Will the CA Fires Facilitate Plans to Turn Los Angeles into a “Smart” City?

Let's Look at What's Up Ahead

(photo by Steven Newcomb) Looking toward LAX Airport and the Pacific Palisades fire on the morning of Jan. 8.

The devastating and deadly fires in northern Los Angeles County have focused much needed attention on the idea of “smart cities,” which is part of the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Recently, a strange accusation surfaced on the internet: The fires were intentionally set to clear a path that the City of Los Angeles (L.A.) will use to complete its transition to a model “smart” digital city by the time the 2028 Olympics are hosted by Los Angeles.

On January 9, 2024, the website Politifact published an article by Maria Briceño evaluating the statement that, “California wildfires ‘are a deliberate criminal land grab in preparation for [the U.N.’s] Agenda 2030 and smart cities.’”

Ms. Briceño writes, “The SmartLA 2028 initiative doesn’t propose rebuilding the city.” It merely proposes to add “smart” “technology to improve residents’ lives.” She points out that “installing smart city technology in a city would not require intentional destruction of existing infrastructure.” (emphasis added)

But does this mean there is no proposal in the works to, in a sense, rebuild parts of Los Angeles? Part of the momentum for “smart cities” is a 2015 United Nations General Assembly Resolution (A/70/L.1), “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The “Goals and targets” of the Agenda “will stimulate action over the next 15 years in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet.” We’re now only five years away from that target date.

On January 31, 2024, the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency (ITA) issued its “2024 & 2025 Strategic Plan.” In the report’s Introduction, General Manager Ted Ross, says the ITA uses “strategic planning and execution to focus limited resources on overcoming key challenges to enable the City of Los Angeles to meet its full potential.”

He also states that this “ITA Strategic Plan has been developed at a critical time in the history of Los Angeles, building on the progress made during the pandemic towards a ‘new better’ (not just a new normal).”

The plan for a “new” and “better” Los Angeles corresponds to the expression “2.0,” meaning “a new and improved version or example of something.” One way to create something judged as “better,” is by disposing of and replacing an existing thing or condition with something else. It’s often accurate to say that an older version gets “supplanted,” a term meaning “to uproot; to eradicate, often so as to replace.”

The Indian Removal Act of the nineteenth century helps illustrate the pattern: Native peoples were forcibly uprooted and removed by the U.S. government to the Indian Territory, thereby enabling Euro-Christian communities to replace the Native peoples and establish their domination on traditional Native lands. Native people in California were also killed or forcibly moved to make way for the development and expansion of California as a state [of domination].

The ITA report continues: “To accomplish this [new better], we must improve the quality and quantity of City digital services (digital information), provide opportunities & safeguards for AI [Artificial Intelligence] and emerging technologies, build smart city tools to facilitate L.A.’s upcoming global events, and recruit top-tier IT human resources . . . Simply put, this plan summarizes our environment, focus, key challenges, and strategic priorities for 2024 & 2025.”

Regarding major global events coming to Los Angeles, the report explains that as a result of “the recent COVID-19 Pandemic,” and the City’s planning for “major global events coming to L.A. (e.g. 2026 World Cup, 2027 Super Bowl, 2028 Olympics, etc.),” “digital tools have become fundamental methods of engaging [with] and delivering services to the public. In short, Angelenos expect online and easy-to-use ‘contactless services’.”

The term “contactless” means the transition toward people receiving City services without the need for human contact and interaction.

According to the narrative structure of the Smart City Paradigm, everyone is a “customer” traveling on a life-journey. In a fully operational “smart city,” all the comings and goings of the residents will be intricately surveilled, by means of Artificial Intelligence (see also), and the Internet of Things every second of every day.

This information is converted into monetizable surveillance data which, in turn, is to be converted into corporate profits pursuant to public-private contracts. Keep in mind that the Olympics, for example, is big business. “Olympic gold” is not restricted to the medals.

A gold miner panning for gold is depicted on every California driver’s license.

That image should serve as a reminder of the Gold Rush Era of the nineteenth century which resulted in genocide being perpetrated against the Native peoples of California, the ongoing effects of which are still reverberating for Native peoples.

Now the global society has arrived at the Data-Gold-Rush Era of the twenty-first century with human liberty and trillions of dollars on the line.

It’s true, as Ms. Briceño states, that the installation of “smart city technology” in Los Angeles “would not” (notice the hypothetical verb tense) “require intentional destruction of existing infrastructure.” (emphasis added)

But when we look at the unimaginable destruction of burned out “non-smart” neighborhoods, one thing is certain: This tragedy will be taken advantage of by movers and shakers who are working on their long-range plan to refashion the future of Los Angeles and the planet.

(From “Smart LA 2028,” published by the City of Los Angeles)

We can use the metaphorical image of the rootedness of communities by saying that some entire neighborhoods have been effectively “uprooted” by fire because they no longer exist. Given the insurance crisis and the recent cancellation of fire insurance policies, an onerous permitting process, and massive costs, it will take many years for those places to “grow back.” But they will never be the same.

As Rahm Emanuel notably said some years back, “never let a crisis go to waste.” Every crisis can also be thought of in terms of a juncture. In other words, a crisis gives politicians and the ultra-wealthy plenty of leverage to take reality in the direction they desire. This is consistent with President Biden’s refrain, “build back better,” a “green economy” phrase popularized by public officials aligned with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations, which evidently envision a “smart” planetary totalitarian future.

All the positive sounding language about the environment in numerous United Nations resolutions and other UN SDG documents, however, is contradicted by the fact that building a “smart city” “green” global economy is premised upon economic exploitation (such as child labor, i.e., slavery), human and ecological costs of mineral extraction including cobalt, lithium, resultant tech toxification, and water usage on a mass scale. To what extent is this not an intensification of the global domination system? And is “sustainable development” on such a scale even globally sustainable in the long run?

The phrase “build back” is accurately interpreted as meaning “to rebuild.” In other words, “Rebuild Better.” Was Governor Newsom, with a strangely chipper demeanor, saying the quiet part out loud when he began talking about “LA 2.0,” and the coming roll out of a “Marshall Plan” for Los Angeles.

As an analogy, he is referring to the Marshall Plan to “rebuild Europe” in the aftermath of World War II. It’s no conspiracy theory to point out that the phrase “LA 2.0” indicates a clear intention to rebuild entire areas of Los Angeles toward the image of a “smart future.” Indeed, “LA 2028” and “LA 2.0” are synonyms: “LA 2.0—2028.”

The publication “Smart LA 2028” refers to another report that was issued by the McKinsey & Company and the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) in June 2018, “Smart Cities: Digital Solutions for a More Livable Future June. A line on page 23 of that report reads: “Smart Cities Need Smart Government.” (p. 23)

In the context of that sentence, it makes sense to interpret the word “government” to mean both “decision-making” and “decision-makers.” Indeed, it stands to reason that any city, whether “smart” or not, needs sensible and highly intelligent state and city planners and decision-makers.

However, it’s unlikely that public officials who lack common sense will suddenly become astute and insightful simply because the city has installed ecologically damaging “smart” technology, with a build-up of massive surveillance capabilities running 24/7, 365 days a year.

It would have been smart for public officials in charge of the Los Angeles water supply to use a digital calendar (or even a paper one for that matter) to schedule a specific completion date for the repair of a bird-poop-proof cover for the San Ynez reservoir with its 117-million-gallon capacity. It had been evidently sitting empty for eleven months when the Pacific Palisades fire broke out.

Given that it had been without water for nearly a year, it would have been smart for the San Ynez reservoir to have been made fully operational in a timely manner and filled with water. In such a scenario, that additional water could have been readily available for heroic firefighters during the conflagration instead of running out of water in one area by 3:00 a.m. on the Jan. 8, less than 24 hours after the Pacific Palisades fire began on the morning of Jan. 7.

One of the earliest emergency calls about the fire was made at 10:29 a.m., and apparently no water was dropped on the fire until about 11:20 a.m. It evidently took more than forty minutes before the first water was applied to the fire. By that time, it could not be contained.

Lastly, as previously stated, technology such as “smart meters” are needed to carry out the plan to turn Los Angeles into a “smart city.” Accordingly, millions of smart meters have been installed all over Los Angeles, on residential and commercial buildings, and the meters use lithium-ion batteries.

When lithium-ion batteries burn, they produce intense heat and a considerable amount of toxic smoke and gas (e.g., hydrogen fluoride gas and phosphoryl fluoride gas). What happened when smart meter lithium batteries, the lithium batteries on Cell Towers, and electric vehicle batteries caught fire? What toxins were released as a result?

(The massive lithium battery storage facility that recently burned out of control up north at Moss Landing is another case in point).

What if any potential danger did those gases and other toxins pose to the public and the environment, and what are the possible long-term health and environmental consequences of these “green” solutions? How much potentially health-threatening and life-threatening toxicity has been released into the air as a result? And how smart is that?