3 ms·

Since I was born and raised in Santa Cruz I found this article interesting and posted it to a Santa Cruz local site. The old timers in Santa Cruz like my parent

Since I was born and raised in Santa Cruz I found this article interesting and posted it to a Santa Cruz local site. The old timers in Santa Cruz like my parents don't like the influence that UCSC brought to the town, but I love it: MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder Neom, the Saudi crown prince’s urban megaproject, is supposed to have a ski resort, swim lanes for commuters, and “smart” everything. It’s going great—for the consultants. "One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter. While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia." https://archive.ph/65uZx https://archive.ph/65uZx (Bloomberg)

pavlov 4y ago
This article is fascinating, and it has a great quote about the 75-mile "landscraper": The concept carried echoes of an idea originated in the 1960s by Superstudio, an Italian architectural collective, for a structure so enormous it would wrap around the entire planet. This “Continuous Monument” was never a real building proposal; it was intended as a critique of excessive urbanization and of the modernist megaprojects then in vogue. One of Superstudio’s last surviving members, when asked about the Line by the New York Times, dryly noted that “seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for.”
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Reminds me of Felka's Great Wall of Mars from Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space.
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    Or perhaps the Girdlecity, from Iain M. Banks' "The Hydrogen Sonata".
- dillondoyle 4y ago
  Then make have mckinsey make a graph of aesthetics ranking from dystopian feeling to utopian. Probably cost $5mm to make that slideshow I personally like the 'swim to school' roads. Some people have too much power and money. Spending to try and make desalination economically viable and other green tech is cool. Vanity projects that forcibly remove (potentially murdered) residents, wasting said green energy on fake ski resorts, etc are not.

pavlov 4y ago

This article is fascinating, and it has a great quote about the 75-mile "landscraper": The concept carried echoes of an idea originated in the 1960s by Superstudio, an Italian architectural collective, for a structure so enormous it would wrap around the entire planet. This “Continuous Monument” was never a real building proposal; it was intended as a critique of excessive urbanization and of the modernist megaprojects then in vogue. One of Superstudio’s last surviving members, when asked about the Line by the New York Times, dryly noted that “seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for.”

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Reminds me of Felka's Great Wall of Mars from Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  Or perhaps the Girdlecity, from Iain M. Banks' "The Hydrogen Sonata".
dillondoyle 4y ago
Then make have mckinsey make a graph of aesthetics ranking from dystopian feeling to utopian. Probably cost $5mm to make that slideshow I personally like the 'swim to school' roads. Some people have too much power and money. Spending to try and make desalination economically viable and other green tech is cool. Vanity projects that forcibly remove (potentially murdered) residents, wasting said green energy on fake ski resorts, etc are not.