Somewhere in an IEEE archive sits a paper nobody outside the field will ever read, proposing a seventh generation of wireless network — frequencies beyond terahertz, neuromorphic chips that process data the way a brain does, sensors so dense the network doesn’t just connect devices, it perceives the world continuously, everywhere, all at once.
It’s decades from a commercial date. Most of the researchers working on it would tell you frankly that half the physics isn’t solved yet. But the problem it’s already wrestling with is one System of a Down named twenty-five years ago, and it has nothing to do with speed.
The generation that finally admits the real limit
Every generation of wireless network up to now solved a bandwidth problem. 4G solved “not enough data can move fast enough to stream video on a train.”
5G solved “not enough data can move with low enough delay to run a factory floor or a remote surgical robot.”
6G, still not commercially live anywhere on earth, solves a stranger problem: the network stops being a pipe and starts being a nervous system — sensing, interpreting, and acting on meaning in real time, not just shuttling raw bytes from A to B.
7G research is circling something stranger still. The early academic papers talk about near-field terahertz communication, jamming vulnerability at frequencies above 100 gigahertz, sensor networks so dense they blur into continuous perception rather than discrete connection events.
One paper I read this week, buried in a research repository, spends an entire section on the vulnerability of these ultra-high-frequency links to interference — because at that density and that frequency, the system built to sense everything can also be overwhelmed by everything, deliberately or not.
Strip away the jargon and you’re left with a question a body asks when it’s overfed: at what point does more input stop being nourishment and start being poison?
That is not a metaphor I am forcing onto the engineering literature. It is close to a literal restatement of what saturation means in a sensing network.
Too much signal, too close together, too fast — and the system doesn’t get smarter. It gets noisier. It loses the ability to tell what matters from what doesn’t.
What the song actually said
“Toxicity” — the album, the word, the accusation buried in that one syllable — was never really about drugs or industrial pollution as literal subjects, whatever the surface imagery suggested.
It was about a culture consuming past the point of benefit and mistaking the volume of consumption for progress. More noise treated as more meaning.
More access treated as more understanding. More input treated as automatically, unquestionably good. Twenty-five years on, the engineers designing the network after the network after next are running headfirst into the identical wall — they’ve just relabelled it in petabits and gigahertz instead of guitar riffs and a scream.
That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is easy to assume technology and culture argue past each other — that a research paper on terahertz jamming vulnerability and a nu-metal record from 2001 have nothing to say to one another.
They do. Both are describing the same failure mode: a system, human or technical, that keeps adding input without ever building a mechanism to ask whether the input is worth having.
Why this belongs in a column about Sarawak, not just gadgets
We’ve spent three weeks in this column chasing infrastructure. Coverage percentages. Who owns the fibre.
Whether Sarawak sits at the standards table or just pays the bill someone else negotiated. Whether a future network could help preserve a dialect with a few hundred living speakers left.
Every one of those arguments quietly assumed the same thing: that more connectivity, built and owned correctly, is straightforwardly good.
7G’s own research literature doesn’t let that assumption stand unchallenged. A network that senses continuously, everywhere, doesn’t just need more bandwidth and a seat in the standards alliance.
It needs a filter — a deliberate, human decision about what deserves to be sensed, transmitted, and acted upon, and what should simply be allowed to pass unrecorded.
Without that filter, total connectivity and total noise become the same thing wearing different names.
Sarawak chasing 5G coverage numbers, and eventually 6G readiness, and eventually whatever 7G becomes, without ever asking that second, harder question, risks building the most thoroughly connected version of exactly the toxicity the album was named for.
Total access. Zero discernment. A longhouse, a newsroom, a music studio, a child’s bedroom — all of them wired into a system engineered to sense everything, with nobody having decided what’s actually worth hearing.
This is not an argument against infrastructure. I have spent three columns making the opposite case, and I stand by every word of it.
Sarawak needs the fibre, needs the manufacturing capability, needs the standards-table seat. But infrastructure without discernment is just a faster road to the same overwhelm, built with better engineering.
The lesson sitting inside 7G research — decades before a single commercial tower goes up — is that the generation after the AI-native network still hasn’t solved the oldest problem in communication: knowing when to stop adding channels and start asking what’s worth saying through the ones you already have.
The Practice
Before your next scroll, your next notification, your next “just checking” — ask what a screaming Armenian-American rock band asked a generation ago, in a language that had nothing to do with terahertz or neuromorphic chips: is this input feeding you, or just filling you? The network of 2050 will be able to sense everything, everywhere, continuously, without pause.
It will still be on us — not the engineers, not the standards bodies, not the telcos bidding for spectrum — to decide what deserves to be heard.
That decision has never once belonged to the technology.
It has always belonged to whoever is holding the phone, or standing in the longhouse, or raising the child who will inherit whichever generation of network we hand them.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
