"As dawn spread over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, almond-colored smoke began to fill the sky above the city's Far West Side. The plumes were whorling off the top of a 132-foot-tall cell tower that overshadows an office park just north of SeaWorld. At a hotel a mile away, a paramedic snapped a photo of the spectacle and posted it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. "Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra," he wrote."
"In typical Reddit fashion, the comments section piled up with corny jokes. "Blazing 5G speeds," quipped one user. "I hope no one inhales those fumes, the Covid transmission via 5G will be a lot more potent that way," wrote another, in a swipe at the conspiracy theorists who claim that radiation from 5G towers caused the Covid-19 pandemic. The wisecracks went on: "Can you hear me now?" "Free hotspot!" "Great, some hero trying to save us from 5G.""
"That self-styled hero was actually lurking in the comments. As he followed the thread on his phone, Sean Aaron Smith delighted in the sheer volume of attention the tower fire was receiving, even if most of it dripped with sarcasm. A lean, tattooed-and until recently, entirely apolitical-27-year-old, Smith had come to view 5G as the linchpin of a globalist plot to zombify humanity. To resist that supposed scheme, he'd spent the past five months setting Texas cell towers ablaze."
Almond-colored smoke from a burning 132-foot cell tower over San Antonio drew Reddit attention on September 9, 2021, with users joking and speculating about 5G. Sean Aaron Smith, a 27-year-old who had been largely apolitical, followed the thread and enjoyed the reaction while harboring beliefs that 5G was a globalist plot to zombify humanity. Smith spent five months setting Texas cell towers on fire to resist that perceived scheme. The campaign of arson represented a crude but significant security threat that alarmed U.S. authorities and intersected with broader concerns about rising political violence.
Read at WIRED
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