“The update has failed successfully”

Dehradun, Aisha squints at her smart-glasses as they dim the sunlight streaming through her window. The lens AI mistakes her sleepy yawn for “emotional fatigue” and schedules a five-minute breathing session. She groans. That’s the third time this week. The glasses send a summary to her school’s wellness dashboard. A teacher must be emotionally optimized - always.

In the next room, her grandmother, Radha Devi, struggles to open a stainless-steel tiffin box with a fingerprint lock. It was a part of a local government initiative - “NutriTrack for Naani”, they called it. Except that the fingerprint scanner had updated overnight and no longer recognized wrinkles. Radha Devi is locked out of her lunch. Again!

Outside, on the city’s fringes, a farmer, Shyamveer Singh, watches a drone buzz over his wheat field. It scans soil moisture, clicks multispectral images, and pings a local edge computing node parked under a solar-powered banyan tree. The node calculates that irrigation must wait for a couple of hours. Shyamveer nods, trusting it more than he ever did the weather news. His son, however, wonders if the delay is actually an algorithmic bias- because their node, unlike those in Punjab, is second-hand, donated, and three software versions behind.

1500 kilometres away in Bengaluru, Anirudh, a 25-year-old GenZ coder, leans back in his ergonomic chair. He is debugging a ‘sentiment analysis module’ for a startup that predicts civic unrest using neighbourhood CCTV footage. His edge AI model runs on a mesh of smart-city surveillance feeds. “The client’s from the US,” he mutters, sipping his coffee. “Wants to predict protests before they happen.” His room reeks of burnt wires and idealism. He once dreamt of open-source revolutions. Now he optimizes crowd-monitoring tools. The pay is good. His conscience - buffered

And in a forested district of Odisha, a 14-year-old Malati taps gently on a weatherproof tablet mounted on a bamboo post. The UI is in Kui, her tribal language. She adjusts the settings of an IoT irrigation valve attached to her community’s shared farmland. Last year, an NGO dropped off a solar-edge station and left. Since then, the girls of the village have self-taught their way through online manuals, working between school and sowing season.

Malati is proud. She knows when the dew will settle, when the pests might come. She doesn’t know her data is routed through a private server in Delhi- sold in anonymized chunks to agritech firms she’s never heard of.

At some later time in the day, teacher, grandma, farmer, coder, tribal teen - are connected. Not just to each other, but to a network humming with satellites, towers, sensors and codes. It’s fast, it’s frugal. It’s futuristic.

It’s also watching!

Five lives.One signal.Invisible, however, inescapable.

Welcome to India, 2030!

The nation that leapfrogged straight from patchy 3G towers to satellite-fed 5G highways, bypassing not just generations of tech but, in some cases, human consent. It’s efficient. It’s equitable- on paper. And it is omnipresent.

Except in the shadows, where cables snake under dusty roads and promises of empowerment silently short-circuit.

“Speed Sells. So Does Control.”

In the offices of India’s NITI Aayog, the word “frictionless” has become a religion. Frictionless governance. Frictionless delivery. Frictionless futures.

But speed is not just an economic variable anymore-it’s political leverage.

The Infrastructure of Profit and Power

5G is not just a faster way to stream YouTube. It is the spine of the new economy-one where latency is currency. In smart factories, even a few milliseconds of delay can derail precision robotics. In finance, trading firms pay premiums to edge-host their servers closer to exchange nodes, shaving microseconds off deal executions. And in agriculture, AI-powered drones adjust fertilizers in real time, altering crop yields and commodity prices across mandis.

This tech is not ornamental; it’s infrastructural. But that’s exactly what makes it political.

Who lays the 5G towers? Who gets the spectrum licenses? Who owns the cloud that processes the edge data?

In India, while Jio and Airtel race to “light up” the nation, their infrastructural partners quietly shift from Swedish and Finnish equipment to custom mixes - sometimes Chinese, sometimes American, depending on the geopolitics of the quarter.

Even the ground beneath a Smart Pole is geopolitics in concrete.

Creative destruction, Version 5.0

Joseph Schumpeter once romanticized capitalism as a force of “creative destruction”-new industries demolishing old ones in the name of progress. What we are witnessing now is not just creative destruction - it is accelerated obsolescence.

Artisans are replaced by 3D printers fed design from IoT dashboards.

Delivery boys now compete with autonomous edge-guided bots.

Handicraft vendors are outcompeted by AI-curated AR shopping pods in smart malls.

Data farmers - yes, that’s the real gig now-train village women to label AI datasets for pennies per click. It’s digital piecework. Taylorism, but in the cloud.

We have created a new underclass: the Updatable Poor. Those whose jobs, skills, and even identities must be patched like buggy software to remain compatible with the speed of capital.

Governance in the Age of Gigahertz

From agriculture to Aadhaar, governance is now a mesh of edge-linked decisions.

Subsidy delivery through real-time Aadhaar verification.

Fertilizer release controlled by soil-IoT data and regional yield metrics.

Public health alerts that draw on wearable data from state-sponsored FitTechs.

The “edge-state” operates in whispers. Decisions once made in Parliament are now guided by dashboards. Bureaucrats defer to algorithms. Policies adjust themselves. Democracy learns to scale - on Kubernetes.

Sounds efficient? Perhaps.

But in this frictionless world, there is no space for slowness, dissent or ambiguity.

And when everything is optimized, who gets optimized out?

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Indeed, the more India connects, the more visible the disconnects become.

Society and Generations - “We Are All Latency Now”

In the age of edge, the edge is not just technical. It is psychological. Social. Generational.

The older ones feel it as displacement.

The young feel it as dissonance.

And the kids? They are born into it - native to the noise, allergic to the pause.

The Elderly: From Wisdom to Compatibility Issues.

Radha Devi, the octogenarian from Dehradun, sits by the window of her two-bedroom apartment, clutching a palm-sized device that her son insists she keep on her at all times. “It will call us if something happens, “he had said, handing her a fall-alert bracelet with a blinking LED.

She misses the landline. It had a familiar ring - solid, like her husband’s laugh before dementia took his voice. The new device doesn’t ring. It beeps. And it vibrates, once every hour, reminding her to hydrate.

Radha devi is not anti-technology. She has seen India transform - from telegrams to telemedicine. But she feels less a participant, more a problem to be managed.

The hospital app won’t let her book an appointment because her Aadhar-linked phone number expired last year. The new wearable gifted by her daughter in Singapore syncs only to smartphones, not to people.

Even prayers feel unfamiliar. Her local temple now conducts daily aartis on Facebook Live. When the priest goes live, she gets a push notification: “Shree Kasi Vishwanath Mandir is broadcasting.”

She wonders if God is buffering too!

Once her knowledge of herbs, monsoons, and family rituals held her household together. Now, her grandchildren trust Google over her.

No one is to blame.

But Radha Devi, like many in her generation, now exists in a world that no longer reads her fluently. She is a legacy system in a wireless world, patched in for sentiment, but rarely for substance.

Gen Z: The optimized Self

Anirudh, our GenZ coder, is emblematic of his generation’s burden. They are expected to code solutions to crises they did not create. Climate change? AI will optimize it. Loneliness? There’s an app. Employment? Gig, remote, freelance, hustle.

They live on the edge - of networks, of burnout.

Hyperconnected yet anxious.

High agency, low direction.

Raised on TED Talks and TikToks, they believe every social problem can be solved with the right stack.

And when it can’t, they crash - harder than any server ever did.

Parents: Surveillance as Love

For the sandwich generation—those raising children while caring for aging parents—technology feels like both blessing and betrayal.

A father tracks his son’s glucose monitor through his smartwatch.

A mother monitors her daughter’s “emotional engagement” scores from the school AI portal.

A son gets a push notification when his mother’s pacemaker misses a beat.

It’s efficient. It's caring.

But somewhere between concern and control, love becomes a dashboard.

The Rural and Remote: Between Access and Extraction

And Malati, the tribal girl in Odisha? She symbolizes both promise and peril.

With edge computing and 5G mesh nets, her village finally has access—to markets, weather forecasts, and learning.

But every click she makes becomes data—harvested, sold, and profiled.

For every marginalized community empowered by digital inclusion, there’s a risk of being surveilled, shaped, and steered in directions they did not choose.

The generational contract has been rewritten.

Not in ink, but in code.

Not in parliament, but in the fine print of an app’s terms and conditions.

Gendered Implications - “Who holds the remote?”

In a sun-baked village in Rajasthan, a woman ties her dupatta tightly as she prepares to step into a local government e-mitra center. It’s a small concrete room with a single desktop, powered by a solar battery and shared Wi-Fi. She is here to check her MGNREGA payment status and apply for a new identity-linked crop subsidy.

The operator - barely older than her own son - greets her, but not with kindness. He takes her thumbprint, asks for her husband’s phone number for the OTP, and proceeds to “assist” her.

She stands silently, watching her own data travel screens she cannot read.

The woman doesn’t own a smartphone.

Her husband does.

The SIM is in his name.

The bank account too.

Her labour, her rights - digitally traceable - but not digitally autonomous.

Meanwhile in Mumbai, another woman works from her edge-connected apartment in a tech park. She is a product manager at a major agritech startup. She tracks rainfall patterns in Telangana, monitors farmer sentiment via chatbot, and builds predictive pricing tools - all without leaving her place.

This woman is what her counterpart in Rajasthan might become - if the road, the language, and the gatekeepers were different.

But even our working mumbaikar woman senses it: the gender load hasn’t left, it has digitized.

Zoom meetings are interrupted by doorbells. Slack messages arrive even as she cooks. Her productivity is measured in dashboards, not in dignity. Her success is real but always underlined by unpaid, unseen, unending work.

Technology has not removed patriarchy. It has reskinned it with dashboards and tokens.

And beneath it all is data - constantly collected, rarely consented.

The NGO that tracks menstrual health in Bihar does not always anonymize. The women don’t know that their period logs are stored in cloud servers owned by a U.S. - based analytics firm. One woman, who shared her HIV status via the app, saw her brother approached for a clinical trial she never signed up for.

This isn’t dystopia. It’s our reality, just unevenly distributed.

For every story of empowerment - women farmers using IoT to bypass middlemen, urban girls learning to code, housewives earning through remote work - there are stories of new dependencies:

• A girl needing permission to recharge her internet pack.
• A woman whose wearables tracks her heartbeat for prenatal health - but not her consent.
• A trans youth whose facial recognition scans fail, because the system doesn’t recognize their existence.

The question isn’t “Can women access tech?”

It’s “On whose terms, under whose gaze, and with what trade-offs?”

We imagined that with data, women would be empowered.

Instead in many spaces, they are more visible, but still unheard.

As Simone de Beauvoir once said, “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”

Today we must ask:

Are we rewriting the code of power or simply refactoring the old scripts?

The Invisible Users - Kids, The Disabled, and the Uncoded

“If you’re not designed into the system, the system designs around you.”

In a school for children with neurodivergence in Chennai, a boy taps repeatedly on a screen that does not respond fast enough. His diagnosis includes sensory processing disorder, and latency - barely 200 milliseconds to most - is an eternity to him.

The school recently upgraded to a 5G-backed smart classroom.

The sensors track eye movement. The AI adjusts curriculum difficulty in real time.

Everything is optimized.

Except for the boy!

He flinches when the robotic assistant approaches. He avoids eye contact with the facial tracking cameras.

The very system meant to “adapt” to him demands conformity. Intelligence is artificial and therefore empathy is not embedded.

In rural Jharkhand, a septuagenarian lady lives with progressive vision loss. Her village is now part of a Smart Panchayat pilot. Water meter beep, medicine alerts come via SMS, and solar panels upload data to a dashboard she has never seen.

Her grandson tells her it’s progress.

She wonders why she feels more alone!

The world is talking to her through touchscreens she can’t see, apps she can’t read, voices she can’t trust. The doctor told her to scan her health ID QR code to get subsidized medicine. She said, “Can I just tell you my name?”

Elsewhere in Bengaluru, a tech meetup debates the next layer of optimization in “digital twins” real-time virtual replicas of humans for personalized healthcare and productivity.

Someone asks: “How do we represent the homeless?”

The room fell silent.

In this future of edge-enabled precision, you must be locatable, measurable, streamable.

What about the stateless refugee child without documentation?

What about the tribal woman with no fingerprints due to years of hard manual work?

What about the disabled man whose hand tremors confuse biometric sensors?

They are not just underrepresented.

They are unrendered. The system can’t simulate them, so it silently excludes them.

This isn’t failure.

It is the byproduct of design built around those already centered.

Tech dreams of totality - a mapped world, an optimized life, a quantified soul. But what happens to those who do not fit the mold?

Virginia Eubanks warned of this in Automating Inequality. “Predictive systems and risk modelling don’t eliminate bias; they launder it through layers of code and call it objectivity.”

As we move toward an IoT-5G ecosystem, those who don’t produce clean data - or whose lives don’t fit into predictive models - begin to vanish.

Not by violence.

But by irrelevance.

And irrelevance, in a world run by sensors, is a death of another kind.

The Geopolitical Chessboard - Who controls the signal?

“In the age of signal, sovereignty is signal ownership.”

In 2024, a tiny hamlet in Arunachal Pradesh suddenly lit up on the global map - not because of tourism or tragedy, but because it became one of the first testbeds for a Starlink-supplied, edge-computing agricultural pilot.

The villagers, previously beyond the digital grid, now had real-time access to weather updates, automated pest detection, and market price forecasts.

Al they had to do was say YES !

Yes - to a satellite constellation managed by a private company in the West.

Yes - to edge servers whose updates they could not audit.

Yes - to connectivity that did not belong to them.

What they did not know was this:

Every byte of sensor data, soil condition, humidity reading, and crop yield estimates wasn’t just helping them.

It was training a machine thousands of miles away - building models that could one day outprice their own labour.

They were not just users.

They were or are data colonies.

Welcome to the new Cold War - fought not over oil or land, but over signal, data, latency, and who controls the edge.

China’s BeiDou satellite system competes with America’s GPS and SpaceX’s Starlink. India eyes autonomy with NavIC and Bharti’s OneWeb. Africa is divided between Chinese digital infrastructure projects and Western cloud providers.

This is not mere “infrastructure development.”

This is digital colonialism with fiber optics and satellite dishes.

Control the signal, and you control:

• Time (via synchronized devices)
• Space (via GPS and geofencing)
• Speech (via filtered connectivity)
• Commerce (via pricing algorithms)

When 5G towers went up in the Baltics, local protestors did not just object to radiation. They feared surveillance hardware pre-installed on telecom routers from “foreign partners.”

These weren’t conspiracy theorists. These were citizens in a proxy war of bandwidth.

Edge computing when localized, promises sovereignty - our data processed when it is born. However when those edge servers are maintained by third-party vendors or foreign firms, we have simply relocated the leash, not removed it.

In Ukraine, mesh networks powered by drones allowed citizens to bypass blackout zones. In Myanmar, 5G routers were used to trace protestors movement.

You can’t protest what you can’t access.

You can’t build if your bandwidth depends on a satellite owned by someone else’s government.

This is the dark truth:

The more “smart” a region becomes, the more surgically it can be disabled.

Data may be the new oil, but unlike oil, it flows both ways - empowering and extracting, enabling and exposing.

In this race for the future, who will be the winners?

Countries that own the spectrum?

Corporations that build the backhaul?

Communities that negotiate their bandwidth like land?

Or will we all become tenants on a digital land we no longer own?

As the late historian Yuval Noah Harari warned, “The hand that holds the data owns the future.”

And if we aren’t careful, that hand may be our own.

The Mirror Stage - Possible Futures, Fractured Realities

“We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us.” - Marshall McLuhan

In a mid-rise building in Gurgaon, a young couple, both in tech, raise their toddler amidst an AI-powered nursery. The crib measures oxygen saturation. The milk warmer syncs with her hunger cycles.

Everything is connected. Everything learns.

But the child grows up whispering to Siri, not people.

She turns to sensors for comfort, not parents.

By the time she’s ten, she’s tracked in a dozen datasets - academic aptitude, behavioral risk, dietary log.

Her future is predicted before she makes her choices.

In contrast, in the Sunderbans, a teenage girl uses an agri-IoT dashboard installed by a local NGO. It tells her when to plant and when to harvest, using rainfall data from 5G-linked edge servers on the Bangladesh border.

Her father used to rely on the moon and stories from elders.

She relies on graphs and alerts.

But when a cyclone hits and the cloud goes down, the tech stops talking.

She’s alone again, but now without ancestral knowledge - tech replaced it without preserving it.

In the metros, GenZ coders build apps to “optimize happiness.” Their careers are forged in latency-reduced ecosystems. A new caste emerges - not of wealth, but of bandwidth.

Low latency = High status

Unplugged = Invisible

Across gated communities, the elderly live in sensor-augmented solitude. Their movements are monitored, their fridges send refill alerts, their fall detectors text the nurse.

They are safe.

They are also unsurprised, untouched, and unvisited.

We asked for smart homes.

We got sentient surveillance.

We imagined liberation.

We got micromanaged existence.

Three Futures from Here:

• The Networked Utopia: Edge computing becomes local, open-source, and community owned. Farmers such as Shyamveer Singh become data citizens, not data mines. Children learn coding and compassion in equal measure. Public bandwidth becomes a right, not a product. The village and the cloud talk as equals.
• The Corporate State: Starlink, Amazon Sidewalk, Jio 5G - each builds its own feudal stack. Your access to education, jobs, even love is determined by your device’s compatibility with the “right network.” Edge devices become gatekeepers to citizenship. You don’t live in a city. You live in an ecosystem with Terms of Service.
• The Fragmented Mirror: Different realities evolve in parallel- high-speed urban centers, slow-zoned rural edges, black-box refugee camps.

Children in Silicon Valley program drones.

Children in Syria dodge them.

Both are shaped by 5G, but not equally. Not even similarly.

And in between? A weary world that wakes up and asks:

What did we trade for convenience? What did we silence in the name of speed?

“Signal is Sovereignty, Who Will Hold It?”

We need not fear the future. But we must begin building it with tools designed not just to see—but to see justly.

If the “Networked Utopia” is to move from concept to reality, it cannot rest on good intentions alone. A few design principles may illuminate our way forward:

• Inclusive, not just Efficient Designs: Imagine a biometric system that uses multi-modal recognition - voice, gesture, even community verification - to serve elders like Radha Devi or those with worn fingerprints. Or an education platform that adapts not just to pace, but to neurodiversity, language and offline accessibility.
• Balance Promise and Peril: Malati’s story is one of Pride and Peril. Acknowledging the empowerment offered by access - weather alerts, market prices, learning - strengthens the critique. It reveals how the promise seduced before the peril surfaced. To protect the vulnerable, we must first understand what drew them in.
• From Ethics to Execution: Localized governance must go beyond token consultations. Community-owned edge networks, open-data cooperatives, and public audit rights for algorithms are not utopian dreams - they are infrastructural necessities if agency is to be redistributed and not merely symbolized.

The promise of IoT, 5G, and edge computing isn’t evil, however it isn’t a salvation either.

It is infrastructure - one with immense power to uplift, connect and protect.

But only if its design includes the invisible, its governance involves the local, and its profits do not depend on the ignorance of its users.

It must be remembered:

Technology moves faster than ethics.

But it need not outrun our humanity.

If tomorrow’s world is built on smart connections, let us make sure we remain the authors of the algorithm, not just its output.

Because in the end, the most important edge isn’t computational.

It’s moral.

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