Avatar 5G by bob schroeder

The digital illustration shows a generic internet avatar with a flat smartphone pressed to their ear, interwoven with psychedelic-looking coloured waves. The graphic is minimalist and striking; the colour palette includes purple, violet, blue and black. The design is reminiscent of a 1970s wallpaper pattern. The mood of the image can be described as ironic and light-hearted. 'Warum ruft mich eigentlich keiner mehr an' , Herb snapped indignantly and repeatedly tapped his clattering handheld device against the bare exposed aggregate concrete—scarred by his repeated raging outbursts over the decades—before hurling it angrily with every ounce of human energy he could muster into the steel front door. The mobile flashed one last time, as if offended, and fell silent. It was the most thunderous silence that a sleep-deprived administrator of an unofficial chat group for the informal resistance against the all-pervading digitalisation of the wretched city could ever have imagined.
I nodded uneasily and considered the possibility of a eerie existence inside one of those notorious, oversized snow globes I’d read about in internet forums beyond the authorities’ control, deliberately operating outside mainstream society. But what on earth had that been, snow? Thousands upon thousands of tiny self-steering drones, swirling like dust flakes in irregular patterns through the sections visible to us, in order to update our movement profiles and feed in an update of our pre-determined articulation options.