Gilded Cage for a Gilded Age
Gilded Cage for a Gilded Age
A review of The Line housing facility by NEOM
[Transcript]
In the hunt for utopia, we set our minds on easy times while pushing our desires to the brink of excess. We convince ourselves we want what’s being sold but no matter how many [blank] we buy, they end up as a precious link we forge on our own chains. Soon, even the privilege of owning will be gone and daily life will be a monthly subscription; a sliding scale based on your carbon footprint and intellectual curiosity and for what? What is the promise here? Shiny futuristic cities housing millions of us, like ants in an ant colony, predestined in a social order organized around an acceptable lifestyle, with no space vast enough and private enough to be able to ponder your own (in)significance? Thanks, but no, thanks. Take your elegant dystopia and your idiotic explanations and shove ‘em up your EVs.
I wonder what it would smell like when countless birds slam and break their necks in this “mirror glass facade” and begin to rot in an unofficial avian graveyard. Or is foul fowl merely an inconvenience in your fascistic abominations? I can only imagine the epic HOA meetings. You’d be hard pressed to keep Mr. Rogers as your neighbor. I have to be frank here, it is impossible to underestimate this schema. Desperate for Nirvana, the best and brightest have, without a whisper of satire, shown us the idilic life and it is a doozy. Please, just take your Big Bird brains and your beehive blue prints and bugger off.
Your ads are the stuff of sci-fi disaster flick beginnings. After years of dreaming and billions thrown out for solutions to our societal needs, these sustainable metropolises (metropoles? metropolii?) designed to herd human cattle is the best you can come up with? Let’s stuff people in a giant farm where you have constant surveillance and constant predictability, who needs consciousness anyway? Let me guess, Snowpiercer was your inspiration. So, rich people on the top and poor people on the bottom, eh? How novel. How quaint. How absolutely moronic. You got this plan from the donation pile?
You vill live in Ze Line and be happy.
Klaus Schwab, probably
You parade the future before us dressed in cold slick garbs while intoxicating heads of state with monolithic hypnosis. You appeal to them because they strive to be like you, but the rest of us aren’t bred the same. So you can take your used Nazi sales pitch and your technocratic playbook and knock on someone else’s door.
I get it now, how Yuval and the Useless Eaters (h/t Galoshes) will offer up the myth of the metaverse, in hymnals praising sustainability made effortless by AI: leisure for your mind and lethargy for your soul, and the body… well lazy is as lazy does nothing! Drones delivering foods and products, five minute walks to your farthest destinations, perfect weather, all day, every day is desirable, they say. To combat climate change, they say. Combat? I never enlisted in this conflict, my dudes. What’s that you say? I can’t hear you up there, yelling at me from your private plane, and me down here nuking a grub burger. You want me to plug in, tune out, jab up, and shut up to live here? Sounds tempting. I would much rather wonder if my asparagus survives the caterpillar carnage and the Chicago winters. It’s not much of a thrill at the moment, I’m afraid, but who knows, in five years, it just might be a matter of life or death. So, I decline your provisions on Noah’s Dark. If the Gods are angry, let us pay for what we’ve done, you guys can knock yourselves out in your disco mall. I would like less…angles. Sure, you can have access to nature, and with millions of others whose cabin fever is on par with yours, the train out to the forest will resemble the deck pool on a cruise ship. I’m not interested, you soulless unsalted pretzels. Take your halcyon and your Harari Har Har and hit the road.
So beat it with your grand ideas. Scram. Be gone with you. Don’t let the doorknob hit ya where the good lord split ya.
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