[ POLL ] 5G Conspiracy Theories.

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I recently came across a *very* creepy 5G conspiracy theory:

Cell phone companies are using 5G to transmit data really, really fast!

This is ridiculously outlandish, of course, but a lot of gullible people are apparently buying into it.

Sheeple.

A lot of people in the UK were burning 5G towers, too.

"5G causes COVID" is the one I usually see.

For a while, people were selling USB dongles and other devices that claimed to protect or shield the user from "harmful" 5G (but actually did nothing of the sort). They sold a lot of them. I'm not even upset.

...except I am kind of upset that I didn't think of it first.

I think it would make more sense to just wear an aluminum-foil outfit. It would protect you from lots of various types of signals, some radiation, & prevent the government from reading your thoughts. I don't know if those things exist yet though but if not, that's an idea for you Just give me a cut & remember the Ferengi Rule Of Acquisition #82~ "The flimsier the product, the higher the price"
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ru ... cquisition

<* Codger Voice *>

I remember, back in the 1980s, when IBM introduced the first business-level PCs and XTs.

There was fear over reports of "Statistical Clusters" of miscarriages, missed periods, cancers, and other issues related only to women.  While there was little to no valid evidence to support claims of a causal connection, there was near-panic that office computers (especially computer monitors) were causing these problems in women.  I mean, women held mostly admin/secretarial jobs back then and those jobs required computers, right?

Anyway, I started seeing ads for shields, screens, and Faraday enclosures designed to keep that harmful "Computer Radiation" out of women's bodies -- one woman showed up to work wearing the same kind of lead apron that radiologists wear when taking x-rays!

The most laughable product I saw was a spray-on "shield" -- spray it on, wipe it off, and you were (allegedly) protected from 99.97 percent of the harmful rays emitted by your computer!



The problem was that people were spraying themselves with this stuff, which amounted to nothing more than re-packaged furniture polish.  Ahh ... that lemony scent!

Yep....any "new" technology inevitably leads to paranoiac reactions.

I remember around 2003 I was seeing lots of commercials on TV for a device you put behind/under your cellphone's battery that would increase your phone's signal & reduce your exposure to radiation waves. It supposedly helped channel them into going upward to the phone's antenna or something. RadioShack was selling out of them for a while cuz the Sprint phones & plans they sold did not have great signal coverage. I read somewhere that Sprint used a different type of signal than it's competitors & Sprint's signal would only travel half the distance so it needed 2wice as many towers to have the same quality coverage. Their coverage was good in big cities & along interstate highways but their signal majorly s#cked for more rural areas if they were even able to get it. A bit of Sprint customers were duped into buying those devices when they went to RadioShack to complain or cancel their service. So instead of Sprint customers getting let out of their contract without early termination & other fees, the customers lost more money.

Were you supposed to spray it on your computer?

I work on radios. I am a ham radio operator. I'm typing this literally sitting 4 feet from a wifi router. I am surrounded by radio signals at medium to high levels. It hasn't made me any more autistic. I've never had cancer. I am not a nutjob. People's life expectancies have increased since the invention of radio. This is the worst of the worst of the lunatic fringe no-evidence anti-science fake news out there.

I was seeing a commercial for Autism Speaks for a while years ago that was talking about how autism diagnoses was on the rise & it made it sound like perhaps the percentage of autistics was increasing. A very common autism stereotype is that we love & are great with technology stuff like computers. Perhaps some people got it in their heads that autism is increasing because of the increase in computer & other technology usage instead of thinking that autistics are drawn towards that stuff. I know Fnord would say that correlation does NOT equal causation & that is a very good point but more than a small amount of people use that flawed logic to come to conclusions these days.

Yes.  This was before the time when all those consumer warning labels started showing up everywhere.