Was the town of Lahaina decimated by a giant space laser?
I don’t know, and neither do you. None of us were there; videos and photos can be deep-faked; and there are a lot of disinformation agents out there. Personally I doubt it.
But really it doesn’t matter. Lahaina was certainly destroyed, and it sure as heck wasn’t down to climate change. Sorry, LA Times, the poor families of Lahaina are not “climate refugees” no matter how much you try to spin it that way. The planet would have to get an awful lot warmer for towns to spontaneously combust. Wildfires, strong winds, and outdated electrical equipment are currently the media’s favoured culprits, yet given the recent fires in Greece, and Canada were down to arson, it’s not a huge stretch to suspect that the Maui fire was too.
But why Lahaina?
Well, the LA Times has unwittingly given us a clue:
“Lahaina is different from other vacation spots on Maui […] where the community was created for outsiders. There, you’ll find the Ritz-Carltons and Fairmonts, the 18-hole golf courses and gated second or third homes of the wealthy. Residents of Lahaina, by contrast, “are a community that depends on each other,” [Carmen “Hulu”] Lindsey, [chair of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs] said. “They are almost like a whole big family”.”
Interesting… And then there’s this report:
“Can you imagine calling up a family that has just seen their home burn to the ground and offering to buy their land for below market value? This is apparently happening in Hawaii right now on a massive scale.”
Governor Josh Green is outraged.
“You would be pretty poorly informed if you try to steal land from our people and then build here,” Green said in a press release Monday, positioning himself as the champion of the people.
But it turns out Green isn’t entirely on the up-and-up either.
The Hawaiian governor Josh Green revealed plans for the state to potentially purchase properties in the seaside town of Lahaina, which was devastated by the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history.
“I’m already thinking of ways for the state to acquire that land so that we can put it into workforce housing, to put it back into families, or make it open spaces in perpetuity as a memorial to the people who were lost,” Green commented amid the ruins.
So Lahaina, a tight-knit traditional community which for years has held out against developers and market pressures just happens to be the location of a flash wildfire that no one saw coming (wildfires were ranked ‘low threat’ in a recent preparedness survey), and now commercial interests and the government are fighting over who gets to seize the land out from under the displaced residents. Isn’t that convenient?
No, it’s suspicious as hell. And top of the list of theories (other than those space lasers) is that what Josh Green really wants to do with Lahaina is build a smart city.
But what is a smart city? And can we all expect to have our homes burned down in the near future to make way for one?
It’s time to take this week’s Deep Dive…
What is a Smart City?
In its simplest terms, a smart city is one in which everything (and I do mean everything) is constantly monitored to ensure that everything is running to maximum efficiency. The aim is to collect enough data at all times to be in a position to effectively manage every detail of how the city is run. The term ‘smart city’ was coined by IBM in 2008.
Smart cities, which are now 10 years in the making, are extremely reliant upon state of the art communications technologies such as fibre optic cabling and 5G, as well as oodles of server power, to ensure a steady stream of data – and the ability to hold and effectively process that data – in centralised data hubs to make in-the-moment decisions about how to manage resources.
If you like planning and orderliness, you’ll love smart cities.
Advocates of smart cities, such as the Smart Cities Council, say that smart cities will “make the world safer, more activated, beautiful, sustainable, equitable and resilient for everyone.” But will they?
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