Part one set out what is being built. The sixth generation of mobile networks is being specified now, on a published schedule, and part of what it is specified to do is sense — to read where a body is, what it is doing, and the rate of its breathing and its heartbeats, through walls, with no camera, no microphone, and no need for the person to be carrying anything. It identifies as well as detects: gait and cardiac motion are biometrics, and they are legible at these frequencies. Because these waves die within a couple of hundred meters, the apparatus has to be dense and it has to be close, which means the finest sensing of all happens from within people’s private spaces, on equipment people buy and plug in themselves.
And because the survey has always been the first act of every enclosure, the freedom now being enclosed is the oldest one there is: the freedom of not being findable.
What follows is what all this enclosure does to a person standing inside it.
One Whole Instrument
I have been describing all of this one node at a time. A tower here, a phone there, each with its own narrow reach. That picture is too small.
Consider how many transmitting and receiving devices are within a hundred meters of you at this moment, if you are reading this anywhere near other people in an urban environment. Thousands.
In a dense district, at the density this 6G generation is specified for — ten million connected devices to the square kilometer — it will become tens of thousands.
The natural assumption is that this amounts to a great many small sensors, each one feeble, each confined to its own little volume.
That is not how it works. Combined, they are not many sensors. They are one whole instrument.
6G architecture has a term and it is not speculative: cell-free, distributed, multi-static sensing. Spatially separated nodes transmitting and receiving cooperatively, deliberately recognizing each other and combining so that a “target” individual or individuals are observed from many angles at once. The term is describing a mainstream 6G design that already has a substantial body of literature behind it, and the term, the concepts and the design literature exist because the approach actually works far better than any single node possibly can.¹
And here is the physical fact of 6G that matters most, and it is the one from part one — the composed beam — turned the other way. Aiming: many small antennas release their signals in a staggered order, and the waves compose themselves into a beam. Reading: many separated receivers take in what comes back, and the same arithmetic composes it into a picture.
One principle, running in both directions.
In that reading or return direction the resolving power of an array does not come chiefly from the power of its elements. It comes from how many and far apart they are. Astronomers do not attempt to build one impossible dish; they link modest dishes across continents and synthesize an aperture the size of the Earth. Spread, not strength, is what buys resolution.
A crowd becomes not a crowd of weak sensors. A crowd becomes a wide aperture.
With this next 6G generation every phone in a plaza, every fixed access point on every building and light pole, every vehicle at every curb — insofar as they can be time-aligned, spatially located and jointly processed, which is exactly what is being specified — will together constitute a single distributed instrument whose effective size becomes the size of the neighborhood, the plaza, the district, the downtown. And eventually whole populated regions.
To be clear, fully coherent processing at these scales remains a hard engineering problem and it is not fully solved as of today. But it is the direction of the design rather than merely a critic’s extrapolation, and the direction of the design is what this two-part essay is about.
The Quieter Mechanism
And then there is a second mechanism, and it is quieter.
A device does not have to transmit anything at all in order to sense. It can simply listen to the reflections of everybody else’s signals. The literature calls these “signals of opportunity,” and using them is passive radar — a technique older than most people reading this. In a dense environment the air is already saturated with other people’s transmissions, and every one of them is bouncing off every body present.
Which means a listening device leaves no trace of having listened. It emits nothing. It requests nothing. It appears in no record as having done anything whatsoever. The privacy researchers put this in their threat model in plain words: a bystander’s device, sniffing reflected waves.²
And these same reflections can carry one more thing, which is not in any of the design documents at all.
Sound moves things. A voice moves the air, the air moves the window glass and the paper on the desk, and the throat that made the sound is itself moving while it makes it. At one to three millimeters, a displacement of a few millionths of a meter is enough to show up in the phase of what comes back. Which is to say that a radio reflection can carry a voice.
This is not speculation and it is not new. It has been demonstrated continuously for a decade, at the most serious security conferences in the field, on radar chips costing a few hundred dollars. Speech recovered from the earpiece of a phone at eight meters. Speech recovered from a loudspeaker at five. Human speech, spoken aloud in a room, read off the trembling of ordinary objects — a paper bag, a plastic bin, a printer — through a wooden wall a third of a meter thick.³
I want to be exact about the limits, because they are real. Range collapses fast: word accuracy near sixty percent at half a meter falls to two percent at three. Much of what is recovered is machine-readable rather than listenable. And the 6G specifications as they are presently written do not sample nearly fast enough to do any of this — they name refresh rates measured in whole seconds, where reading a voice takes thousands of measurements a second. On the documents as they stand, this is not what is being built.⁴
What I want noticed is something else. The privacy annex to these standards runs to fifteen enumerated concerns. It names gait. It names facial features. It names heart rate. It does not mention this research once — not to rule it out, not to bound it, not to record that it was considered and set aside.⁵
Not hidden. Not denied. Simply not in the model. So far.
Told by the Furnishings
Now the addressing, which I do not think most people have connected to any of this.
Nearly every appliance these days gets an IP address of its own. The thermostat, the doorbell, the television, the refrigerator, the water heater, the washing machine, the garage door, the light switch, the speaker on the kitchen counter, the smart meter on the outside wall. Under the newest advancing scheme, called IPv6, well established and in place right now, there is no shortage of addresses to hand out, and there never will be again — IPv6 holds more addresses than there are grains of sand on Earth, and not by a small margin: by twenty orders of magnitude.
The number of available addresses is not the important point. What an address confers is the point. An addressed and therefore now addressable and locatable object becomes a network participant, and under these new 6G specifications a network participant is a candidate sensing node.
Appliances offer something phones cannot.
A sensing array is only as good as its knowledge of where its own sensing elements are. Uncertainty about the position of a node translates directly into blur. Phones move constantly; their positions have to be estimated and redetermined continuously, and every estimate carries error.
A refrigerator does not move. Neither does a thermostat, a doorbell, a smart wall switch, a smart meter, a television.
And it is the things that do not move that fix the things that do. A phone that can hear four appliances whose positions are exactly known no longer has to guess where it is. It is now told, by the furnishings.
And there is a second thing fixed sensing elements do, which is even heavier. Unmoving transmitters watching an unmoving room will, over time, allow the system field array to learn that room — every wall, every surface, every fixed reflection. Which means the system also learns what the room looks like with nobody in it. After that a body does not have to be specifically looked for. A body becomes simply whatever the room is not.
So a connected home is no longer simply a collection of conveniences that happen to be networked. It is a lattice of permanently located, precisely surveyed reference points, installed by the occupant, inside the interior, at their own expense. It is the skeleton such an array most wants and could not otherwise obtain — because nobody would agree to have a survey instrument attached to the wall of their bedroom, but everybody will agree to a thermostat.
In part one I said your permission would come to cover the room. That was too generous. At urban density, the sensing volumes of tens of thousands of devices overlap one another thousands of times over. Your bedroom will sit inside the coverage of your neighbors’ appliances, the fixtures on and in the building opposite, the cars in the street, and the phone in every pocket that passes your window. There is no arrangement in which one owner’s consent corresponds to one sensed space, because the spaces are not separable. The consent model is not inadequate. It is geometrically incoherent and essentially nonexistent. It describes a world of discrete bounded volumes and entities that will no longer exist.
The Center Is Everywhere
And that is where this stops being about engineering at all.
Because what is being built is a condition in which everything is continuously in contact with everything, in which no interior is separable from any other, in which the boundary between your room and the world goes unrespected because at these densities it is not even recognized.
Which, and in a different dimension or “sense” — I want to say this carefully — is true. It has always been true. Nothing was and is ever separate. The interpenetration of everything with everything is not the nightmare. It is the actual condition of interconnected and interdependent manifest existence, with the belief human civilization is presently lost in, that we are inviolate bounded objects with private insides, being the very error these two parts have been circling towards.
So, we have arrived somewhere strange. The apparatus of separation is about to attempt to enforce, in steel and silicon, something mystics have been reporting for thousands of years.
And yet it will be a complete lie that is enforced.
Here is the difference, and everything rests on it. I wrote once about wilderness as a place where there are no closed doors, no fences, no walls, no separation — where the center is everywhere and experience is always experiencing itself, without any need of a separate experiencer to know itself and its experience as one whole.
Set that beside what is being constructed under the auspices of 6G, and the two descriptions seem to be almost word for word the same. A field with no boundaries. No separate interiors. No privileged place to stand. The center everywhere.
They are opposites.
And only one of them is real.
In wilderness there is no experiencer because there is nothing but experiencing, and the knowing of it that was never separate from it. The seeing and the seen were never two, and what reads as absence is actually fullness with no room left over for an imaginary “outside” spectator.
In the mesh, or 6G “field,” there is no experiencer because alive aware experiencing is not there. Total connection with zero knowing anywhere in it. Every body in the city touched and sensed continuously by a faux apparatus pretending to be everything, and yet actually and really known by nothing.
That is the counterfeit, and it is worth being exact here. The error is now no longer merely about separation; the patriarchal systems have begun to go past separation. Ersatz interdependence without relationship. Cold contact without recognition.
In the 6G mesh the smallest unit is called a link. A word for a joining, used to name a moment of aiming. The mere shape of interconnection, rendered into hardware, missing the one thing that matters most: what realizes itself as the Whole.
This Knowing that I Am.
And then the second half of the error. The apparatus will seem to have the geometry of the Whole — which in actuality is merely the only part of it that can be “drawn.” Everything in contact with everything. No interior treated as separable from any other. No privileged place to stand. That much it reproduces exactly.
But this sort of shape is what is left of the Whole after you subtract everything about it that cannot be measured. What this apparatus will never produce is the experiencing of the Whole.
In all the many human delusions of separation those two can seem to come apart. And in this latest “final” delusion they seem to come apart completely.
It Will Arrive as Care
Enclosures do not arrive as fences. They arrive as gifts, and the gift is always or at least will always seem real. That is what makes the pattern so difficult to see while it is happening, and yet so obvious afterward.
The loudspeaker arrived so the back of the crowd could finally hear. The presses arrived so ordinary people could read. The feed arrived as relevance, so you would not have to wade through what did not concern you. The sentence-finisher arrived as help for people who find writing hard, which is most people. Every one of those was a genuine benefit. Every one of them was also the mechanism.
So it is worth saying as plainly as possible what this next one is going to look like, when it comes.
It will look like an old woman living alone in a house up the road, whose breathing can be monitored without her having to wear anything, remember anything, or charge anything. It will look like a fall detected in a bathroom at three in the morning by a network that noticed a body go from vertical to horizontal and stay there. It will look like a child left in a hot car, found. It will look like sleep apnea caught in someone who would never have gone to a clinic. These are not hypotheticals invented by critics. Living-environment monitoring, activity monitoring, and physiological-signal monitoring are named applications in the actual 6G network design documents.⁶
And they are “good.” I want to be careful not to be glib about that, because I am old enough now to know exactly which side of that transaction I am on.
That is part of the shape of the thing. Not a trick. An actual gift, arriving with a real fence attached, offered to people at a precise moment in their lives when refusing looks like refusing to be protected — or worse, when refusing on someone else’s behalf looks like refusing to protect your own mother, or a child.
And I want to connect this to something I wrote a little while ago about a Senate confirmation hearing, because the mechanism is identical even as I am only seeing the connection now.
I argued then that quieter is not safer. That the theatrical cruelty of one Homeland Security Secretary had been, in a terrible irony, an accidental protection — so visible, so badly managed, so nakedly brutal that it manufactured the very resistance that constrained it. And that a competent successor pursuing the same agenda quietly, building functional relationships, reducing the dramatic confrontations, would remove the visibility that armed the opposition and in doing so damage far more people with far less outcry to stop him and them.
The spectacle is what generates the resistance. Take away the spectacle and the agenda proceeds unopposed.
Now apply that to an enclosure that arrives as a fall detected at three in the morning. There is no raid. There is no agent at a door, no camera in a corner, nothing for anyone to photograph and nothing for anyone to gather in front of. There is a grandmother who did not die on a bathroom floor. That is not brutality dressed as kindness. It is a form of kindness, functioning as the delivery mechanism for a larger and still unseen brutality, and it will generate no resistance at all — not simply because people are fooled, but because there will be nothing visible to resist and, on the surface, nothing anyone would want to resist.
A new level of apparent competence, in service to all the same underlying logics of brutality, domination and control, is more dangerous than mere brutality. I wrote similarly about a nomination hearing. It is now becoming far truer about these 6G standards documents.
Here is what I think is likely. Likely — not predicted, and not fact.
A consent framework will be built. The researchers are already calling for one, and they are honest about the problem with it: consent, transparency, and data ownership for bystander sensing remain open problems, because the person being read may own no device, may have signed nothing, and may simply be walking past.⁷ You cannot obtain consent from everyone standing in a field of radio waves. So the likely outcome is not the absence of a consent framework. The likely outcome is a consent framework that works as a legal fiction: one party signs, and that signature is taken to cover everyone the sensing reaches. Which is worse than no framework at all, because a fiction of consent is precisely what makes a thing feel settled.
There will also be a collision with existing law, and I strongly expect the collision to resolve in favor of deployment. Under the European Union’s AI Act, an operator that processes radio data to classify human behavior or infer vital signs is arguably no longer a neutral carrier of traffic but the operator of a high-risk biometric categorization system, with all the liability that follows.⁸ That is a serious obstacle on paper. Obstacles on paper typically get resolved by carve-outs — and so carve-outs will be written for health and for safety, because health and safety are where any genuine benefit will seem to live.
The gift then becomes the doorway for all the rest of it. These sorts of gifts have always been the doorway.
And underneath all of it, the same thing I keep arriving at from every direction: “care” that requires you to be legible in the context of larger systems is not care. It is management. Real care is relational — it needs a someone else, and being cared for is the felt experience of being known by that someone. What is being built here is care with nobody in it. Attention without an attender. It will keep an old woman alive longer but it will not once know who this self-aware being is, or what the conditions of her life are.
That is not a small distinction. It is the same distinction drawn in part one, about what perception is, arriving now at someone’s bedside.
The Observer, Installed
Here is the part I consider most important, and the one I can least document.
Everyone knows in their body what being watched does. Something changes when someone in a room realizes they are being observed. Something contracts. Attention that had been out in the world turns and comes back on itself, and for as long as the watching lasts you are no longer simply here — you are here, and you are the one being seen here, split in two, now monitoring the version of yourself that you believe is visible.
So far that experience has been occasional, local, and locatable. A camera in the corner. A neighbor at a window. A microphone on a table. A person across the room. And crucially, because it is locatable, it can be ended. You leave the room. You close the curtain. You put the phone in a drawer in the kitchen and walk out to the garden. The watching has an edge, and on the other side of that edge you get yourself back.
What is being specified with 6G is that condition without an edge. Ambient. Continuous. Unlocatable, without perceptible boundaries, because the sensing is intended to become not a particular device in a corner but a property of all these very mediums in which we live and move. And all of it without a point of origin anyone could turn toward, or turn away from.
Which is the difference that matters. Being watched by something you can find produces a response — you move, you close the curtain, you refuse. Being watched by something with no location produces the contraction and nothing else, because there is nowhere to put it. The cue that would prompt any ordinary response never arrives. The condition arrives anyway.
A medium that continuously registers someone’s presence will continuously produce a felt sense of being a separate located object with an outside. That is what being sensed does to a nervous system. It remanufactures the observer position inside the observed.
Identification is then what makes it personal.
To be sensed anonymously would produce something general — a diffuse sense of exposure, unpleasant but vague. To be recognized is a difference in kind. Recognition hands you a specific self. It says: not a body, that body, this body. Not somebody, you. I am seen. The one who was in another building on Tuesday. And now here. This one with this heart.
That is not vague exposure. That is the continuous manufacture of a particular, named, locatable, accountable somebody — which is exactly the thing every contemplative tradition has spent thousands of years trying to help people see through, past, beyond.
We can now set the two halves of this beside one another, because they have been describing the same thing.
From 6G architecture’s side, in its own documents, everything interpenetrates. No interior separable from any other. No privileged place to stand. That is some of the geometry of the Whole, exactly and literally, now rendered in hardware.
From inside any one self-aware nervous system standing within that same geometry, you are handed back to yourself as a located object, continuously, and additionally told which one you are, all the while as you are also entered under that name into what is still in essence a ledger.
That is the phenomenology of total separation.
Maximal ersatz connection, manufacturing maximal experienced separateness.
Which is precisely inverted from our actual conditions, where structure IS connection and also the experience of it, and there has never in truth been a gap between the two for any imagined thing “else” to get into.
That position 6G is intending to enforce in a universal way is not a side effect of the belief in separation.
It IS the belief in separation.
It is exactly patriarchy’s founding error and belief itself, made into hardware — the conviction that I am a thing here, apart, with a boundary, being looked at by a world that is not me.
Until now that original error has been maintained by belief. Conditioning, culture, language, and ten thousand years of accumulated forgetting — and every bit of that, being belief, can at least in principle still be seen through. This sort of seeing through is the work every mystic and sage for thousands of years has been guiding and pointing towards. It is what all serious spiritual practice has always been about.
Belief can dissolve, sometimes slowly and sometimes in an instant, so that when and as it goes, what was never actually in truth separate is simply here, aware of itself once again, having gone nowhere.
6G architecture neither recognizes nor requires belief. 6G architecture does not care whether you have seen through it. It will operate on the nervous system of someone forty years into spiritual practices exactly as it operates on everyone else.
And the specific casualty, the most destructive loss, is surrender.
Willingness, as against willfulness, has always required a felt condition of not being tallied, tabulated, or “counted.” And I do not mean privacy as a legal category. I mean the actual bodily and felt experience of being unobserved, which is the ground condition under which a person can stop holding themselves together and let go. No one can let go in a room where they are aware they are constantly being measured. That measuring will always keep producing a “one” who will then have to “do” the letting go. Separation inherent. The doer and the done. Every time it registers you, it hands you back yourself as an object.
Whether a generation raised inside a sensing medium like we are talking about here retains reliable access to a condition that allows the discovery and development of true willingness is a real question, and I do not know the answer to it. Here is a claim about consequence, and yet consequences always by their nature arrive later. I would rather be wrong having said it now, than right having waited.
The rest here in this part is not prediction.
6G is patriarchy arriving at its terminal form. Not the domination of bodies, which it has always done, and is still always doing. Something further along than that: the industrial manufacture of separateness itself as innate human identity, continuously, birth to death, in literally (eventually) every human, and all of it enforced from above, below, “outside,” and around.
And so here we now have the terrified separate self, eternally unable to fully secure its own delusional separate existence, building apparatus that attempts to guarantee that every other human will also continue to experience themselves as a “separate” self. Which only feeds its own belief that it is really separate, and feeds it exponentially. And so, in order to feel safe and ongoing in that seeming existence, it must continue its efforts to dominate everything it believes it is separate from.
Not because any one or more individuals “intends” any of this. Nobody in any of those rooms intends it. It is, simply, what the thing they are all identified with (and believe they are), still, after all this time, does.
Our Defenses Are Made of the Same Material
Something plain has to be said here next, without escalation.
The privacy tools that work now do NOT reach this. The VPN, the hardened browser, Tor, encrypted mail, the encrypted message — every one of them protects data in transit. Every one of them assumes a pipe with something travelling through it, and does its job by making what travels unreadable by anyone other than sender and recipient, or closes the pipe’s access to you. None of them has any purchase whatsoever on a medium that reads physical presence as the very condition of its operating, because in that case nothing is travelling. Nothing was sent. There is no message to protect. There is a body, and there is a field, and what the field touches changes the field.
That is a technical fact, and yet it is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that every one of those tools some of us have been using shares a premise with the thing the tool attempts to defend against. Each one is a wall. Each tool becomes an extension of the separate self once again attempting to secure itself — generate its own protection, draw a boundary, define an inside where it believes it alone is safe.
I spent a whole essay on the mechanics of this fortress mentality — the bunkers in New Zealand and Patagonia, the hydroponics and the air filtration, The Line rising in the Saudi desert as a hundred-mile machine for functioning while everything outside it burns. I described the fatal flaw in it, what I called the Service Problem: a billionaire is a billionaire only by sitting atop a pyramid of eight billion people and a resource and supply chain that reaches every continent, and no quantity of money repairs a world that has actually stopped working. You cannot exploit a dead planet.
What I did not say, and should have, is that the same flaw runs all the way down.
The bunker in the mountain and the VPN on the laptop are the same move at two budgets. The premise is that a boundary can be drawn around a self and the rest left outside to manage on its own. And the same move once established cannot dismantle itself, at either price. A doer by doing cannot undo a doer, neither itself, nor a seeming “other.”
I have also been saying for a long time that the tools of the system cannot be used to take the system apart, and that anyone who uses its tools that way will eventually get absorbed into serving it. I did not expect to have to apply that so quickly as I now am to my own desk, my own laptop.
None of which is an argument for doing nothing, and none of it is contempt for anyone’s encryption, or VPN, including my own. Keep it. It still does the job it does, and the job it does is worth doing. But do not mistake a “wall” for an answer, and do not let the presence of the wall delude you into thinking the real dilemma we are up against here has been handled.
Because the honest thing to say to a reader here is that as an individual, against this, you have almost no leverage at all. And the instinct that rises when a person hears that — to find the tool, buy the device, shield the house, get out ahead of it, or else simply give up and be absorbed — is the very same instinct that built and continues to build the thing.
It is willfulness. It is the separate self, hearing that it cannot secure itself, responding by trying even harder to secure itself.
Our response has to come from somewhere other than the impulse to secure. I am not going to pretend I can hand anybody a procedure for that. It is, first and foremost, not a procedure.
But there can become a willingness.
The Room Where It Is Being Decided
There is a window, and it is narrow, and it is not where anybody is looking.
I should say first that we already know how this goes, because it has happened once, and recently, and nobody noticed.
On the twenty-sixth of September 2025, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers published 802.11bf as an active standard.⁹ It is an amendment to ordinary Wi-Fi. It covers the bands below seven gigahertz and the directional sixty gigahertz band. Its purpose is sensing, and among the applications it names as enabled is human identification. It went through a task group, it went through balloting, it was published, and it is now the standard the future wireless equipment in your home will be built to. The box on the shelf. Not the one already there — the next one, which will look no different.
There was no hearing. There was no coverage. There was no moment at which anyone was asked whether the wireless network in their home should be capable of identifying the people moving around inside it.
That is the whole pattern, complete, in eleven months, with a published document at the end of it. What will follow with 6G is the same pattern at a much larger scale, and the only difference is that it has not finished yet.
I gave the dates at the start of part one: six months to the requirements, twenty-one to the architecture. Freeze is not a figure of speech. It is the word the standards world uses for the moment a specification stops being open to change — March of 2027 for what 6G is required to do, June of 2028 for how it is built in order to do it. After those dates the document is no longer a draft. A standard is not a proposal or a white paper or a statement of intent. It is the document every manufacturer builds to, every carrier deploys against, and every national regulator writes spectrum policy around. When it freezes, the argument is not merely lost. The argument is completely over, because there is no longer a venue in which to have it.
And now I want to be precise about what kind of body this is, because it turns out to be the crux of the entire thing.
3GPP is not a government. It is not an agency of any government. It holds no statutory authority, occupies no public office, answers to no electorate, and cannot compel anyone to do anything at all. It is a partnership among seven regional standards organizations — ATIS in the United States, ETSI in Europe, CCSA in China, TTA in Korea, ARIB and TTC in Japan, TSDSI in India — together with the hundreds of companies that hold membership through them. Qualcomm. Ericsson. Nokia. Huawei. Samsung. The carriers. The chip designers.
It is, in plain terms, the industry, meeting, to agree with itself.
And you cannot walk in. Attendance requires Individual Member status, which requires membership in one of those seven organizations.¹⁰ The human rights organization Article 19, which has taken the trouble to map these groups, reports that the subcommittee handling lawful interception has been shaped mainly by Nokia, by Ericsson, and by governments from Europe and North America together with their law enforcement agencies.¹¹
Consider what that means, and do not assume the answer to be national regulation. Huawei sits in the same room as Qualcomm. This is not an American body or a European one. It is global industry, coordinating across governments that otherwise agree on very little else, which is exactly why its output holds and why no single legislature or legislation can reach it.
In other words, its documents carry more practical force over the physical conditions of human life than most legislatures and government bodies do — not because anyone granted them that power, but because once a specification freezes, every manufacturer on Earth has to build to it. And afterward the thing simply exists, with there never being a moment at which it required a public’s permission or agreement.
That is what is meant by the argument being over rather than lost. Nobody cancelled the hearing. The hearing was never constituted. Standards bodies were not designed to include or exclude the public — they were built instead to keep manufacturers from making incompatible equipment, back when the thing being coordinated was the pin spacing on a connector.
Pin spacing has now become whether the “air” in your house can count your heartbeat. Yet the venue for these decisions has never changed.
And here is what I most want to insist on, because it is where writing on these sorts of subjects usually goes wrong and becomes easy to dismiss.
Nobody is hiding any of it. There is no conspiracy. No hidden meeting, no hidden memo, no hidden agreement. The minutes are published. The specifications are public. The privacy analysis has already been written and posted by the standards bodies themselves — that ETSI report from February exists, anyone can read it, and almost no one has. The insulation is not secrecy. It is genre. It reads as engineering, and engineering reads as neutral, and what reads as neutral is understood not to require consent.
That is the whole trick, and it is not even a trick. It is simply how power finds the necessary rooms and levers nobody is watching.
Which is a thing I have written about before at length, in a different register, when I did not expect these two subjects to meet.
In August of 1971 a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell, two months from his Supreme Court nomination, sent a confidential memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce arguing that American business had been politically naive, too absorbed in quarterly returns, and needed to organize for the patient recapture of the institutions that shape how people think. What followed was Heritage in 1973, ALEC in 1973, Cato in 1977, the Manhattan Institute in 1977, the Federalist Society in 1982 — an entire apparatus built on one insight.
The insight was about time. Powell understood that institutional capture is durable in a way that winning elections is not. He operated on a twenty-year horizon while his opponents operated on two. And so a memo written in 1971 eventually produced a Supreme Court supermajority that reversed fifty years of settled law, and produced Project 2025, and no election in between ever touched the mechanism, because the mechanism was never on a ballot.
Now look again at what I just described.
A twenty-year horizon. A venue no election reaches. Decisions that persist regardless of which party governs which country, because the specification is global and political parties are not. Attendance restricted to those with a commercial reason to be there. Outcomes that read as technical rather than political and therefore attract neither coverage nor challenge.
The people Powell was speaking to had to build their institutions from scratch. This room did not have to be built. Standards bodies have been coordinating industry out of public view since long before Powell was born, doing exactly what he would later prescribe. This terrain did not need to be captured because nobody was contesting it in the first place.
Nor does the state’s interest here have to be inferred. In June of 2025 the European Commission published a roadmap for lawful access to data, built on six pillars. One of the six is titled “Standardisation” — the Commission working with Europol, with industry, and with law enforcement practitioners toward a European approach to standardization for internal security, with particular attention to lawful disclosure and lawful interception.¹² They did not conceal their intention to route this through the standards process. Instead, they published it as policy.
One more thing about that timeline, and then I will leave the bureaucracy behind for good.
Look at the shape of it. Freeze dates. Releases. Roadmaps. Stages numbered one, two, three, running in a single direction, linear, a line, a track on a schedule, toward another imagined new stage, or terminus.
On the other hand, everything that actually exists, everything real — every orbit, every season, every watershed, every breath, every life — is circular. It returns. And spirals. Only illusions are linear. And a line, all by itself, just like the illusion it is, when pursued far enough, will always meet its own demise.
Epilogue
I have no strategy to offer, and I would distrust myself if I did. Anything the separate self does about this will be the separate self doing something, and that is exactly the material the problem is made of.
So let me end with the only thing I am actually sure of.
They will be able to count the breath, and the heartbeats. They will be able to count these things through a wall, in a house, in a room where a woman is asleep and nobody asked her anything. That is coming, it is coming on a published schedule, and it will arrive through misdirection and over simplification wrapped also in what seems to be a genuine kindness that will make it very hard to refuse.
And nothing in that apparatus, neither 6G nor AI nor an ever-expanding network of datacenters will ever know what it is to breathe, to have a heart that beats, to care, and cry, and love.
Not only because the engineering by its very nature is immature and unreal, however technically sophisticated it becomes. But because knowing is not a capability. Knowing is what is reading this sentence right now, and it is not located in your head, and it was never “produced” by anything. The radio waves will register the chest rising. They will not know the rising. They will never once be the breath.
She, on the other hand, will always be. She is what breathing is. She, Goddess, God, Life, Truth, Love. Use your own term here, for what is always prior to all terms.
That is not a comfort, and I am definitely not offering it as one. Nothing about the next twenty-one months is comforting. The enclosure will very likely proceed, and I expect this body, which for a while I also am, to be dead before the worst of it lands on the people and the world and the life forms I care most about.
It is simply the fact underneath all the other facts: the thing they are moving to enclose was never a possession, cannot be transferred, and cannot become theirs by being measured. Presence is not a resource. It is what is always here. It is the one commons that can seem to be fenced and still not be taken, because there was never ever anyone real outside it to do the taking.
God loves things by becoming them.
Or the Buddha’s words: I and all sentient existence has awakened.
~ John Fridinger
Late Summer, 2026
Talent, OR
Notes
1. On distributed, multi-static, cell-free ISAC: e.g. “Cell-Free ISAC MIMO Systems: Joint Sensing and Communication Beamforming” (2023); “Detecting Multiple Targets with Distributed Sensing and Communication in Cell-Free Massive MIMO” (2025); “Scalability and Implementation Aspects of Cell-Free Massive MIMO for ISAC” (2024). Spatially separated access points cooperate to transmit and receive sensing signals, improving detection and localization by combining diverse angles.
2. Günlü et al., op. cit., on passive sensing using communication signals as “signals of opportunity,” and on the adversary model, which includes “a malicious bystander UE sniffing reflected waves.”
3. The literature is a decade deep and sits at the field’s most serious venues. C. Wang et al., “mmEve: Eavesdropping on Smartphone’s Earpiece via COTS mmWave Device,” ACM MobiCom (2022) — speech recovered at six to eight meters using a commodity automotive radar board. P. Hu, W. Li, R. Spolaor, X. Cheng, “mmEcho: A mmWave-based Acoustic Eavesdropping Method,” IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2023) — loudspeaker audio at five meters, 18.1% word error. R. Zhao, L. J.-T. Yu, H. Zhao, E. C. H. Ngai, “Radio2Text: Streaming Speech Recognition Using mmWave Radio Signals,” Proc. ACM IMWUT 7(3) (2023) — human throat vibration, vocabulary above thirteen thousand words, 9.4% word error at half a meter. C. Shi et al., “Privacy Leakage via Speech-induced Vibrations on Room Objects through Remote Sensing based on Phased-MIMO,” ACM CCS (2023) — live human speech read off ordinary room objects through a 0.33 m wooden wall at 92.9%, on a ten-digit vocabulary. For the underlying physics, E. Bederov, B. Berdugo, I. Cohen, “Recovering Speech from Vibrations: Principles and Algorithms in Radar and Laser Sensing,” Sensors 26(8), 2553 (2026).
4. S. Basak and M. Gowda, “Wireless-Tap: Automatic Transcription of Phone Calls Using Millimeter-Wave Radar Sensing,” ACM WiSec (2025): word accuracy 59.25% at fifty centimeters, 2% at three meters. The recoverable band is generally capped around three to five kilohertz. One correction worth making here, because the claim circulates widely: ordinary Wi-Fi is not an acoustic channel. The paper usually cited for it, “We Can Hear You with Wi-Fi!” (ACM MobiCom 2014), is radio lip-reading, and its authors state plainly that Wi-Fi signals “cannot detect or memorize any sound.”
5. 3GPP TS 22.137, published as ETSI TS 122 137 V19.1.0 (January 2026) — the normative ISAC service requirements — contains no instance of vibration, acoustic, sound or audio, and its specified sensing refreshing rates run from 0.05 to 600 seconds, where audio recovery requires phase sampling in the thousands per second. ETSI GR ISC 004 V1.1.1 (February 2026), the dedicated ISAC security, privacy and trustworthiness report, enumerates fifteen key privacy issues and names gait, facial features and heart rate. It does not mention this literature.
6. Günlü et al., op. cit., on internal and external ISAC applications.
7. Ibid., research roadmap: consent, transparency, data ownership for bystander sensing, permission revocation, and third-party auditing listed as open problems.
8. Ibid.: under frameworks such as the EU AI Act, an operator processing radio data to classify behavior or infer vital signs “is no longer a mere data conduit and it may become the operator of a high-risk biometric categorization AI system.”
9. IEEE 802.11bf-2025, WLAN Sensing, published 26 September 2025. Scope covers license-exempt bands below 7.125 GHz and the directional 60 GHz band; human identification is among the named enabled applications.
10. 3GPP membership rules: meeting attendance requires Individual Member status via one of the seven Organizational Partners (ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TSDSI, TTA, TTC).
11. ARTICLE 19, Internet Standards Almanac, entry on 3GPP TSG SA WG3 Subcommittee on Lawful Intercept (SA3-LI).
12. European Commission, Roadmap for effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement, 24 June 2025. Six pillars: data retention, lawful interception, digital forensics, decryption, standardisation, and AI solutions for law enforcement.
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).
Such a masterful piece, John. Thank you.
Do you remember the day that an unlikely assembly of Silver City people put together William's greenhouse? Not for long, of course, but that day is something I celebrate every time I remember it.