this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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it continues to be weird how many of these things want to Just Build A New City as magic solutionism. the same strain of “that’ll fix it” it shows up with Neom and some others too. dunno if I have a conclusion with that really, just that picking cities of all things seems like the fucking weirdest all-in-one pick to go with
anyone happen to know if there’s someone that’s studied this and written a bit about it?
I am actually talking book proposals about this one. (I told my agent about the Akon City article and her eyes lit up.) There's a definite strain of compelling crazy to pursue here.
obviously I should write an AI book first. But also, writing isn't fungible, so it'll be what I come out with first.
It's part of their retrofetishism & sneaking admiration for dictators and autocrats. "Remember when we used to really build things? Build whole cities, even? When we used to displace 10,000 people at the drop of a hat so we could build a new freeway? We don't do that anymore, because of ~~woke~~ bureaucracy"
that's almost certainly a thing on the supporter/stan side, and probably not not a thing with the people that suggest these citybuilding, but I don't know if it's necessarily the prime motivation (or one of the primaries, as it were)
armchair analysis: the broad stroke of it is that suggesting a whole new thing instead of figuring out how to fix a thing sells simpler. on the face of it, "start fresh" means none of that messy "figure out how to address problems and work around them", none of the politics, etc. of course this rarely holds up to scrutiny or realworld interaction at all, but the pitch is nice and clean. it's a really big part of why we've seen a lot of these things (and a major driver behind the then-popularity of the many coins (alongside the lies of a golden payday)). but as to why it is so frequently cities, instead of anything even a bit smaller (new railways! new ports! new airlines! new $x...), that's the thing that's a standout wtf for me in this
You're right. I was thinking more of the lesswrong types than about Akon.
TESCREAL libertarians ignore the last 50 years of planning & urban studies because they think it's all a conspiracy to destroy innovation. Celebrity cryptofans ignore it because they don't even know the last 50 years of planning & urban studies exist.
My armchair analysis: The dream of "starting fresh" isn't just that you end up with a new city, but that the kind of people who live there are new too, either because you believe that the quality of the urban environment affects people's morality (as many people thought in the 19th century) or because you've hand-picked the kind of people who will live in your city (as crypto-fascists seem eager to do). So a city is more exciting than a new airport or a new railway because it's about who people are, who people want to be.
E: & also a lot of TESCREAListas are convinced that San Francisco, New York etc. are "failing" cities, that urban life is falling apart
yeah you make a valid point there on the social angle, that kind of vibes club shit has definitely clung to a lot of the recent shit
gonna have to do some digging sometime to see how this was swung with some of these propositions in the past. and, probably, find some translators, given how many of these will have been in places whose languages I don’t speak
My money is on glorification of colonialism. It's this weird idea of rugged pioneers taming the land and building a Free(tm) community outside of the existing system. Shows up all the time with libertarian cranks, and probably not accidentaly does it often include claiming land from an existing population say somewhere in Oceania, because colonialism without robbery is just sparkling migration.
Also see that libertarian town that got destroyed by bears because they didn't want to regulate garbage disposal.