Streetlights Are Turning Purple
4th December 2022
It isn’t ghost- or football-related. And it isn’t some grand conspiracy, though lots of people saw in the synthetic twilight the effects of 5G radiation or government surveillance, a sign of the times. There’s nothing shady going on here. But still: Streetlights aren’t supposed to spontaneously change color.
So I did a little digging. The mystery of the purple lights appears to be both more mundane and more worrisome than anyone has realized — a mood-indigo check-engine light on the entire infrastructure of modernity. When LED streetlights start changing color for no apparent reason, it’s a visual cue that we might need to rethink, just a bit, how we build the future.