Mike Davis on Dubai (an Ink by the Barrel exclusive)

When I did my interview with Mike Davis about the history of the car bomb for The American Prospect, we also covered the glistening new metropolis of Dubai. Home (supposedly) to a quarter of the world’s building cranes and to (definitely) its richest and most flamboyant global elite, Dubai is also racked by labor problems.

The New York Times claims that the emirate is in the midst of reform, but Davis is far less sanguine. He sees a world consumed by “a nightmarish and kind of apocalyptic presentism” that won’t mend its ways any time soon.

The interview below makes reference to Davis’s article “Fear and Money in Dubai,” part of the New Press’s forthcoming “Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism.” Davis’s piece is the book’s most electric, and it is also available from the New Left Review free of charge here.

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I’m curious if you know anybody who lives in Dubai and if you’ve visited?

No. There’d be no point to me going—aside from how expensive Dubai is, I’d probably have the same experience as a young Indian-American researcher who corresponded with me last year who had a Wilson or a Fulbright or something. And he went to Dubai thinking he could do normal research on workers in Dubai, and almost immediately found himself in the hands of the police and then deported from Dubai. Apologies followed but he was quite traumatized by his deportment.

[…] I would love to go to Dubai in a sense. I just doubt the practicality of it, how far you could get. There’s some amazing stuff on Dubai on the internet. There’s an Armenian television crew, these guys just working literally out of their luggage with a small camera, who managed to get into Dubai and spend several weeks filming and talking to Armenian prostitutes. Most of them were young women who were tricked into prostitution with the promise of other jobs. All of this was recorded clandestinely under constant threat by people from the Russian mafia, which runs the sex industry but also from the Dubai authorities. But this is on YouTube or Google video. It’s an eight or ten-part television series.

And if you really want to see the nightmare, spooky side of Dubai this is the best thing I’ve seen.

I came to the end of this article and I was shocked. But the city still has this strange appeal to me—

Oh it’s incredibly popular, particularly to Brit expats. It’s no longer the Mediterranean where the beautiful young things from London go. It’s Dubai. And of course that’s the result of the very shrewd policies that the regime has followed—making it possible to buy real estate, and allowing a generous modicum of sin. And I would imagine the sheer spectacle of the place. As long as you don’t have to live in the laborers’ construction camp 30 miles outside the city in 122-degree heat in the desert.

The picture of Dubai you paint is of this emirate stuck between untrammeled capitalism and neo-feudalism. Do you see this as a model for the 21st century?

I actually argued something a little different. That’s Dubai or the Gulf as a whole in broad terms. But what Dubai has pioneered, and it’s quite extraordinary, are modular legal and cultural superstructures. In other words a big part of Dubai’s incredibly ambitious development plan are the creation of these specialized cities—science cities, internet cities, chess cities and so on. And each city is fitted with laws and regulations on whatever permissiveness is required for their activities but they’re like bubble-tops. They stop at the edge of the city. So for instance internet in the city as a whole is subject some censorship, but not in Internet City. The new stock exchange has actually imported regulations from London, has actually brought British business regulators to set it up. So it’s an extremely interesting experiment on how within this larger framework of a country essentially owned by one dynasty and absolutely feudal, you can create enclaves with their only goal cultural superstructures such as they need to lucratively carry out business. This is something which I don’t think exists anywhere else in the region. It’s something you wouldn’t find in Arabia and perhaps in Abu Dhabi to some extent, I don’t think in Kuwait or Bahrain. This is a new stage in the custom design of utopian capitalism that provides the freedom that’s supposedly needed for entrepreneurship and technological invention and high-end consumption without conceding one iota to real political freedom or the slightest semblances of democracy or even parliamentary monarchy.

Do you think there’s an analogy here to China’s special export zones and Hong Kong?

Yes. There are two chapters missing in the book, Evil Paradises. I just couldn’t get them commissioned, and I think they leave a big hole in the book. One would have been Macao, which in some ways is the most interesting comparison to Dubai. And the other would have been Saipan, North Marinaras, which is kind of America’s utopia of exploitation, where you have custom-fitted juridical-moral regimes to accelerate and nourish business that extend no further than that.

China’s a little more complicated in the sense that national law does apply in Guangzhou and Guangdong as a whole, it’s just not implemented. There are of course huge struggles about that right now in China. China has excellent laws on the books—just like Stalin’s constitution in 1936 was supposedly the most democratic ever adopted. It doesn’t really mean much.

I say it kind of jokingly but I really kind of mean it, Dubai is like something that was created in a business school, like at the University of Chicago—if you got neo-liberal, neo-classical technocrats to sit down and design a utopian capitalist society. In the past Singapore has kind of been the model of that. But Dubai, because it copies everything, just promiscuously absorbs everything, has created the state-of-the-art. Because it amalgamates Singapore and Las Vegas and Hong Kong and Monte Carlo all together. This is what you’ll see in future with other city-states and enclaves. Though right now as long as Dubai continues to enjoy this immunity from terrorist attacks it should speed along quite happily. It has proved to societies in the rest of the Gulf that it’s really one of the best places to park their money, even better than the United States. Dubai profits immensely from being a secure bulwark in a turbulent region. Every time the price of oil goes up there’s more money to invest in Dubai.

Do you think it can last? Can the Island World stay afloat without sinking metaphorically or literally?

Its great vulnerability that all of this depends on security in an utterly insecure region. In the long run, if you think rationally, the US remains the far better choice. All this gambles with luck. The new skyscraper there is a really attractive target to highjacked passenger planes. There’s immense speculation, no one understands exactly, what kind of insurance policy Sheikh Maktoum in Dubai, or for that matter the United Arab Emirates as a whole, has purchased. They obviously provide space for laundering money and transfer of arms. On one hand they provide space for home-porting American missile cruisers, on the other hand they’re off in the desert falcon-hunting with bin Laden. It’s all mortgaged to that fact. Otherwise it might be a perpetual motion machine. But it would be very, very easy to dismantle that sense of security and send Rod Stewart and all the other expats running home from their desert islands.

Is there any way to make the people in the paradises see the evil? Can pressure be put on the Rod Stewarts of the world to do something about the abysmal labor conditions?

Sure. We could have a real social revolution on the Arabian peninsula, or we could have some kind of serious world-wide crusade against tax shelters. And I continue to believe in and support all those things, it’s just highly unlikely.

It’s not just that the rich and increasingly portions of the middle class are taking flight into these paradises and walled islands and so on. It’s also supported by a nightmarish and kind of apocalyptic presentism—consume all of the good things of the earth in our lifetime.

I mean, I live near LA and I realize plenty of the people on the west side are now running their Mercedes or whatever on recycled vegetable oil, doing their part for saving the environment. But consumption is at a scale that’s unprecedented since the late Roman empire or something. Even the robber barons didn’t consume the portion of the wealth that the rich today do. A lot more of it was put into granite and philanthropy and things like that. In the 60s I remember debating, once going to a New Left conference that was devoted to “Who Actually Rules Society?” And we decided that the easiest way of figuring that out was who we’d shoot. And we went around the room and of course most people put down the name of somebody else in the room that they really wanted to shoot, but we decided at the end of the day that it was the system and the corporate institutions themselves not the rich who were the problem. Even if you took away all the Rockefellers’ money it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

It’s not like that today. We’re talking about tens and tens of trillions, hundreds of trillions of dollars potentially. The whole thought of the next twenty or thirty years, as oil prices rise above $100 a barrel, Hubbert’s Peak or not, we’re talking about the greatest rentier income in world history. Oil producers will extract as a rent an unprecedented fraction of global income. In the case of Venezuela this will be recycled positively for development and for the poor. But right now most of it is going to Switzerland, is going to Dubai. The money that supposedly we should be using to build new green foundations for society. The point I’m making is that the evil paradises are more than just symptoms or lurid metaphors for the system. They actually represent a sector of immense inequality and economic disruption.

Although try telling that to any of the architects I know. This is the thing about Dubai. Dubai is the dream world of modern architecture. I was a little shocked. I used to teach for years at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. I talked to some of the younger architects I know who subcontract to firms which have contracts in Dubai, and it’s like the Klondike. It’s the Promised Land. You can build anything, as long as it’s big.

Photos by Flickr users sophmattgunner and cityh.

The Idiot Weapon

A massive explosion on Wall Street. Many dead and the foundation of America’s financial system dealt a damaging blow. A shadowy transnational movement behind the attack. This is 1920, after Italian anarchist Mario Buda rode a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron slugs up to J.P. Morgan’s headquarters and lit a fuse. The world’s cities have never been the same.

In his new book Buda’s Wagon, urbanist Mike Davis, well-known for his study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, traces the development of the car bomb and its effects on urban life. The United Nations estimates that more than half the world’s population now lives in cities, and Davis believes we are all increasingly vulnerable to attack from these ultimate “idiot weapons,” that “even in the most remote science-fiction future” there will be no defense. He talked with TAP about the devastating history and grim future of the car bomb.

Read my interview with Mike Davis at TAP online.