• Networked Dream Worlds, by Shannon Mattern — Real Life Mag
    https://reallifemag.com/networked-dream-worlds

    We need to start thinking about 6G now.” Maybe 6G, unlike its predecessors, won’t be about being first or fastest, most ubiquitous or unrelenting. Maybe it will be about energy efficiency. Or local responsiveness. Or slowness. Or reflexivity. Or privacy, or equity, or digital justice. Maybe 6G will affirm a broader digital ethos, which affirms “the ways that technology can help individuals and communities be and relate to each other,” as Seeta Peña Gangadharan puts it in “Digital Exclusion: A Politics of Refusal.” This implies a refusal of “access,” speed, and growth as ends in themselves, and of tech companies’ hegemonic rule as a natural law. Not a vision likely to rouse the telecom execs — but hey, our imagination can exceed their corporate vision.