"Dubai raises the questions raised by any apparent utopia: What's the downside?" That's from George Saunders' great 2006 essay The New Mecca. Now, even as the shiny new tallest-building-on-the-planet staffs up, this slideshow, from Fast Company, at last delivers an answer.
Monday, August 17, 2009
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I strongly recommend this great article by Johann Hariri:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
(I emailed it to Balk some months ago, but he was too busy googling for "Megan + Fox + nipples" with one hand to take any notice of it.
The downside is that the wonderfully shiny start up magazines that were collateral "damage" of the boom will not pay you when they suddenly go under.
Yeah, I always thought Johann Hari's article was one of the most educational on Dubai. When you consider the construction workers dying of heat exhaustion, and the domestic workers basically being held captive, it is suddenly pretty cruel to be complaining that your real estate investment tanked.
That Hari article was indeed very good. Dubai's glorious beaches! Only don't go swimming, the waters are brimming with shit. My UK cousin has lived there and been inviting me to visit for a decade, and I have no desire to. An awful lot of ugly things beneath the shiny, internationalist surface.