Pathfinders – Vanity projects

Science fiction often presages science fact. In the 2013 Hollywood film Elysium, the super-rich live in luxury on an artificial utopia floating in orbit above a devastated Earth populated by desperate survivors attempting to scratch a living amid the dirt and ruins.

It’s a dystopian horror story that rings true. One can easily imagine the rich building something like this in reality, albeit not necessarily on a space satellite. They’ve always had landed estates and gated communities. They perpetually fantasise about escaping entirely into private little worlds, untouched by the brutal consequences of their own capitalist behaviour.

For instance, there are the ‘preppers’, who plan to ‘save themselves from the apocalypse’ by building luxurious bunkers complete with military security in order ‘to survive a societal collapse they helped create’. Author Douglas Rushkoff has met these preppers in person: ‘More than anything,’ he says, ‘they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.’ Interestingly, he adds that their biggest worry is how to stop their own security forces (ie, workers) turning on them after Doomsday has rendered their money and titles worthless (bit.ly/3BcpykX). It’s a valid concern. If these preppers end up being hog-roast on their own barbecues, there won’t be anyone around to protest.

Other billionaire moguls have set their sights higher than simply hiding in an underground James Bond film set. Elon Musk has said for years that he plans to die on Mars – ‘just not on impact’. In the event that he and his megalomania do rocket off together on a one-way trip to Mars, one expects that his son, X Æ A-12, will lose no time in changing his name by deed poll, just as Zowie Bowie did.

An altogether loftier, though Earth-based vision, was announced in 2021 by the former president of Walmart, billionaire Marc Lore, in the form of Telosa, a proposed $500bn ‘utopia’ in a yet-to-be determined area of American desert, and intended as a home to 5 million people by 2050. Far from being an exclusive Elysium for rich people, Lore envisages the project as a ‘reformed version of capitalism’ which embodies something called ‘equitism’. Based on the tax-reform ideas of Henry George, which saw something of a revival in the 2010s with the Occupy movement, this is supposedly a way of allowing workers to ‘share in the prosperity that they help create’ while not unduly taxing the profits of the rich (tinyurl.com/r495rxdt). Quite why this hare-brained have-your-cake-and-eat-it economic vision needs to be in a brand new futuristic city, rather than in an existing one, is unclear. At any rate, plonking it in a desert may save on land prices, but it will create one hell of a utility connection problem. Still, they did it with Las Vegas.

Hot desert is even less of an impediment to the Saudi Royal Hand-Choppers who, awash with oceans of cash thanks to ongoing stratospheric oil prices, are embarking on an eye-popping trillion-dollar scheme to build Neom, a gigantic ‘utopia’ on the Red Sea in the country’s north-western Tabuk Province, featuring beaches lined with marble, fleets of drones forming an artificial moon, and robots doing the menial work. Located 111 miles from the regional capital, Neom will apparently be an independent enclave free from Saudi government oversight and not subject to its laws, labour regulations or tax rules. Local Tabuk inhabitants are less than enthusiastic, however, as they are currently being evicted and even executed by Saudi forces, while foreign workers may also be reluctant to flock to this utopian oasis free of all labour regulations, especially when they find out what Neom CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr has said about driving employees like slaves, gleefully remarking that ‘when they drop down dead, I celebrate’ (tinyurl.com/yvrtx3az).

Neom is planned to consist of 10 regions, of which 4 are currently known. Trojena is an outdoor ski resort (yes, in a hot desert, you’ve read that right), while Oxagon is an octagonal floating industrial complex. There’s also a luxury yachting island called Sindalah, a name unhelpfully reminiscent of Sinaloa, home of the notorious Mexican drug cartel. Most gobsmackingly of all is The Line, a car-free, smart city-building 130 miles long but only 200 yards wide, a structure so enormous that ‘the curvature of the Earth becomes an engineering challenge’ (tinyurl.com/2ta2hn8d). It is intended to house 9 million people, with a high-speed rail line that can allegedly go from end to end in 20 minutes. Presumably passengers are shot out into nets as it rockets through stations at nearly 400 mph.

This is not the only folly currently gracing Middle Eastern regimes keen to squander their oil fortunes on pointless and ill-considered vanity projects, including golf courses, World Cups and Formula 1. Dubai, already famous for splashing out billions on a still-deserted archipelago of tourist island resorts shaped like a map of the world, is planning a $64bn answer to Disneyland, called Dubailand, plus a $5bn replica of the moon, for use as a hotel where guests wearing astronaut suits can enjoy lunar-rover taxis and, in some unexplained way, ‘low-gravity’ moonwalks. As if that’s not wacky enough, the UAE has also bought Mark Zuckerberg’s Kool-Aid by sinking billions into the Metaverse, while Bahrain plans to artificially extend its landmass by 50 percent.

In H G Wells’s seminal 1895 novel The Time Machine, beautiful, golden-haired Eloi enjoy carefree lives of idleness in above-ground pleasure gardens, while the stunted, troglodytic Morlocks do all the hard work. It’s a powerful metaphor for class war that has spawned many subsequent works, including the film Elysium. But, in a sort of ghastly quid pro quo, the Morlocks do at least get to eat the Eloi. No such luck in real-life capitalism, where the rich continue to consume us, body and soul, in the vainglorious quest to build their future fun palaces.

PJS

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