G is for ‘Generation’ of cellular networks that structure the flow of information across territories.

The first iteration, 1G, was launched in 1979 throughout downtown Tokyo by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, and by 1984 covered the whole country. Similar networks were rolled out across Scandinavia and eventually through the US in 1983. It was not until 2G and 3G, launched in 1991 and 2001 respectively, that we saw the characteristics that we consider to be commonplace of mobile telephony: speed of transfer, size of download, SmS and always-on internet connectivity through increasingly sophisticated mobile technology.

5G, which is being introduced to the network throughout 2019-21, is promoted as the slipstream of the next phase in the information era. It promises a revolution in mobile internet speed and data transfer. It will become the lifeblood of the Internet of Things, which forms the lattice of Platform Urbanism. In 2007, according to the UN, the world’s population became 50% urban. After 9,000 years of history, we finally became an urban species. Predictions note that by 2050 the majority will rise to 75%. But perhaps far more important, and less noted: In 2007, more objects were connected to the internet than people existed – around 8 billion of them. By 2010, 10.5 billion more objects were connected, from kettles that tweet when they come to the boil, to phones and cars, to CCTV cameras and city-wide sensors. By 2020, this figure has risen to 50 billion connected objects. This is the physical reality of the Internet of Things.

The places of our everyday lives have become socio-technical spaces, urban platforms in which code, space and bodies are intertwined. The infrastructure of our daily rituals has become mediated, often without our knowledge or our permission. It is also increasingly invisible, so that the membranes between the online and offline worlds are no longer perceived. This is a frictionless space where we efficiently go about our business without fear of glitches or interference. This is the end dream of developers like the visionary Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC who hoped that 'the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it'.

Simultaneous translation using Google powered AI means that language barriers no longer exist. Objects can communicate with each other within a smart home – your fridge can order a new delivery of milk when it senses that you are close to running out. A weather forecast can be relayed remotely to the traffic grid in order to anticipate congestion. Sensors and monitors now meter how we use utilities such as electricity or water, so that street-lamps only turn on when they sense a body walking towards them. Smart meters can ensure that we use water more sustainably. It is a reminder of Richard Brautigan’s prescient poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

But 5G is also the source of concern amongst many of those who are fearful of more malign influences. The network is at the centre of a conspiracy theory about the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak. This tells us something about the concerns that people have with the rapid technological changes occurring around them. Secondly, it reveals how conspiracy thinking has become the cognitive logic of platform urbanism.

5G conspiracies existed long before March 2020. From the outset, it was advertised by suppliers that the network was to be even more powerful that its predecessors, so that others claimed that its ‘non ionizing’ radiation signals could cause harm. Spurious evidence such as a cluster of dead birds in the Hague in September 2018 was blamed on the introduction of the network. Elsewhere, when trees were cut down and replaced with 5G masts it was thought that the trees had died as a result of the new signals. Leading hucksters such as David Icke, InfoWars, QAnon also folded 5G into their byzantine theories of world control. Social media algorithm went to work on spreading the virus of disinformation in the pursuit of hits and eyeballs.

Thus, when COVID moved westward from Wuhan in January 2020, the combination of the pandemic and the commercial roll out of the new network made for a potent array of cockamamie half notions and hot air ideations. 5G, it was claimed, was first developed in Wuhan. COVID was in fact the mass injury of G5 signals. Others suggested that there were hidden messages connecting 5G and coronavirus in the design of the new British £20 note.

However, such myth-making had a real world impact. During April, over 50 engineers for OpenReach in the UK conducting ordinary work on the network were attacked. There have been over 80 attacks on mobile masts in the UK, by far the largest number in Europe.

What fuels such disinformation and fear? Conspiracy thinking emerges from the flows and eddies of Platform Urbanism. James Bridle outlines this connection in his book on the future of knowledge in the Information Age, Dark New Age. In a complex world, he argues, it is impossible to have enough information in order to have a complete view. The stories we tell ourselves are therefore filled with dead ends and contradictions. Yet we are told that information is power:

‘Paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information which only further clouds our understanding – revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion. . . . [Conspiracies are] the edge cases of the problem space’.

These are the same problems faced by Platform Urbanism, the crisis of need for total information to impose some kind of algorithmic order upon a complex world. This is clear and obvious when it is solely focused on the material settings of the city.

However, Platform Urbanism does not just determine the physical spaces of the city – the interconnected surfaces, densities and solids. It can be read in the flows of behaviours intangibly dictated by the flows of information. Platform Urbanism can be found in the spaces between buildings, in the way bodies encounter each other, collide or repel. It orders and catalogues the inequalities between parties. It monitors citizenship.

Take, for example, the question of track and trace technology that uses mobile phone networks to monitor the spread of the Coronavirus. Here, G5, COVID and paranoia combine and hugely impact the ways we use the city. In the UK, the National Health Service encouraged people to download an app onto their phones. [Both Apple and Google jointly developed their own tracking apps, which they made available]. The NHS app used Bluetooth to identify nearby phones and therefore monitor contact and to notify people who had come into contact with the infection.

The App was seen as an essential component of protecting the nation in the aftermath of the first lock down between March and July. The government claimed that the system would be ‘world beating’ and help to keep the R number, the rate of reproduction below 1. Almost immediately, there was push back against the App by human rights and data freedom activists, who saw this as a dangerous invasion of privacy. However, more than that, it was ineffective. In November, the government announced a second lockdown, and it was calculated that less than 55% of those who had come into contact with the virus were informed.

Once again it comes down to power. Platform Urbanism speaks to us through 5G, but does it do more than that? Can we trust its Loving Grace, even if we cannot see it?