On an ordinary October morning in 1985, downtown Salt Lake City was shattered by a blast that killed businessman and document collector Steve Christensen. Hours later, a second bomb tore through a quiet Holladay neighborhood, killing Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen’s former business partner. The next day saw a third explosion. This one was in a car near Temple Square that nearly killed rare-documents dealer Mark Hofmann. 

Rumors swirled instantly, tying the attacks to money, religion, and shadowy early-Mormon documents Christensen had recently acquired. For days, Utah held its breath. What unfolded was stranger and darker than fiction. The bombs weren’t the work of religious extremists or enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but instead, the doings of Mark Hofmann himself. Hofmann was a nerdy, soft-spoken dealer who had secretly become one of the most skilled document forgers in American history. 

His creations were so convincing that they reshaped historical narratives, fooling scholars, collectors, and church leaders. When the lies began to close in, the bombs became his final, desperate attempt to keep his world from collapsing.

Hofmann had been fabricating Mormon and American historical documents for years. He was a prodigy of deception, sourcing period paper, mixing inks that cracked just right, and mimicking handwriting with obsessive precision. Most of all, he knew how to read people. Utah in the 1970s and ’80s was a collector’s paradise. As bookseller Ken Sanders told Salt Lake Magazine, it was “a consciousness shift,” a recognition that rare Utah history was a treasure worth pursuing. It was also, he notes, fertile ground for affinity fraud.

Nothing captured that vulnerability more than the Salamander Letter, a supposed 1830s correspondence which claimed Joseph Smith encountered a magical white salamander rather than an angel. The document shook Latter-day Saint circles. Church leaders, worried about its implications, quietly purchased it along with other materials Hofmann dangled before them. Many reasoned that if the church was willing to buy it, then it must be authentic and true, and Hofmann understood that psychology perfectly.

When Kevin O’Leary appeared on Fox Business and casually announced that Utah would soon become home to what could be the largest AI data center project in the world, many Utahns had the same reaction:

Wait… this was already approved?

Three days before Ralph Hoffman was killed, Utah Stories interviewed Phillips Plaza residents who described security concerns, unauthorized visitors, and questions about how vulnerable tenants were being supervised. After the murder, many of those concerns remain unanswered.

If we were all just consumers, Governor Cox, Mike Lee, Speaker Schultz, and Kevin O’Leary would have it easy. If we were just more concerned about money, jobs, and tech, and less concerned about raising our kids in communities (not in front of screens), culture, the environment, and water, those smart dudes would get exactly what they want — Stratos: a city of the future, buzzing with processors and transistors, making all of our AI dreams come true! 

The world we could live in would be a dazzling, Mr. Wonderful kind of place. We would beat those pesky Chinese in the AI war; our AI robots could do all of our farming and ostensibly harvest the water we need for the Great Salt Lake out of thin air. But apparently, we just don’t get it. We haven’t yet reached the point predicted by Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World, where we are completely distracted, dopamine-driven consumers who only need sex, drugs, and stuff to remain happy.

Maybe Stratos will be an amazing marvel, and somehow, as Governor Cox claims, “. . . add more water to the Great Salt Lake.” But we aren’t sold. While this Stratos project has received considerable attention, it’s worth taking a step back to attempt to understand how corporate power appears to have usurped civic power.

Civics is the practice of shaping our society through our collective voices and community involvement. Ask the residents in Tremonton, Utah how well that is working out for them. Can we still shape our world through our elected leaders? Does it matter who we vote for at the ballot box if organizations like UDOT, UTA, and MIDA can supersede our local government authority and citizen backlash? 

The corporatization of our communities and the interests that impact our political leaders’ decision making processes are seen as far more of a concern than the average Utah resident’s concerns. Special interests and corporate power are shaping Utah’s future more than ever. 

It’s worth asking: ‘How can we regain control over shaping Utah’s future in light of the growing power and billions that the technocrats now wield in shaping our world today?’ Amazon’s market cap exceeds the GDP of Canada. The “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks now have a greater market cap than the entire GDP of Europe ($23.6 trillion. EU countries have $19.3 trillion GDP). Will tech companies become their own nation-states and dominate their own chunks of various states? Will we become their subjects?

There are two sides to this coin: We love Utah not just because we have the most outdoor wilderness playgrounds, but also because of Utah’s prosperity and job market. This is because Utah has become a tech hub. Our tech leadership has minted several billionaires and billion-dollar businesses. Utah offers a market and an educated workforce that more businesses and giant corporations want to be a part of. This is a benefit for even non-tech Utahns.

The problem with this success is that as we dole out more money to attract more tech businesses, data centers, fulfillment centers, and big corporate retailers, it becomes more difficult to carve out our “sense of community.” As corporate sovereignty replaces local business sovereignty, we see that our voices and our votes matter less.

Ask who our politicians work for, and nearly every Utahn believes they work far more for their corporate donors than they work for the average Utah citizen. So how do we best regain control over our communities?