u/olagon

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I grew up in Kalihi and have spent most of my life building tech here at home. I just started a column at Civil Beat where I write about tech and the connections that lead back to Hawaiʻi.

My first piece starts with a sketch on a napkin over dim sum with friends. This is that actual napkin. That sketch became one of the first crowdfunding platforms and helped move $100 million to causes around the world. It also came down to one local bank willing to say yes when everyone else said no.

I plan to keep writing about how big things start small here, and where tech fits or does not fit in our future. If you have story ideas or want to tell me I am wrong about something, I am here for that too. Some of my best ideas come from comment sections.

Link in the comments. Love to hear feedback. I really do think we need to hear more of these stories.

Mahalo nui kākou.

Aloha kākou, I have 2,000 or so words and phrases that need cleaning up. This project is ad free, 100% open source, with zero user tracking. Also looking for any feedback to improve the site. My goal is to create a resource to master the most common 2,000 words in Hawaiian within a couple of years. Mahalo nui!

https://olelodaily.com/

Aloha all, I have a vibe coded mobile tool here https://olagon.github.io/pegasus/ that is open source. I want to use it daily to master the 0 to 100 peg words. Are there any ideas that can make this better for mastering this list? This is not a tool that tracks people but just a tool for me (and maybe others) who want to learn a peg list fast from their phones. Mahalo!

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Nānā i ke kumu. Look to the source.

I just came back from Boston for an AI strategy class, but I was also there to nānā i ke kumu. This time, the source found me.

To be crystal clear, this is not aimed at any faith. These are my raw reflections after sitting in an old church and facing hard truths.

Salem was supposed to anchor this huakaʻi. It holds rare glimpses of kūpuna life before western contact, and I figured some time to kilo small details would ground me. They did. The artwork on a huawai pāwehe made me curious about the artist. I could imagine a kupuna tightly weaving the connected hawele rope. But it was an unplanned side trip that did the real work.

Park Street Church anchors one edge of Boston Common. I had never heard of it before I arrived. I am sure I walked right past this red brick church in the 90s and never looked up. I was lucky. Members with ties to Hawaiʻi invited me in and gave me all the time I needed.

This is a remarkable church, and its members should be proud of centuries of humanitarian work. A huge plaque out front lists the milestones they celebrate. William Lloyd Garrison’s first anti-slavery speech. The first chartered branch of the NAACP. The first time “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” was ever sung. Our own aliʻi outlawed slavery in 1852, more than a decade before the United States, and I got curious whether some of that conviction was carried by people tied to this very church.

Why? Because right near the top of that same proud list sits this one. Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) Church Founded 1819. That is us.

In 1819, this congregation sent America’s first missionaries to Hawaiʻi. They had taken in and converted four young Hawaiian men who had found their way to New England, and it was likely those men who turned the mission toward our islands. The four boarded the ship alongside the missionaries, to plant the first American colony here and to save our souls. I wonder if they would have come had they seen what their children would do.

Before Cook landed in 1778, there were upwards of a million of us. We had lived alone in the middle of the ocean for so long that we had no defense against sicknesses already burning through the rest of the world. Syphilis. Tuberculosis. Measles. TB is not some history book lesson to me. I caught it myself as a kid and spent a year swallowing two chalky pills a day that made me sick just to get well.

The missionaries arrived in the middle of a great dying. By the time they stepped ashore, barely four decades after Cook, we had already lost the vast majority of our people. Some of our own aliʻi pivoted and began dismantling our traditions, and the missionaries accelerated the push away from our hula, our mele, nā akua, and our kāhuna. The missionaries were instructed to cover these islands with fruitful fields, pleasant dwellings, schools, and churches, while refraining from all interference with the local and political interests of the people.

Park Street Church and the ABCFM grew from the same Boston roots. A decade after the first missionaries reached Hawaiʻi, the ABCFM sent reinforcements, including Dwight Baldwin and William Alexander, who were stationed on Maui. A generation later, their sons Henry and Samuel turned that mission ground into cane and founded Alexander and Baldwin.

More descendants of missionaries, joined by other American and European settlers, planted plantations, organized waves of immigrant labor, and amassed western fortunes. Even that was not enough. They wanted the whole Kingdom. They helped engineer an illegal overthrow and imprisoned our Queen.

There is a saying credited to Desmond Tutu. When the missionaries came, the people had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They said let us pray. The people closed their eyes. When they opened them, the people held the Bible and the missionaries held the land.

One of the four Hawaiian men who sailed with that first wave would later take up arms to defend his homeland. He was already too late. Piece by piece, the descendants of those missionaries took the land. Tutu spoke of Africa, but he could have been speaking of us. Tūtū, in my language, means grandparent. He never knew our word for him, but he spoke like one.

By the time the dust settled, they had lowered our flag and raised their own. Barely 37,000 of us were left to watch it climb.

The plaque ends with, To God Be the Glory, Great Things He Has Done. From a pew in Boston, that reads as a proud celebration. I thought about this sign as I skipped the subway for the long walk back to my hotel. In the end, I think that glory often belongs to the one holding the chisel.

I am not throwing daggers. I am forcing myself to sit in discomfort instead of sleeping through the static. Every strand of the hawele in Salem sits behind glass. This sign sits behind glass too. Both carry cords of hope, healing, and deep wounds. Pull one and you pull them all. I pulled this one.

ʻIke i ke kumu.

Photos at https://olagon.substack.com/

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In 1980 the Supreme Court awarded the Lakota Sioux over a hundred million dollars for land the government had stolen from them. They refused the money. It sits untouched today, worth more than $2 billion, because what they want back is the land. I thought about them while I read a new report called “The True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi.”

For the record, I served. And I have a hard time trusting any institution with our local resources when it cannot account for its own. The U.S. military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. It holds the largest portfolio of contaminated sites in the country, hundreds of polluted soil and groundwater lands across its installations. It is the only major federal agency that has never passed a full audit, leaning on trillions in unsupported adjustments to paper over decades of waste. Trillions.

A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion is about 32 years. A trillion is about 32,000 years. Trillions in unaccounted stuff is bonkers.

The big picture I got from this research is that for over a century, the case against U.S. militarization of Hawaiʻi has been a moral argument made mostly by Native Hawaiians and largely ignored by the institutions that make policy. This new report from six respected organizations takes that same argument and runs it through the Pentagon’s own valuation models. The conclusions are the conclusions activists have been shouting for decades. The difference is that they now come in a form that cannot be dismissed as activism.

Since 1964, the military has leased more than 46,000 acres of public trust land for $1. Not per acre. Not per year. One dollar total. If any other trustee leased trust assets to a tenant for a dollar, they would be removed and sued for breach of fiduciary duty. Here the trustee is the State of Hawaiʻi, the tenant is the Pentagon, and the breach has been allowed to stand for more than sixty years.

Let me back up on that word. Trust. If you live in Hawaiʻi, you are a beneficiary of a Public Land Trust. About 1.4 million acres, originally the Crown and Government Lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom, were taken after the illegal overthrow of 1893 and transferred to the United States through the contested annexation of 1898. At statehood in 1959, those lands were placed in trust under the Admission Act and made the responsibility of the new State of Hawaiʻi. The Admission Act named five purposes for that trust. The betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians. The support of public education. The development of homeownership. The provision of lands for public use. And the funding of public improvements. The state is the trustee. The people of Hawaiʻi, with Native Hawaiians named as a specific class of beneficiaries, are who the trust is meant to serve.

A legal equivalent was not hard to find. The U.S. government once held about 500,000 individual Indian trust accounts holding revenues from leases on Native American allotment lands. From the late 1800s into the early 2000s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs systematically mismanaged them. Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet treasurer, sued in 1996. Thirteen years later the case settled for $3.4 billion. The plaintiffs argued the real mismanagement ran into the hundreds of billions and that the settlement was a fraction of the actual damage.

Which brings me back to the Sioux. The Black Hills were reserved for them in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Then gold turned up in 1874 and the United States took the land anyway. Crown and Government Lands here were reserved for a kingdom too, until they were not. The Sioux are still waiting. So are we.

In my piece this month in Ka Wai Ola, I shared that if we used what the U.K. pays the Republic of Mauritius for Diego Garcia or what the U.S. pays the Republic of the Marshall Islands for Kwajalein, the value of Pōhakuloa’s 23,000 leased acres lands somewhere between $313 million and $460 million a year. This research uses more conservative U.S. government accounting and still arrives at $133.7 billion in unpaid back rent. That figure does not include cleanup.

The cleanup is its own story. PFAS forever chemicals at just three sites, Mākua, Schofield, and Bellows, conservatively $493 million to remediate. Statewide it runs into the billions. The report is clear that true remediation with current technology is not possible. We are talking containment and monitoring for generations to come.

Then there is the economic story we have all been told. The military’s real contribution is about 6.4% of our GDP, not the 9.2% the Pentagon and the state like to repeat. At least five other industries already contribute more. Once you subtract cleanup costs and rental market damage, the net benefit shrinks further.

Speaking of rentals. Drop your finger on a map of Oʻahu four times. Chances are one of those points lands on military controlled land. They control a quarter of the island. With all that land you would think they would house their own people. Nope. They have pushed them onto the rental market, taking up one in ten rentals with generous vouchers that enrich landlords and drive ʻohana out of their own neighborhoods. The report puts the cost to non-military renters at $234 million in a single year.

So picture the other path. Put real resources behind an ʻāina-based economy. Farming, food, land and water stewardship, the work this place was built on. Done right, it could match the military’s 6.4% or beat it. And it would create real jobs. Jobs that do not rise and fall with a federal defense budget. Jobs that do not poison our ʻāina, kai, and wai, or push ʻohana out of their homes.

Do you think we have the State leadership to finally honor this trust?

References:

The report The True Cost of the U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi and my Ka Wai Ola article Maunakea, Pōhakuloa, and the Word They Keep Using.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-199794456

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Chances are, NSA surveillance programs are processed in part through a data center here, like at the Rochefort Building near Wahiawā. It’s a $358 million facility where the NSA intercepts communications.

Snowden worked at the old building this one replaced. He walked out with documents that proved a lot of that listening was aimed at ordinary people, like an illegal court order forcing Verizon to hand over the call records of every American customer.

Data centers drive so much good like health care, banking, and systems that keep society running. But they also drive things like mass surveillance and military attack plans. I could not find a source for data centers here so cobbled this imperfect but insightful guide.

We have a couple dozen data centers built or being built. Ours are much smaller than those million-gallons-a-day thirsty facilities. Nine show up in the standard directories. DRFortress, Lumen, Hawaiian Telcom Endeavor, AlohaNAP, Cogent, the two Servpacs, the UH ITS hub at Mānoa, and Hawaiian Telcom Kawaihae.

The rest took more digging. NCTAMS Pacific in Wahiawā is one of the largest naval communication stations in the world. INDOPACOM’s Nimitz-MacArthur Command Center is about 275,000 square feet and runs the Pacific theater. DISA Pacific runs a classified site at Pearl Harbor-Hickam. The Maui High Performance Computing Center in Kīhei is one of five DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers. UH Mānoa runs the Koa supercomputer.

My guess is we host around 60 megawatts of data center load. For scale, a docked cruise ship pulls about 8 megawatts, so roughly seven cruise ships plugged in 24/7. Residential solar drives so much of our grid that these facilities are partially running on power that ʻohana financed and now host.

More is coming. The Navy is building a roughly 170,000 square foot Joint Intelligence Operations Center. AlohaNAP is adding 1.5 megawatts. Servpac broke ground on Building 2 at Mililani.

We are powering a federal Pacific strategy that does not need our consent, just our grid and ʻāina.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-199152290

I was supposed to live in the County of Kalohana, not Honolulu. It passed both chambers. It was law waiting for a signature. A single man decided for us by not picking up a pen.

In 1901, Kānaka ʻŌiwi legislators in Hawaiʻi's first territorial legislature passed a bill that would have named our counties after aliʻi nui. Maui would have become the County of Liliʻuokalani. Kauaʻi and Niʻihau, the County of Lunalilo. Oʻahu, the County of Kalohana. Hawaiʻi Island split into the County of Kauikeaouli and the County of Kamehameha.

House Bill 48 passed both chambers on April 26, 1901. The Maui News ran a headline the next morning: "Liliuokalani County." This was law waiting for a signature.

Governor Sanford Dole never signed it. He sat on it for ten days until the session ended, killing it through a pocket veto so there would be no chance for an override. When Kānaka legislators demanded answers, he did not reply.

By 1903, the Home Rule party had lost its majority. The county system that finally passed used geographic names stripped of genealogy, stripped of the message those Kānaka legislators were sending. They were asserting that this ʻāina still belonged to its people.

I learned that there is a word for what happened next, over and over, for a hundred years. Toponymic subjugation. Puʻuloa became Pearl Harbor. Lēʻahi became Diamond Head. By 1976 scholars estimated only 86% of place names across the islands were still in Hawaiian.

Now restoration is happening. Slowly. Hawaiʻi Island was officially recognized as Moku o Keawe in 2025. I hope that somewhere a generation of Kānaka will grow up never knowing the name Diamond Head. Or Pearl Harbor.

I learned of this history from the excellent paper "Race, Power, and the Dilemma of Democracy: Hawaiʻi's First Territorial Legislature, 1901" by Dr. Ronald Williams, Jr.

Source: https://www.academia.edu/19822502/Race_Power_and_the_Dilemma_of_Democracy_Hawai%CA%BBis_First_Territorial_Legislature_1901