
The town that banned Wi-Fi - edward
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/21/the-town-that-banned-wi-fi
======
beloch
"None of which gets round the core issue: if EHS is real, I asked Diane, then
why has it not shown up in formal experiments? “I encourage scientists to go
to where we are and measure the environment,” she replied. “Don’t try to
pretend that you’re God and expose us to different frequencies in a lab.
That’s like taking someone and breaking their legs and asking how much it
hurts.”"

Right, so we can't actually test your crippling sensitivity to EMF in a lab
even though, if it's as bad as you say it is, a double blind test to see if
you could reliably tell when a radio in a shoe-box is switched on ought to be
good enough.

\---

"the lack of proof from major studies is merely evidence of a conspiracy
between interested parties. “Conventional government-funded science isn’t a
reliable indicator of health defects,” she told me. “There’s a vested interest
in keeping the truth out of circulation."

So, beyond the fact that willing test subjects are hard to find, there's a
conspiracy to cover up evidence showing people really are "sensitives".

\---

"Like Meckna, Dacre felt that there were people claiming to be
electrosensitive who were nothing of the sort, who were queering the pitch for
the others: “You can tell at once who is just pretending,” she said. "

Even better, the test subjects we can round up are likely fakers!

\---

"“See those?” he asked.

“Aeroplane trails?”

“Not contrails – chemtrails,” he said. “The government sprays the air – it
gets in the atmosphere.” He paused and looked me in the eye. “The world needs
to know what’s happening here.” "

My suspicions about what's really going on here are beginning to coalesce...

~~~
scholia
Given that hundreds of millions of people live in cities like London, New
York, Tokyo etc that are completely covered with thousands of mobile phone
towers and thousands more Wi-Fi networks -- not to mention radio controlled
cars, baby monitors and all the other things that use the same frequencies as
Wi-Fi -- EHS is remarkably rare.

Really, Starbucks baristas should be dropping like flies.

However, the reality is that Wi-Fi sickness or EHS is not caused by Wi-Fi, it
is caused by stories about Wi-Fi. It is a Mass psychogenic illness.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness)

It's like a placebo effect, where fake pills can actually cure sick people (if
they believe that they will). However, because it's the opposite effect to a
placebo, it's called a nocebo.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo)

People really do get sick, even though there is no biological reason for them
to get sick.

Fortunately, most EHS victims just get the symptoms that are common to all
mass psychogenic illnesses, regardless of the imagined cause: headaches (67%),
dizziness or light-headedness (46%), nausea (41%) and so on. However. some
nocebo's can be fatal, eg witch-doctors.

Journalist training should really include information about nocebos because
writing or broadcasting about psychogenic illnesses can _cause_ psychogenic
illnesses.

As it is, however, almost all today's EHS sickness is most likely caused by
the people who are campaigning about EHS.

~~~
reagency
Placebos can only affect psych/neuro (and possibly hormonal) conditions, which
is the brain is biologically capable of changing things. Not all illnesses are
susceptible to placebo.

~~~
scholia
Indeed, placebos are not a good treatment for the vast majority of physical
illnesses. There's a big difference between _being_ better and _feeling_
better.

------
mistercow
>He held a meeting with some electrosensitives, and didn’t tell them he had a
mobile phone in his pocket. “They noticed at once. After that I was convinced.

Ah the good ol' base rate fallacy.

I can predict with around 90% accuracy whether a given American adult has a
cellphone on their person, simply by always answering "yes".

But I doubt you'd be impressed if I pointed at a random stranger and said
"That guy has a cell phone".

~~~
daemin
It's also likely that the electrosensitives have had this test run on them so
many times by ordinary people where "I'll just hide this radio device here
somewhere and see if they pick it up", that they get attuned to finding out
the hidden object, rather than actual sensitivity.

It would have been more amusing if he had the phone switched off already or no
phone at all and they asked him to switch it off.

------
cwyers
> None of which gets round the core issue: if EHS is real, I asked Diane, then
> why has it not shown up in formal experiments? “I encourage scientists to go
> to where we are and measure the environment,” she replied. “Don’t try to
> pretend that you’re God and expose us to different frequencies in a lab.
> That’s like taking someone and breaking their legs and asking how much it
> hurts.”

That would in fact let you determine if breaking someone's leg caused them
pain, though.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Also, we have probably tens of thousands of records of times that we either
intentionally or accidentally, but under heavy observation broke someone's
leg, and they seem to pretty reliably be disturbed by the incident. (We
actually have effectively done controlled experiments on leg breaking during
various times we used torture methods to kill people, and as you say, it turns
out that it hurt them.)

If the EMF people had a fraction of that evidence, everyone would take them
much more seriously.

~~~
saalweachter
We do break people's bones pretty regularly as part of a medical intervention.
The simplest case is just resetting a bone that healed crooked, but there are
countless other ways, like in open-heart surgery or an orthodontic procedure
that involves breaking the upper or lower jaw.

~~~
__z
Removal of impacted wisdom teeth (a common procedure) often involves removal
of bone.

~~~
girvo
I have a bit of bone right above my two front teeth that was removed -- right
in the middle of it was a random tooth. I like to think it was my egg-tooth,
but regardless, I was in rather a lot of pain after the operation; turns out
removing and breaking bone hurts quite a lot.

------
JohnTHaller
EHS always reminds me of the town in South Africa whose residents swore that a
broadband internet tower was causing headaches, skin rashes, tinnitus, and all
manner of maladies. They claimed it would take hours after they left the town
for their symptoms to subside, sometimes up to a couple days. While they were
continuing to complain at a town meeting, they did not know that the tower had
already been off weeks ago and yet they continued to complain about it causing
EHS symptoms. Even after learning they were wrong, they just kept fighting.

[http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-
revelat...](http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-
in-iburst-tower-battle.html)

------
protomyth
"She felt the hostility was best explained as a kind of conspiracy between the
ill-informed and Big Telephony."

or, just maybe, people don't like people who show up and demand everyone
change for their sake - see any entertainment venue / farmer that has a new
housing development show up in the next property over

------
tomohawk
If 'sensitives' are so impacted by this, perhaps they should buy up a bunch of
land in a valley in the boonies somewhere and create their own community?
Probably get better results than moving into an existing community and trying
to coerce people to change their ways.

~~~
batou
They aren't the most logical bunch.

My father is allergic to poultry apparently yet chows down on hot dogs made
mostly from turkey. Same level of batshit.

~~~
nitrogen
There was an episode of some TV show where someone thought they were allergic
to poultry but it was actually an allergy to the antibiotics in the poultry.
Maybe the parts of turkey or the processing methods used for hot dogs contain
less antibiotic residue?

~~~
batou
He was brought up on a farm in Switzerland in the 1950s before industrial
farming took off, so definitely not that.

I suspect it was a psychological thing after having to process chickens by
hand.

~~~
danieltillett
He may well be allergic to something in their feathers. While I am not a huge
fan of hot dogs and what goes into them I suspect that even the worst
manufacturers draw the line at letting feathers into the vat.

------
morgante
> US Cellular was the brand – I didn’t react to AT&T, Spring or Cellular One
> towers.

That's where I stopped reading.

Shame on the Guardian for giving these anti-science reactionaries the platform
for seeking the attention they so desperately crave.

~~~
kw71
I think the article is pretty good because they didn't filter out any of the
silliness on the part of some of these people. It really shines through to us
rational types and this piece gave me the biggest laughs I had today.

Also I don't know the details (the year and more details about the location
would help) but there is the chance that that one carrier used different
frequencies to the others. People, their dental works and medical implants
will all resonate at different frequencies. However if it turns out she was
reacting to only one carrier's AMPS towers (all US AMPS ran on 806-896 MHz)
it's total BS.

------
bane
Ignoring the crazy people in the article, I've driven through Greenbank a
number of times on the way to-from skiing in the region. There's not much of a
town there, it _really_ is out in the middle of nowhere, down in a valley.
You'll be driving along not having passed another car in the last hour and
suddenly there's a massive massive radio telescope sitting out in the middle
of what would probably be a farmer's field.

The town is more like a few houses dotted along a major road and a couple of
turn-offs with a few bunched up houses. My wife and I usually comment while
driving through something about how it must suck to be an engineer working on
the telescope and living there. I always wondered what sort of folks live
there and now I know.

This is the area if anybody's interested
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Green+Bank+Telescope/@38.4...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Green+Bank+Telescope/@38.432155,-79.839803,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x884b6ecff9104eb9:0x3091683ec4a98833)

You can get tours
[https://public.nrao.edu/tours/visitgbt](https://public.nrao.edu/tours/visitgbt)

~~~
jimminy
I'm from the area, a little town about 35 miles away, but living in the Bay
Area. The article doesn't really tell a good story about the folks living
there. Just the ecentric people that have started showing up relatively
recently.

Maybe growing up there, but I actually prefer the solitude. The interesting
thing about those few small houses is that you end up getting to know the
people in your area and around you pretty well. Nearly everyone. So I wouldn't
make the assumption that "it must suck".

I could make the same assumption about any over populated area, like the Bay
Area, because it's nearly impossible to really know your community and traffic
is horrible. Ugh, it must suck to be an engineer working on some startup and
living there.

~~~
bane
Yeah that's true.

I guess I should qualify my comment. I mean "it must suck" being in a
technical field, but in a real sense quite cut off from interaction with your
peers. It's actually a beautiful area, but I can't help but feel that people
could very easily feel out of their milieu there.

------
cmdrfred
This should be an easy condition to prove with a trial. Get two shoe boxes and
place them on them in two rooms, get two 'electrosentives' and place one in
each room. One of the shoeboxes has a WiFi router in it. Do this a bunch of
times and see if its any better than random chance.

~~~
zalzane
in the article it says they don't want to submit to testing

> None of which gets round the core issue: if EHS is real, I asked Diane, then
> why has it not shown up in formal experiments? “I encourage scientists to go
> to where we are and measure the environment,” she replied. “Don’t try to
> pretend that you’re God and expose us to different frequencies in a lab.
> That’s like taking someone and breaking their legs and asking how much it
> hurts.”

~~~
emiliobumachar
Their should be a signal intensity level high enough to be distinguishable
from nothing but still low enough to cause slight annoyance rather than
traumatic agony over a short period.

~~~
cwyers
One of the people in the story claims the florescent bulbs at the Dollar Store
triggered her condition. If that's the case, it should be REALLY easy to
verify some of these claims in a laboratory setting.

~~~
vsync
Heachaches caused by fluorescent lights are an entirely separate issue,
considering they produce flickery light at odd color temperatures with weird
peaks across the spectrum. Never mind that lots of establishments have things
way too bright, and probably failing sockets causing extra fluctuations as
well. I don't think it's disputed that anyone can see visible light.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I'll add to your comment that light sensitivity in general is a known issue
with many people (eg autistics). They actually feel pain from seeing lights
that are too bright including lots of sunlight or artificial light. So, one or
more of these people might have this condition.

~~~
vsync
Well, programmers historically have tended to stereotypically prefer a dimmer
milieu. Not to mention there are a number of simple physical injuries that can
cause photophobia: <URL:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophobia#Causes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophobia#Causes)
>

Overillumination has been known for some time to cause various other
deleterious health effects anyway, and flicker aside fluorescents just put out
plain terrible light. It completely baffles me why so many establishments
install it (well, workplaces; retailers like it because it makes you buy more
apparently).

~~~
nickpsecurity
Appreciate the link. It linked to something that applies to me: the photic
sneeze reflex. It really sucks haha.

------
assface
> "People come here because they say they can hear the electrics"

That phrase is straight out of a Deliverance-like horror film.

~~~
javajosh
I can hear CRTs and some lighting fixtures. It's a super high pitch. Not
painful - and is only useful to verify that a CRT is getting power on powerup,
before it's display turns on.

I hypothesize that if these people had some unusually high metallic content in
the skin/bone in/around their inner ear that moves slightly in response to EMR
then that might actually do something to them, like trigger complex migraines.
You'd need two highly unlikely (and unlucky) problems for this to be real, but
it's not exactly the same as Morgellons[1]. Also, tooth fillings + bone
conduction can pick up radio signals, so I'm not sure why these people are
being dismissed so quickly as psychiatric cases.

Diane's demanding nature sounds like it caused more problems for her than her
condition.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons)

~~~
dedward
What you are hearing is plain old sound - higher frequency, in the ranges we
tend to lose first with time and age. In both the TV and light fixtures, you
are hearing the transformer coils physically shifting.

I hear them too.

Tooth fillings and bone conduction could pick up AM signals, because of the
nature of AM.

~~~
steve19
Getting older and losing these frequencies has been a blessing. Switch power
supplies and old school LCD screens (or the switching power supply used to
power them), like those on my palm pilot and other electronics used to really
bug me when I young. I am sure modern LED light fixtures would have driven me
crazy.

I am sure I cannot appreciate music as well, in fact I have sold almost all my
high end audio gear, but I will take the lack of high-frequency sounds in
everyday life over slightly better range when listening to music.

~~~
eropple
I have Hue lights in my house and can't hear them. But I can hear CFLs and
it's piercing.

------
sxcurry
I live near a town (Ashland OR) full of wingnuts who are worried about EMF,
chem trails, and vaccinations. My question: with so many real things to worry
about, why focus on false ones?

~~~
girvo
It helps them feel special, and that they know things that everyone doesn't.

------
danmaz74
> US Cellular was the brand – I didn’t react to AT&T, Spring or Cellular One
> towers

...

------
sean-duffy
A pretty good treatment of the whole idea of 'EHS' in a fictional context can
be seen in the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Caul Saul, where the main
character has to care to his brother, who claims to have EHS.

------
pbiggar
If they decided to do it, is there a (legal) way for Green Bank to prevent
electrosensitive people from moving there?

~~~
rblatz
Put up city-wide wifi.

~~~
cwyers
Well, they can't -- the law requires the town not interfere with the radio
telescope there.

~~~
gurtwo
Might be enough to just pretend they did

------
reillyse
From reading the article. Turns out they didn't actually ban wifi. It's just
not very prevalent in the town. It's not illegal but the observatory might ask
you to stop.

~~~
rdc12
The more intersting part is the cause and effect. A perfectly sane and
techincal reason for the restriction of wifi, and the effect being people
turning up for that reason.

From the headline I was expecting some woo people, had managed to ban wifi in
a town. (reversed cause and effect)

------
busterarm
I thought when NAS came around we were gonna get cool, drug-addict symptoms
like the black shakes...but headaches and skin-rashes?

Lame.

~~~
bitwize
Fun fact: Gibson got the idea for NAS from Pana Wave, a Japanese cult whose
members believe that ordinary radio waves are harmful and go around in white
sheets or something.

------
anti-shill
I wonder whether any of these nonprofit organizations that publicize the
problems of ‘Electrosensitive’ people are funded by cable and internet
companies.

~~~
vidarh
Probably very few given that pretty much all ISPs these days assume that
everyone wants wifi routers.

~~~
anti-shill
you are not getting me...back when it looked like cities might be using
powerlines to build their own internet infrastructure in combination with
wireless, there was a sudden burst of concern about wireless causing health
problems. Then for some reason the possibility of such networks went away. And
at the same time, the complaints about wireless went away. It seemed to me
that such networks were a threat to companies such as comcast, time warner.

So, I wondered whether time warner, comcast et al, were funding these
complaints via nonprofit foundations.

~~~
kw71
You are confused, are misinformed, or misunderstand.

BPL did not take hold because it fundamentally caused interference to HF
radio. BPL itself has nothing to do with wireless anything.

It is not the usual case that cities own powerlines. The cities that do own
such utilities have generally preferred to lay fiber instead of experiment
with BPL, as they frequently own utilities that deliver telephony and video
services.

~~~
anti-shill
that is a moot point...my statements above stand...

