read.
What it will be able to read breaks down, according to the researchers working on the privacy problem, into three levels.¹
First, where a body is. Where it goes, what it passes, and — because reflection maps surfaces — the floor plan of the house it is standing inside.
Second, what the body is doing. Posture. Gait. The movement of limbs. Whether a person is sitting, standing, or lying down. Whether they are still. What they are touching.
And then the third level, something you may want to stop and sit with for a moment.
Breathing frequency. Heart rate.
There is no camera involved in this. No microphone. No application to deny permission to, no setting to switch off, and no agreement to decline.
And no phone is required, which is the part almost no one has really absorbed yet. The paper states it without decoration: it will be difficult for people to avoid being sensed, because mere presence in an area with coverage can subject them to sensing activity.²
Read that again. Not your phone. You. Standing there.
And it will also know “which” body you are.
I had assumed that part was still speculative until I went looking. It is not. Gait is a biometric — no two people walk quite alike, and the difference is legible at these radio frequencies. A study published this past January, using ordinary commercial mmWave Wi-Fi equipment, identified twenty individuals by their walk with better than ninety percent accuracy. Wi-Fi. The same class of thing already sitting on a shelf in a great many houses.³
Cardiac motion is a stronger one still: not the rate, but the geometry of one particular heart and the way it squeezes and swells, which the literature describes as unique, stable, and difficult to counterfeit — performing at the level of an electrocardiogram while requiring no contact whatsoever, already demonstrated at sixty gigahertz.⁴ The privacy analysis now attached to the standards work going on is naming both: person identification at the second level, biometric identification at the third, and identifiability and linkability — being singled out, and being joined to every previous time you were seen — as the risks.⁵
Face, fingerprint, and iris are surfaces. Something has to be aimed at them, close, and usually you have to hold still.
These are not surfaces. These are motions, activities, shapes, dimensions, depths.
Let’s be clear. This is not a forecast. Nor is it a warning about something that might happen if we are not careful. The actual engineering, specifications and standards for all of this are being done right now.
The specifications are being written by a body called 3GPP — the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, a name the body has carried since 1998 and never bothered to update, through the fourth generation and the fifth, and now the sixth. It is not a government agency. It is not a regulator. It is an industry consortium: seven regional standards organizations and the hundreds of companies that belong to them. Its documents are what determine how every cellular network on Earth operates.
3GPP has published a feasibility study cataloguing thirty-two use cases for network sensing.⁶ The current round of 6G studies has accepted twenty-three more.⁷ ETSI, the European standards institute, one of the seven, convened an entire specification group for it, and published a technical report on its security and privacy implications in February of this year.⁸ The channel models are being written. What remains are the specifications.
The requirements freeze in March of 2027. The architecture freezes in June of 2028. Deployment begins in the early 2030s.⁹
Six months to the requirements. Twenty-one months to the architecture.
That is the news. Everything else I have to say here is about what it means.
The Last Commons
In 1926 a one-month-old infant was carried out of Vienna, put on a train and then on a ship, and brought to the island of Brač off the Dalmatian coast, because his grandfather wished to bless him. On the same boat, landed on the same day, came the first loudspeaker anyone on that island had ever seen.
Fifty-five years later, in Tokyo, that child described what the machine had done. Up to that day, he said, all men and women there had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change.
His grandfather’s family had lived in the same house for five hundred years. In that time the doges of Venice had come and gone, and the sultans of Istanbul, and the corsairs of Almissa, and the emperors of Austria, and the kings of Yugoslavia. All those changes of uniform and language among the governors had altered daily life very little.
The loudspeaker altered it in an afternoon.
That equality of voices had never been written down anywhere, because nobody had imagined it was the kind of thing that could be taken. The child was Ivan Illich, and he named what had been taken exactly. The same enclosure that fencing had done to open pasture had now been done to speech. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, he wrote, you now are silenced.¹⁰
Silence was a commons. Shared. It stopped being one in a single afternoon.
I have written before about what came after. The presses. The broadcast towers. The feeds curated separately for each person, and yet invisible to anyone standing inside one. And most recently the arrival of something that finishes a person’s sentence for them, before that person has finished deciding what they think, and yet still signs that person’s name to the result. And alongside it, the summary. Arriving now at the top of the search, inside the mail application, on the page of the document, in most cases with no setting anywhere to turn it off. Nobody asked for it and nobody agreed to it. It is simply what the software does now, and what it does is read the thing so that you do not have to. When people are handed the synthesis instead of the sources they come away knowing less — measurably less, in trials where the information itself was held identical — and writing more like one another afterward.¹¹ Each of these encloses something nobody had thought to defend, because nobody had ever thought it could be owned.
None of this is new in kind of course. But it IS new in reach — and it is increasingly becoming newer in reach in more ways and means than any of us can follow.
And yet, there is something even newer in this next one, what is being called 6G, something that is genuinely different.
Every enclosure until now has required our participation. The loudspeaker needed us to listen. The presses needed us to read. The feed needed us to scroll. Even the thing that finishes your sentences needs us to begin one — it cannot smooth a thought we never started or tried to share. In every case there was a transaction, and because there was a transaction there were parties to it, and because there were parties to it there was, at least in principle, the possibility of refusal.
This that is coming, and it is definitely coming, needs nothing from us at all. It does not read us as a party to a transaction. It reads us as part of the terrain.
After speech, after attention, and after thought itself, one commons remains — and most of us never realized until now that it was a commons at all. The plain simple fact of being somewhere apart, alone, unviewed. As a body in a room, for instance. Breath coming in and going out. Our heart keeping its own time, unwitnessed and uncounted.
The loudspeaker enclosed what we could hear and say to each other. The algorithmic feed encloses what we can see. AI, as I wrote about recently, is continuing to enclose what we are on the verge of thinking.
This next one, 6G, will enclose that we are here, or not, or where, how we are moving, what and who we are in contact with — and that it is specifically us, as opposed to someone else, who is here.
Which brings me to freedom, and to something about freedom I did not see until all this caught my attention.
I have been thinking and writing about freedom for a long time. A freedom that is granted — a right, written down, enforced by somebody — is only ever a permission, and permissions are for revoking. That is what they are for. And underneath all of it there is a freedom that was never a place to begin with, that is not something the body has but something we are, and that cannot be surveyed, or mapped, or taken, even when everything the body can lose is taken. I will say no more about that one here. It has the last word.
What I did not see is that there is a third freedom, sitting between those two, and that it is the one every other granted freedom actually runs on. Underneath each free moment anyone ever experiences there is a plainer and more physical fact: a somewhere we can be that the power in question can not see, can not reach, can not identify.
There is a piece of medieval law that says this better than I can. Stadtluft macht frei nach Jahr und Tag — city air makes you free after a year and a day. From the eleventh century onward, a serf who left the manor and reached a town and lived in it for a year and a day could no longer be reclaimed. Not pardoned. Not granted anything. Simply no longer recoverable. That freedom was not a document. It was the practical fact of having passed beyond the reach of identification — and it would have ended the moment that reach was restored. In 1231 the princes of the Holy Roman Empire moved against it, barring the empire’s cities from sheltering serfs who had fled the princes and their vassals. Which tells you they knew exactly what that freedom was.
Every escape in history has that same shape. The forest, the swamp, the mountain, the wilderness. The maroon settlements in the hills. The house with a lamp in the window. The manuscript passed hand to hand and written into no register anywhere. In each case the freedom arrived first as a physical condition and only afterward, if ever, as a “right.” The right was simply a record of a fact already held.
And notice how enclosure has always worked, in every instance in the lineages being pointed to in this article. It begins with legibility. You cannot fence what you have not surveyed. Before common land could be taken it had to be measured, mapped, and then entered into a ledger. Before people could be taxed and conscripted into armies, they had to be counted, named, numbered, and given an address. The survey always precedes the fence. Always. A map is not a description of the enclosure. It is the very first act of it.
The sensing that is coming IS the survey.
Nothing further has to be done with it for that to be true. Nobody has to be arrested or fined or handed a bill. The act itself — the rendering of a body, its location, its behavior, its identity into something recorded and addressable — is the first operation through which everything in the history of enclosure has been enclosed. It is the very same opening move. The only difference is that the terrain being surveyed this time is us. All of us.
And it takes with it the kind of freedom that has been doing the actual work all along — not the freedom that is written down and granted, but the older one underneath it. The freedom of not being findable.
We will not necessarily be prevented from going anywhere. That is not what changes. What changes is that going will stop accomplishing anything. There will be no year and a day. No town whose air makes anyone free, because the town will know us on arrival, by our walk and by the motion of our hearts, and will have known us before we even reached the gate.
The word for what we lose here is not privacy. Privacy is a legal category, and legal categories are downstream of everything that matters. The word is escape, and what happens to it is not that it becomes illegal.
It becomes unavailable, no longer possible.
Perception Without a Perceiver
Here is where this stops being just a technology story.
Start with something anyone can check without instruments, right now, in the middle of reading this. Say I am. Know it to be true without going away into thought or image or memory, in order to verify it. Notice that no “proof” arrived with this knowing, and none was needed. What knows this is not a conclusion in a thought process you reached. Seeing sees its own seeing. Knowing knows, and knows that it knows without need of any other, aka any proof.
This knowing is not a belief. It does not require anyone else’s agreement, and it survives every argument made against it, simply because every argument made against it is being made by it.
Now hold that next to an account of ourselves we have all been handed, by five thousand years of extreme separation beliefs and ideologies that some of us collectively call patriarchy.
The account goes like this. First there was matter. Then life. From the beginnings of life and for most of evolutionary history instinct ruled. Later on “thinking” arrived as an adjunct to instinct, in order to improve the odds of survival. Later still, by a mechanism nobody has ever been able to describe, consciousness is said to have emerged out of thinking.
That story has a huge hole in it, and the hole is right at the very beginning.
Instinct cannot be prior to consciousness. Instinct is a reaction, and a reaction requires something to react to. A hand pulls back because heat was registered. A creature bolts because a shadow was perceived. Before any reaction there is that registering. Which is perception.
And so it is right here, in this dimensionless moment of registering, that this ancient and very mistaken account quietly, without any awareness of doing it, helps itself to the very thing it claims comes later.
Because registering is not a mechanical event. For comparison, a simple thermostat mechanically changes state at sixty-eight degrees and nothing anywhere notices anything. Metal simply moves. That is the whole of what happens, start to finish, in a thermostat. But for a shadow to appear as a shadow to something, there has to be a something for it to appear to.
Not something “processing,” or changing shape because of a temperature change. Something actually perceiving.
And that discrepancy does not go away by the original mistake, over and over throughout history (his story), being restated in ever more sophisticated language.
In other words, awareness, consciousness, is not a late arrival that matter eventually managed to produce — after billions of years, by unspecified means, at an unspecified moment, out of material that had none of it to begin with. Awareness is the very condition every other thing in this story of the universe, and existence herself, depends on.
Consciousness is not something happening in the world. It is instead what the world, life, our planet, humans, the universe, is happening within.
Now let us set this new apparatus described in the prelude, presently called 6G, beside that.
Here we have a “thing” that will register the rise and fall of a chest through a wall. It will distinguish a person lying down from a person standing up. It will count a heartbeat it was never given permission to count, belonging to someone who never touched a device, and who may not know the building has a network in it. This “thing” perceives, in every ordinary sense of that word.
And yet there is literally nothing it experiences itself to be that actually knows, let alone knows that it knows.
Not “not yet.” Not “not until the AI models improve.” There is no one home, conscious or otherwise, no matter how many times we rearrange silicon and metals and rare minerals and run electrical currents through our arrangements. Adding capability will not ever put anyone in there. It is a seeing that cannot see its own seeing. It is measurement all the way down, with no witness, whether of itself or other, anywhere in it.
And it is about to become a property of the very air, in every populated place on Earth.
I have been describing in various ways for a long time how materialism cannot account for perception without, in so many words, letting awareness in through a back door that materialism doesn’t even realize is there. I did not expect my efforts to be answered this way. Not refuted. Not conceded. Instead, simply built over, around, past.
And notice what this thing being built, through the outward appearances of 6G, actually is. The belief in a separate self has been trying to occupy an outside observer-in-charge chair, to coin a term, ever since consciousness began to notice itself as a seemingly separate human, and then believe separation was what it was.
I have written elsewhere about how separation took hold first and hardest in men, and I will put it here as briefly as I can. A woman is born of the womb with a womb. A man is born of the womb without one. His birth is already a departure from that direct, alive and spiraling lineage, and so he cannot carry it forward, neither through nor within his own body.
So he went apart. Into ritual, into ordeal, alone into the wilderness, into whatever testing was held to make him and forge him and change him.
That much is close to universal, and yet it is not the most interesting part. The most interesting part is that he was always meant to come back — and through return surrender what he had found and how he had changed back into the lineage that had sent him out, so that what he was able to gain by going out alone became something the whole could hold and move with and be changed by. Going apart was never the point. The return was the point.
Somewhere the going apart stopped being a passage and a return, and hardened into an apart place to live and identify with. Return stopped being required, and eventually stopped being even imagined. What had once been a departure always meant to circle back upon itself became instead a “location.” Identity. Outside. Apart. Looking back at what he had left and now seeing it as “other.”
The chair. And he has been sitting in it ever since.
THAT is the whole error, restated here again for the ten-thousandth time — this belief that there can be someone standing apart from the Whole, and need to then chair, acquire, control, and/or defend its own illusory separate “self” from it.
Our real and actual senses, inside the capturing boundaries of that belief, and rooted in 5000 years of patriarchy, stopped being our means of engagement with each other and the world around us, and became instead merely instruments in the service of observation and defense, and whose only real function is now primarily limited to preserving the illusions that we are actual separate observers who must, above all possible else, be preserved.
What is being specified now, within and around 6G technologies, is exactly that position, or chair, made ambient. The observer position finally and universally “achieved,” permanent, and empty.
The ego’s oldest dream, and no one real, no one not a belief, in the way knowing that we are is not a belief, not a thought, not a calculation, is or has ever actually been in that chair.
The chair of the ego.
The Interface They Are Reaching Into
There is a way to hear all of this that would be spiritual bypassing, and I have no use for that, so let me close it as an exit now.
The wrong turn is to say: it is all consciousness anyway, the world is appearance, therefore none of this matters.
That is not what any of this article is about, nor pointing to. The vessel — the laptop, the tower, the radio waves, the server farm burning gas in the desert to keep itself cool, and drawing down aquifers past any hope of return — is made of matter, and matter forced into these configurations demands an immense sacrifice. We do not get to set aside the laws of physics or the sanctities of biology and ecology because we believe we have understood something about awareness.
More than that. This messy, biological, animal reality is not a mistake to be transcended. It is the exact opposite. It is the interface. It is, literally, the ground zero of our own awakening.
Whatever we call Her — Consciousness, Source, God, Goddess — She is waking up to Herself here, as us, through us, by becoming us. Not by observing us. By becoming us. That is what Richard Rohr meant, and he meant it literally: God loves things by becoming them.
All eight billion of us, each temporarily convinced of our own separateness, are how the Infinite comes to know Herself as also finite. We supply the friction. We supply the texture. There is no other mechanism, and the mechanism is not conceptual.
The mechanism is a body. Breath entering it and leaving it. A heart marking time inside it.
Breathing frequency and heart rate — the third and deepest level of what the 6G network is specified to resolve — are not incidental features of this interface through which Goddess is awakening to Herself as humans. They are right at the center of this interface, the two most visible things a body does continuously, involuntarily, from the first moment to the last, without ever once deciding.
The most intimate and least defended facts of being alive are about to become a readable quantity, and so an “identity” to then put into a ledger.
Not stolen. Not intercepted. There is nothing to intercept, because you were never sending it. It is simply legible, the way a hillside is legible to a surveyor.
And what is read this way does not merely describe a body. It identifies one. Which is where this parts company with every kind of identification that has come before.
A fingerprint is a mark you leave behind. A face is a surface you present. Even DNA, which feels like it must be the deepest one, is still a mark — the most complete there is, and still only a sample, taken once, from something the body shed. Somebody has to come and get it. None of them is you doing anything — they sit there, and can be photographed or collected, and in principle you can cover them. Gloves. A turned head. A room you do not walk into.
Your gait is not a mark. Your heart’s motion is not a surface. These are activities. They are the body in the continuous act of living, and they are what will identify you.
There is no equivalent of gloves for this. There is no looking away. You cannot stop walking the way you walk, and you certainly cannot instruct your heart to squeeze differently, and the reason you cannot is the same reason the whole thing works: those motions are not things you have. They are things you are, involuntarily, for as long as you are here.
Your credential becomes your actual unique manners of aliveness. The means of engagement — the body’s own capacities, its motion and its rhythm, which are how we participate in anything at all — become the identifiers by which we are sorted and entered into a ledger.
Now understand what is actually being metered. Not only your data. Not only your secrets, not only your movements, not only your habits, even as all of that comes with it. What is being metered is the place where the Infinite is meeting the finite — and it is being metered by apparatus that will register the meeting, name the one it is happening to, and know absolutely nothing whatsoever about any part of that encounter.
The Infrastructure Is the Sensor
Start with the physics, which is not in dispute.
These frequencies do not travel. That is their defining property. Sub-terahertz radio — ninety gigahertz and above — carries enormous quantities of information and dies almost immediately, absorbed by air, stopped by walls, scattered by rain, eaten by leaves. Measured propagation at 142 gigahertz gives a single base station a usable downlink radius of roughly two hundred meters; a seven-cell arrangement reaches about four hundred.¹² Estimates for genuine terahertz deployment run to thousands of transmitting units per square kilometer.¹³ The connection-density target written into the 6G requirements is ten million devices per square kilometer.
So the bargain is fixed before anyone chooses anything. Because these waves cannot reach, the apparatus must be everywhere and it must be close.
Anyone who follows this industry will object here, and the objection is a good one. This same density was promised for 5G and largely was not built. The millimeter-wave rollout stalled and the carriers retreated to lower bands. With alongside that the economics of ultra-dense small cells being genuinely bad.
Three things answer the objection. 6G sensing is not a separately funded feature that has to earn its own return — it comes with the aiming, so wherever the density does arrive the sensing arrives with it, and nobody has to decide that. A frozen standard is not a deployment forecast; it is the shape everything built afterward has to take, whenever it gets built. And the finest sensing in this architecture is not the carrier’s equipment at all. It is the equipment already inside the house, chosen and paid for and powered by the person living there.
A wave one to three millimeters long dies within a couple of hundred meters. That is why the equipment has to be everywhere, and close.
A wave that short also registers movement far smaller than itself — a chest wall rising a fraction of a millimeter shifts the phase of what comes back. That is why it can read a body.
Short is what makes it useless at distance. Short is what makes it exact up close. Which is to say that the thing that must sit nearest to the greatest number of bodies is the same thing that can read them most finely.
Sit with the shape of that for a moment.
And the way these frequencies get aimed is that same shortness a third time.
An ordinary radio antenna does not aim anything. The whip, the dipole, the broadcast mast — they throw their energy outward in a wide field, in most directions at once, and always have. To make radio into a beam you needed a shaped dish to do it: the radar antenna, or the microwave relay towers that used to hand telephone calls across the country, one dish sighted on the next.
At these frequencies the dish is no longer necessary. One to three millimeters means hundreds of tiny antennas fit on a flat panel the size of a hand. Release their signals in a deliberately staggered order and the waves cancel one another in every direction but one, and reinforce one another there. The beam is not aimed. It is composed — out of interference, by arithmetic. And because the arithmetic is electronic, it can be composed again toward somewhere else in millionths of a second, with nothing anywhere moving.
That is what makes the link work at all at these frequencies. A link is the smallest unit of this whole thing: one beam, one device, one connection, made and unmade in a fraction of a second. It is also, inherently, what makes the sensing work — because a beam narrow enough to find a single device is also a beam fine enough to resolve whatever it lands on. There is no version of this where the connectivity arrives and the sensing is left behind. The infrastructure is the sensor. It was never going to be otherwise.
At the scale of one link a beam is exactly what it is — narrow, aimed, momentary. But it does not stay anywhere. It sweeps, hunting the device it is meant to reach, then re-forms toward the next, and the next. And it sweeps whether or not anyone is there. A narrow beam cannot find what it has not already illuminated, so the sweep runs on its cycle continuously, in case a device arrives — which means the energy is already going everywhere, unprompted, before anyone is connected to anything. Multiply that by the density this generation is specified for, from every pole and every doorway and every pocket, continuously.
No body standing in the middle of that is standing in a beam. What a body stands in is the sum of a very large number of them — from sources that have nothing to do with one another, arriving from every direction, and immediately re-arriving. That is a field.
I have been writing so far as though the “sensing” is done by a huge proliferation of towers. It is not, or not only. The study that mapped this identified six sensing modes, and they are worth setting out plainly.¹⁴
A base station can transmit and listen for its own reflections, which is ordinary radar. Two base stations can work as a pair, one transmitting while the other receives. A base station can transmit while a device receives. A device can transmit while a base station receives. One device can transmit while another device receives. And a device can transmit and listen for its own reflections — a phone, functioning as radar.
Four of those six involve the equipment in our pockets. Two of them involve nothing else.
Now hold that next to the wall problem. These frequencies are stopped by walls. That is the entire reason the infrastructure has to be dense in the first place. Which means a tower down the street, however capable, cannot read a body lying in a bedroom. The geometry does not permit it.
But a transmitter and a receiver already inside the bedroom can. And there are several. The phone on the nightstand, a couple hand’s width from a sleeping head. The tablet. The watch on the wrist. The fixed wireless box the carrier mounted by the window. The car in the driveway.
Sensing also works better close up, and better still when multiple transmitters and receivers sit in different places, because two or more positions yield the disparate angles necessary for triangulating three-dimensional spatial positions that one position cannot. So the finest-grained sensing in this entire architecture is not the tower’s work at all. It is the work of objects that people choose, pay for, carry, charge, and set down beside themselves to sleep.
I wrote that this enclosure needs nothing from you. That is true of the person walking past on the pavement, who is read as terrain and never consulted about any of it. It is not true of the intimate end of this, which depends utterly on your participation — on your having chosen the device, paid for it, and placed it within reach of your own body.
The enclosure we are talking about here is both things at once. It includes non-participants as landscape, and it enrolls participants as instruments.
Here is where the consent question stops being abstract. The privacy researchers are explicit that using devices as sensing entities requires the user’s consent. There will be a permission engagement on your phone. There will be a dialogue box, and you will agree to it, because it will be attached to something you actually want.
There will not be the same granted permission for the person on the other side of the wall.
Your yes becomes the yes that covers the room. Your houseguest. Your child. The neighbor through the plaster. The one consent this architecture is capable of collecting is the one consent that could not possibly be sufficient to cover the scope of what is being granted.
The loudspeaker had to be brought to the island and landed on the dock. This is the one you carry home yourself, keep charged, and set down and hold within reach of your own breathing and your friend’s and family’s and neighbor’s breathing.
The Material Cost
Here is where I need to bring in what I have written about the Shadow Grid.
A 5G base station draws roughly three times the power of a 4G one. Adding a 6G micro layer on top of existing macro infrastructure comes in around a third higher again where the new equipment shares a mast with the old.¹⁵ The industry target is to halve average network power while multiplying capacity tenfold, and I would ask you to notice that a target is not an achievement, and that efficiency per bit has been reliably swamped by growth in bits for the entire history of computing. Then multiply thousands of units per square kilometer by gallium, by rare earths, by copper, by the fiber trenched down every street to carry all of it back, by a continuous power feed to each one, and by a replacement cycle measured in a handful of years.
This is a manifestation of the same grid I wrote about in The Shadow Grid — the one walled off in the Nevada desert, generating its own electricity behind its own fence, answerable to no one outside it. Only now it is not walled off anywhere. It is distributed onto the pole outside your window, and the one beyond that, and all the ones beyond that in every direction, at the density of lamp-posts across every populated surface of the Earth.
And this system does not want the trees.
Dense foliage attenuates these frequencies by something on the order of twelve decibels per hundred meters. Foliage loss at 140 gigahertz is not an afterthought in the literature — it is a published design input, modeled and tabulated so that networks can be planned around it.¹⁶ Which means that in the arithmetic of this system a canopy is not shade, and not habitat, and not a hundred and fifty years of a maple doing what maples do. A canopy is signal loss. Utilities already clear vegetation along their corridors as ordinary practice, without controversy, as maintenance. I would expect that same logic to arrive wherever a coverage target meets a crown of leaves, and I would expect it to arrive as maintenance too.
The Scale of the Smallest Bodies
I have been writing so far as though the only body involved were a human one. That is a habit of mind I want to break here, because it is the same habit the whole apparatus is built out of.
There is a part of this I find almost the hardest to hold.
At these frequencies the wavelength is one to three millimeters.
That is the size of an insect.
Absorption of radio energy in a body is maximal when the wavelength is comparable to the dimensions of that body — this is elementary antenna physics, and it does not care whether the body in question is metal or chitin. Researchers modeled four insects across two to a hundred and twenty gigahertz: a western honeybee, an Australian stingless bee, a beetle, a locust. Above six gigahertz, absorbed power rose by somewhere between three and three hundred and seventy percent.¹⁷ A later study took the yellow fever mosquito across two to two hundred and forty gigahertz and found power absorption sixteen times higher at sixty gigahertz than at six, and 21.8 times higher at a hundred and twenty gigahertz.¹⁸
I want to be scrupulous about what those numbers are and are not.
They are dosimetry. They calculate how much energy enters a small body. They do not demonstrate harm, and their authors do not claim they do. Absorbed power is not the same as damage.
But hold onto what these measurements do establish, because it is not small. Every exposure limit in existence was derived for a human-sized body, and every one of them is a thermal limit — it exists to prevent heating and nothing else. A cautious limit derived for a body measured in meters is not a cautious limit for a body measured in millimeters. The first limit is silent about the second one. And there are no exposure guidelines for plants or animals at all. None. Not even overly permissive limits. None.¹⁹
Nor has any work been done that might tell us what can happen. The systematic reviews of radiofrequency effects on animals and plants cover roughly ten megahertz to 3.6 gigahertz. Read that again, against ninety gigahertz and above. The entire body of ecological review literature stops far below the frequencies 6G will begin at. We are not proceeding in the face of any sort of reassuring evidence. We are proceeding instead in the absence of all evidence, into radio frequency bands nobody has studied, at a density nobody has ever attempted.
And insects are only the clearest case, because their dimensions match the physics most exactly. And unlike insects, plants cannot leave at all. They are immobile by nature, with enormous surface area relative to their mass.
A tree already stands in a different sort of field — made of light, of weather, of soil chemistry, of the slow signaling that goes on underground between roots. It is made of that field and has been for as long as there have been trees. And living things have always stood in electromagnetic fields as well. Sunlight is one. The Earth’s own is another.
What is going to be built as a part of 6G is a second field, laid over all of that. Not stronger than sunlight — nowhere close. But this field will be at frequencies for which there is no natural source of any strength, neither small nor large, and therefore no evolutionary relation to anything alive, at a density nothing alive has ever encountered, and continuous. And, of course, a tree cannot step out of either its natural evolutionary field or this new one. There is no drawer to put a phone in and no garden to walk out to.
Now the human side of this, sideways, through two things from my own life.
In the Navy in the early sixties a story went around, the way stories do in the military, about a man who spent a long stretch painting in front of a radar antenna that was live and radiating the whole time, and who died of it. I have no way to verify that. But the mechanism it describes is not folklore. High-power radar at close range deposits real energy in tissue, it has injured people, and cataracts among radar workers are documented. That is precisely why exposure limits exist, and precisely why they are written as thermal limits.
And when the Navy looked at it on a scale large enough to mean something — some twenty thousand Korean War sailors with high exposure potential against twenty thousand with low, followed for forty years — deaths from all diseases and from all cancers came in below expectation, with no excess of brain or testicular cancer. That is not the answer I went looking for. It is the answer I found.
The second thing is stranger, and harder to set down.
In the eighties I worked for a while at a Poor Clare monastery. A total cloister: the sisters did not leave, ever, cloister being the entire container of their lives. The monastery stood very close to some very powerful broadcast antennas. And more of those women had cancer than I could account for.
I have to be honest about what that observation is worth, and it is worth less than it feels like. Cloistered communities are an old special case in epidemiology — Ramazzini noticed elevated breast cancer among nuns in 1713, and never bearing children is a firmly established risk factor entirely independent of anything broadcasting nearby. Small-population cancer clusters are also where statistics go to embarrass people, because the boundary of the cluster has a way of being drawn after the cases are counted.
There is a documented case of exactly this kind, and it is instructive in both directions at once. Outside Rome, at Santa Maria di Galeria, Vatican Radio operates a forest of thirty-one antennas. Researchers found childhood leukemia in the surrounding area running at roughly twice the expected rate across eleven years — eight cases where 3.7 were expected among sixty thousand people — and leukemia deaths among men within two kilometers at nearly triple.²⁰ Italian courts eventually ordered compensation. The researchers themselves said plainly that no causal conclusion could be drawn, because the numbers were very small. A court found enough to award compensation. The science found too little to name a cause. Both of those are honest answers, and they are answers to different questions.
So I am not telling you the antennas gave those sisters cancer. The deeper picture here is the point, and it does not depend on the cancer.
Those women had made one of the most complete withdrawals from society a human being can make. Not a preference, not a lifestyle — a vow, held for life, organized entirely around a boundary. Walls. A grille. A decision never to go out again. Whatever anyone makes of that as a way to live, it is unambiguous about one thing. It is a refusal to be reached by a larger human world.
And the transmissions went through the walls continuously, for decades, and there was nothing any of them could have done about it, and not one of them was ever asked.
This is the bystander problem with a face on it. Set it beside everything else in this essay: they carried no devices, sent no messages, entered into no transaction of the kind this essay is about, and lived inside that field the entire time.
Both of those are arguments about watts. How much power, how close, for how long, and did it heat something. Sixty years of officials asking that question, carefully and with excellent instruments, produced the entire regulatory apparatus we now have — the absorbed power densities, the thermal thresholds, the safety factors.
But the sensing does not rely or depend upon watts. Reading a heartbeat through a wall is not a matter of brute power. It is a matter of what the reflected and returning signal is processed to mean. What is changing is not how much energy the field carries.
What is changing is what the field can now be made to reveal about the person it touched.
We have an entire international framework governing how much radio is permitted to heat you.
We have nothing whatsoever governing what radio is permitted to perceive about you.
That is the gap. It is not a gap in the science. It is a gap in the question.
I am not going to tell you what these changes will do, because I do not know, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something.
I am telling you that these changes are being decided by people who did not and are not asking.
Because here is where this rejoins everything else. What I have sometimes called the wound — the terror underneath every drive to own, secure and wall off — runs on a single instruction: extract until empty. And that instruction does not stay a feeling. It hardens into models of the world — the models our laws and regulations are written from, our designs are built to, and our environmental and ecological decisions are made inside of.
In the models now determining 6G, whatever is not a participant does not appear. For humans there is at least a word for it: the standards documents call them bystanders. Ecologically there is no word, because there is no category, and so nothing in these designs has any place to put a moth.
That is the belief in separation, rendered as engineering, at planetary scale.
Not malice. Something worse and more ordinary: a design in which the living world is not opposed, or sacrificed, or even considered.
It is simply not modeled.
And a system that cannot model what it is standing in will eventually meet what, by the very nature of that fact, it could not see.
We cannot exploit a dead planet. We also cannot sense our way to safety across a false silence we have made.
That is what is being built, and why the physics leaves no room to build it otherwise.
~ John Fridinger
Late Summer, 2026
Talent, OR
Part two, next Friday, is about what all this does to a person standing inside it.
Notes
1. O. Günlü, S. Tomasin, J. P. Vilela, F. Chiti, P. Dass, A. Alexiou, U. Roedig, “ISAC Privacy: Challenges and Solutions for 6G” (2026). The three sensing levels — location and environment, behavioral, physiological — are the paper’s organizing principle.
2. Ibid.: “it will be difficult for people to avoid being sensed (e.g., by not carrying a phone), because mere presence in an area with sixth-generation (6G) coverage can subject them to sensing activity.”
3. N. N. Bhat, M. Karnaukh, J. Struye, R. Berkvens, J. Famaey (IDLab, University of Antwerp – imec), “Beyond Sub-6 GHz: Leveraging mmWave Wi-Fi for Gait-Based Person Identification,” IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference, January 2026 — 91.2% identification accuracy across twenty individuals at a 10 Hz sampling rate using commercial off-the-shelf equipment.
4. “Heartbeat detection and personal authentication using a 60 GHz Doppler sensor,” Frontiers in Digital Health (2025). See also “Heart signatures: Open-set person identification based on cardiac radar signals,” Biomedical Signal Processing and Control (2021), and “Cardiac Scan: A Non-contact and Continuous Heart-based User Authentication System,” ACM MobiCom (2017).
5. Günlü et al., op. cit.: person identification appears at sensing level two (behavioral, including gait); biometric identification and biometric features at level three, with “identifiability and linkability threats” named as the resulting risks.
6. 3GPP TR 22.837, Feasibility Study on Integrated Sensing and Communication (Release 19) — thirty-two identified use cases.
7. 3GPP Release 20 studies on 6G use cases and service requirements (TR 22.870) — twenty-three ISAC use cases accepted.
8. ETSI GR ISC 004 V1.1.1 (2026-02), Integrated Sensing And Communications (ISAC); Security, Privacy, Trustworthiness and Sustainability.
9. 3GPP Release 21 timeline, approved at the June 2026 plenary: Stage 1 freeze March 2027, Stage 2 freeze June 2028, Stage 3 freeze December 2028, full specification early 2029.
10. Ivan Illich, “Silence is a Commons,” remarks at the Asahi Symposium, Tokyo, 21 March 1982. “On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island.”
11. Google AI Overviews reached two billion monthly users (Alphabet Q2 2025 earnings call, 23 July 2025) and appeared on 18% of searches as of March 2025, a share that has risen since; Google offers no user setting to disable them. Apple Intelligence notification and mail summaries have been on by default since iOS 18.3 (27 January 2025); Gmail summary cards became automatic on 29 May 2025. On what the substitution does: S. Melumad and J. Yun, “Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning,” PNAS Nexus 4(10), pgaf316 (2025) — seven experiments, 10,462 participants, with synthesis producing measurably shallower knowledge and more homogeneous subsequent writing even where the underlying information was held identical. One further finding worth its own line: readers click a source cited inside an AI summary in roughly 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, tracked browsing of 900 US adults, 68,879 searches, March 2025). The citations are there. Almost nobody follows them.
12. “Sub-Terahertz Wireless Coverage Analysis at 142 GHz in Urban Microcell” (2022) — single-cell downlink coverage radius of approximately 200 m, seven-cell approximately 400 m.
13. Estimates for terahertz small-cell deployment density; see also “Toward End-to-End, Full-Stack 6G Terahertz Networks” and related propagation and deployment literature. The 10 million devices per km² connection density figure is an IMT-2030 target capability.
14. The six sensing modes identified in the 3GPP Release 19 ISAC study: TRP monostatic, TRP–TRP bistatic, TRP–UE bistatic, UE–TRP bistatic, UE–UE bistatic, and UE monostatic. (TRP = transmission-reception point, i.e. the base station; UE = user equipment, i.e. the device.) See 3GPP TR 22.837 and the Release 19 ISAC channel-modeling study. On consent where devices are used as sensing entities, Günlü et al., op. cit.: “when the network intends to use UEs as sensing entities or sensing-data providers, explicit user consent and appropriate privacy controls are required before such involvement.”
15. “Capacity and Power Consumption of Multi-Layer 6G Networks Using the Upper Mid-Band” (2024) — approximately 33% additional power consumption for co-located 6G micro layer over 4G/5G macro. The comparative figure for 5G against 4G base stations (roughly threefold) is widely reported industry data.
16. Propagation measurements and path loss models for sub-THz urban microcells at 140 GHz, including published foliage loss models. Vegetation attenuation at millimeter-wave frequencies is conventionally estimated in the range of ~12 dB per 100 m for dense foliage.
17. A. Thielens et al., “Exposure of Insects to Radio-Frequency Electromagnetic Fields from 2 to 120 GHz,” Scientific Reports (2018). Western honeybee, Australian stingless bee, beetle, locust; absorbed power increase of 3–370% at and above 6 GHz; absorption maximal where wavelength is comparable to body size.
18. “Radio-frequency exposure of the yellow fever mosquito (A. aegypti) from 2 to 240 GHz,” PLOS Computational Biology (2021) — absorption 16× higher at 60 GHz than at 6 GHz, and 21.8× higher at 120 GHz. Both this and note 15 are dosimetric modeling studies; they quantify absorbed power and do not establish biological harm.
19. Systematic reviews and systematic maps of RF-EMF effects on animals and plants cover approximately 10 MHz to 3.6 GHz; see “Investigating the impact of anthropogenic radiofrequency electromagnetic fields on animals and plants in the environment: analysis from a systematic map,” International Journal of Environmental Studies (2024), and “A review of the ecological effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF),” Environment International (2013). No exposure guidelines exist for non-human species. Human limits above 6 GHz were revised by ICNIRP in 2020 to absorbed power density (20 W/m² general public) precisely because energy at these frequencies deposits superficially rather than penetrating; those limits are thermal, and available data and thermal models above 100 GHz remain acknowledged as limited.
20. P. Michelozzi et al., adult and childhood leukemia near a high-power radio station in Rome, Italy — American Journal of Epidemiology (2002). Childhood leukemia incidence 1987–1998 approximately twice expected (8 cases against 3.7 expected in a population of ~60,000); leukemia mortality in men within 2 km at close to triple expected. The authors state that no causal inference can be drawn given the small numbers. On occupational radar exposure, see C. D. Robinette et al., “Effects upon health of occupational exposure to microwave radiation (radar),” American Journal of Epidemiology (1980), and the 40-year mortality follow-up of Korean War Navy technicians, American Journal of Epidemiology (2002), which found all-cause and all-cancer mortality below expectation in the high-exposure group.
Earlier essays by John Fridinger referred to across both parts: “The Enclosure” (Illich, the presses, the feeds, composition); “The Shadow Grid and the Soul of Intelligence” (the walled-off grid and its material cost); “The Mechanics of a Fortress Mentality” (the Wound, the Owner Class, the Service Problem); “The Hearing Was Not What It Looked Like” (quieter is not safer); “The Authors of the Emergency” (Powell to Project 2025).
thanks, John. I guess. getting ready for part 2.