Ask Not for Whom The Line Tolls

It turns out that this whole conjuring-a-whole-city-out-of-thin-air thing is a bit harder than you might think.

Not quite ten years ago some dudes with something like $200 million in techbro dollars decided to start up their own brand new city on an island in Honduras. They called it Prospera, which might have been a bit of hubris on their part as the city isn’t exactly prospera-ing at the moment. 

The plan, you see, was to have some 10,000 residents in this new city by the end of 2025, and they’ve fallen short of this goal by 9,921, resident-wise, with only 79 people actually living year-round in the handful of buildings that have been constructed so far. The, uh, “city” broke ground about six years ago. If they continue adding residents at this blistering pace, roughly 13 a year, they'll reach their target population of 100,000 in approximately 7,570 years, sometime around the year 9596 AD. 

Meanwhile, the brotopian backers of a thing called California Forever spent years quietly buying up enough undeveloped land in, yes, California to house a city of 400,000. But when the local residents found out what was going on, and who was behind it (a bunch of techbros including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and egg-headed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen), well, they pretty much rose up as one in opposition and the planned city was quickly scuttled in favor of a ship-building project that has yet to materialize. Anyone want to buy some land, lightly used?

But, as abject as these brotopian city-conjuring failures are, these guys are rank amateurs compared to Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) whose grandiose plan for a 105-mile-long skyscraper city taller than the Empire State Building and housing a population of 9 million has gone belly up, swallowing an estimated $50 billion so far with little to show for it beyond some holes and trenches and a handful of huge pilings installed in the desert sand. 

The project, called The Line because, uh, it would basically be a very long, and very tall, line, was supposed to have its first residents by last year, with enough housing for 1.5 million built by 2030. It has zero residents now, mainly because it has zero buildings actually built, just the foundations. Now the official plan is to build only about 1.5 miles of the originally planned 105 miles by 2030, with enough housing for several hundred thousand. But construction is currently on hold and at this point pretty much no one except perhaps MBS thinks even a drastically scaled-down version of the city is likely to be built. 

What got me thinking about The Line was a piece by The Nation’s architecture critic Kate Wagner lambasting a number of leading architectural firms for getting in bed with the thuggish Saudi regime to work on a project that anyone could see from the start was utterly preposterous. “Is it not humiliating,” she asks, “to aid and abet a project that is so evidently bullshit?”

One of the project’s biggest follies, a planned upside-down skyscraper that would hang from a bridge like a chandelier, was scrapped once it was realized that it could start swinging like a pendulum in the wind and possibly break off and fall into the stagnant artificial lagoon beneath it. Oh, and also because, as Wagner notes, “human waste can’t be flushed upward.” Meanwhile, she adds, “The Line’s reflective surface and wind-turbine farm basically created a bird-slaughtering machine along one of the world’s most important migratory routes.” Or would have created one, had they actually done anything on the project besides moving a mountain of dirt and building a small portion of what would have been the megastructure’s foundation. 

But the project was not only bullshit, as Wagner makes clear; it was also utterly barbarous in its treatment of the tribespeople who were living in the supposedly “empty” desert where The Line was being built, who were forcibly evicted and, in the case of one man, shot dead, apparently for refusing to leave his house when the Saudi forces arrived to throw him out. Dozens were arrested in the protests, and several have been put on death row. Workers on the project and other construction projects associated with the Saudi Vision 2030 modernization program have if anything fared even worse, with ITV reporting that an estimated 21,000 have died or vanished. That’s twenty-one thousand dead in the service of MBS’ giga-project fantasies. 

Wagner’s brief but pointed piece led me to a much longer investigative report in the Financial Times that chronicles the project’s failure in excruciating detail and is full of paragraphs like these:

“If the birds aren’t being sliced and diced by going through the wind turbines, they are going to run into a 500 metre-high mirrored finish,” said the planner. “We would sit in hundreds, literally hundreds of meetings about birds,” said the senior architect.

Designers proposed fritting — printing small ceramic dots on the glass — to make it more visible to the birds. But Livio Rey, of the Swiss Ornithological Institute, explained that this would not address the issue. Even if they spotted the obstacle, they would “have to fly 90km along The Line to go around it”.

But the man at the helm was undaunted, largely because he was unchallenged.  

Several former Neom employees likened the working culture to the atmosphere in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. Dissent was ignored or punished, concerns failed to reach the leadership and adjusting course became impossible as the project started to go awry.

Exhibitions of design work would be set up for Prince Mohammed, who was a hands-on chair of Neom. “The underlying emotion that was felt in the room was fear, people would just mimic whatever he had to say,” said the planner. “MBS would arrive with his entourage of about 40-50 people. And as he walks around, there’s absolute silence.” At one point he would say that he liked something and “he would turn to his entourage and they'd all go, ‘love it’”. Then he would see something he didn’t like and his entourage would all shake their heads, tutting.

If this all sounds like a Monty Python sketch that’s because it kind of is. Except that this real-life version of a Monty Python sketch has killed thousands of people and wasted billions of dollars and caused serious ecological disruption in the name of a supposed eco-city. 

This is what you get when someone with more money than they know what to do with and no democratic constraints tries to bend the world to their fantasies. It is, in short, very much like your typical brotopian project, just on a much grander scale. Its failure is tragic, not for MBS – who gives a shit about him, frankly – but for the people who have suffered and died in the service of his puerile science fiction dreams. 

It’s a story worth keeping in mind as we continue to explore the follies of our American brotopians.