'Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai' by Mike Davis

Before reading ‘Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai’ by Mike Davis, I didn’t like Dubai. Now that I have read it, I really don’t like Dubai. Modern Dubai is a theme park, a completely fake ‘world’, which physically represents the greed, ignorance and selfishness of its creators.

Like I said before, I already didn’t like Dubai - the architecture being built there is monstrous. It doesn’t need to take into account any context, environmental factors, or anything else; because all that matters is that the buildings are a symbol of money. I wonder what will be next after Burj Dubai, or what people will make of this in 50 years time. The idea of building a set of islands that creates a mini world is ridiculous! I don’t know how Rod Stewart (wanting to buy Britain) can take himself seriously! Definitely a case of more money than sense. It is almost laughable.

Unfortunately, it isn’t funny, because behind all of the glamour and prosperity, is a grim reality of exploited workers and dirty money, which most of the overpaid celebrities won’t even know about. The ones that do are probably having too good a time to care. The divide between rich and poor is so extreme, but I suppose this is not unusual. It does baffle me how so many people can choose to be so ignorant to how others live.

Reading this text has really frustrated me, because ultimately a lot of the problems raised are not just about Dubai. Unfortunately Dubai is just an extreme representation of an attitude in many societies across the world. We live in a world where everyone has to be number one. Everyone has to be at the top. Everything needs to be the best, the quickest, the best looking - there isn’t time to waste – if we don’t have these things our lives will be so much worse than that other guy that we’ve never met. It’s really sad that all of this has distracted us from the real. Just like Badiou’s article explains; we are watching a fantasy on a cinema screen, we can’t get sucked in – we need to stand back and look at what is going on in the real world, and in the case of Dubai, it’s pretty terrifying.