
“Phages hate this one trick,” said undergraduate research assistant Polly Merrace.
Photo by Theo Erickson
A recent breakthrough study led by Gervin Hernandez, an electrical engineer with a PhD in Structural Design, found that instead of spreading cancer, 5G towers actually spread cell service. “We looked at the blueprint for the towers and, well, apparently they were designed to spread cell service,” Hernandez said. “I’ve been hiding my kids in tinfoil walls for nothing.”
This new information, however, has been met with much skepticism. According to data anthropologist Kevin Love, “this finding only further exacerbates the obstacle of misinformation in this already hyper-developed sociocommunicative modern era.” Despite the concern raised by Love and his colleagues, the study has been making rounds on social media platforms, with many concerned citizens sharing comments ranging from “that’s so strange” to “that’s so fake.”
“It just seems like too much of a stretch,” said Michael Budenholzer, a resident of Phoenix, Arizona. “I mean, when Galileo said that the Earth was a sphere that orbited around the Sun, everyone called him crazy. And guess what? Everyone was right.”
The divide between those who believe the towers spread cancer and those who believe they spread cell service has sparked new research endeavors. Citizen-scientists of the former group have begun to take on what has been called “vigilante” research work, secretly cutting down cell service towers in their area and taking off their tinfoil protection to prove they are not developing cancer while the towers are inactive. Others have begun their own experimentations with ladders, using them to climb cell towers with their electronic devices to prove that the service there was better. This has led to multiple people falling to their deaths from the cell towers. As they fell, they were cited as stating that they had “lower ping than usual.”
Corporations, however, have already taken Hernandez’s findings as fact. Major cell service companies such as AT&T and T-Mobile have already begun establishing new cell towers around the country, while the National American Board for Cancer (NABC) has begun to delve into new cancer-spreading research to make up for the lack of cancer among the American population. Congress plans to reintroduce the Cell Tower Act that would legalize the construction of hundreds of thousands of new cell towers in lowerincome areas. This had previously been criticized by the general public, who believed that the building of cell towers would lead to increased cancer rates and therefore increase sales for big pharmaceutical companies. When asked about this theory, Robert Horry, one of the leading proponents of the Cell Tower Act, responded: “We’re not trying to give these people cancer. We just pump as much cheap crack as we can into these communities and get them addicted to give justification to our war on drugs, in turn allowing us to further suppress minority areas. We’re not monsters.”