Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

Last month, I wrote a rant about Oxfordshire's plan for the "15-minute city. (I disabled comments, but don't comment on old threads anyway) It's a dystopian nightmare of controls and surveillance, the kind of thing totalitarians dream of. It is not, however, the ultimate dystopian nightmare. There's much that can be done to make living conditions even worse. What about much less space? How about making your typical "transit zone" not 15 minutes by car, but 5 minutes by foot? How about increasing density to appalling levels?

It can be done and, if the money holds out, it is being done. As we speak. Not here, not in Red China, not in India, not in Europe but in Saudi Arabia. This gained some recent worldwide notice because of the project's coverage during the recent WEF confab in Davos. Some clips were put on Twitter and covered by many parties in the press, but it isn't new. The marketing looks slick, if you can set aside the horror of it all:

DAVOS WATCH: WEF unveils the 5 minute city utopia, which they claim will be 100% solar and wind powered, occupied by millions

The 5 minute city is said to be completed by 2045 #wef23 pic.twitter.com/mnuqyMWZES

— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) January 19, 2023

Now that's dystopia on steroids. It's called "The Line" and it's a "linear city" where you'll live in a "module" and walk to a handful of business establishments or take automated transit to other "modules" within the city. There will be "nature" in the form of hanging gardens through the open-air central corridor - or "canyon" as they call it - and presumably some parks. There will also be total surveillance and rigid control over everything and everyone. On the project's official website, they boast about it:

Automated services will be powered by artificial intelligence.

It's actually a human-centric approach, using machines to process large volumes of data to come up with optimal solutions. And it's a virtuous circle because the more the system learns, the bigger the data pool and the more accurate the algorithms become.

It is also, of course, "sustainable" and "green." It must be. "Sustainability" is the anchor point of every anti-human, miserable, oppressive re-engineering of civilization dreamed up by nasty totalitarians the world over. It will be all renewable energy and most of the water will be desalinated. It probably won't be, but whatever. That's the promise.

There's surprisingly little detail in their public information about things that matter. How big will your apartment pod be? How big and how frequent are the parks? How do they plan to handle industrial activity that requires more than the 200 meter width of the structure? How much will it cost to live there? What is the economic model they're trying to achieve? Where is the food going to come from? Is it defensible?

Piddling details. It'll all work itself out. For the good of all mankind the ruling class. Despite the absence of details, they do have a response to the "small percentage of naysayers:"

... You can't make everybody happy all of the time, but for us the proof will be in the product. We have to now deliver and we will. ...THE LINE will be hugely attractive to those drawn to tech, research, education and the environment. We are designing for the greater good.

You don't want to be backward, do you? You're not opposed to designing for the greater good, are you? You don't want to be some kind of a regressive that objects to the idea of being stacked like cordwood in a hellish, dystopian arcology, right?

Surely you're not a naysayer. Be hip. Be cool. Live in the high-density prison and subject yourself to total, top-down control over everything in your life. For the environment. For the greater good!

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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