I keep seeing new Neom ads for something called Trojena. I guess it’s the third element in the imaginarium after The Line and Oxagon. Something really fascinatingly hypermodernist-grotesque about whatever MbS is trying to do here.
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I’d like to see real photos of what’s there now. Wikipedia is only slightly helpful.
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They’ve relocated a tribe of 20k people and killed one in the process. Par for the course for these things. It’s some mix of smart city, special economic zone, and idiosyncratic sci-fi larp. It’s like how a mega-rich Bond villain gazillionairre does premium-mediocre futurism.
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Normally I’d predict a big-bang authoritarian-high-modernist start followed by years of neglect and unraveling into a cyberpunk dystopia. But there’s enough money at work here — 500B, something more than Dubai++ might be brute-forced through.
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I’d like to see South Park do an arc on this. Their SodoSopa/Citipatown plot arc about a premium mediocre “arts and culture” gentrification drive remains one of my favorites. In later seasons it features as a decaying blight neighborhood. This is a 1000x version.
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Wonder how many Khashoggi-grade murders this will take. Not a particular indictment of MbS… he’s no more a McVillain than anyone who drives such things. I guess I live in a city that was the Neom of its time.
I really should watch Chinatown
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Very briefly when MbS first came to power, I was suckered into thinking he was a genuine philosophical modernizer by, of all things, a Tom Friedman puff piece. Genuinely embarrassing.
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MbS, Assad… there’s a species of leaders who find it convenient to pander to the Davos set while it is convenient and profitable to do so, and have the brains and superficial ease with western cultures of manners to “pass” but there’s zero liberal western inclinations in them
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But unlike say Karzai, presenting elegantly in western milieus isn’t the sum total of their abilities. There’s a real person behind the facade. Just someone who doesn’t compute easily in a western socio-political calculus.
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Thought experiment — what would Christopher Alexander do with 500b and the Neom territory?
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