More Corporate Utopias
1) King Abdullah Economic City
2008, 10 mins., Saudi Arabia
Producer: Emaar Properties
Digital Advertisement Film (at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dY9nnAw5D0)
The Saudi Arabian megalopolis of the future will be built near Riyadh, its capital city. The instant megalopolis is named after the Saudi ruler, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, and will be composed of at least six zones concentrating on commerce, tourism, and education. Although the Saudis’ wealth is primarily oil-based, of course, they have strong light industries (such as electronics and pharmaceuticals) as well, and it is these industries, besides containerized shipping and other globalized financial investments that will fund the plans of Emaar, already one of the largest real estate companies in the world, to create the new city.
Unlike Dubai’s projects, the Saudis have less to show on the ground and the videos reflect this: they are hype rather than reality, although few would doubt the Saudis’ ability–if not their finances–to develop most of these projects to completion. The CGI films are light on religion but stress Middle Easternness—the King is the guardian of the Prophet’s mosques, we see tableaus of meetings and hotels with men only (the rare exception being burka-clad university women sitting by themselves in the education zone), and we hear of “high end” residential zones.
The six zones reflect the typical pattern of purpose-built versions of megalopolis:
–container shipping port
–a light industry zone
–residential zones
–tourist areas
–a financial “island”
–an education zone.
YouTube:
King Abdullah Economic City, (at www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP8ZvOgC0I), CNN: Inside the Middle East, 7 mins. With comments by the CEO of EMAAR, Nidal Jenjoon.
King Abdullah City–World’s Largest Private Sector Investment), (at www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9r1PFWDMdU), 10 mins. Features the containerized shipping network as an introduction to the diversifying Saudi economic future.
Further Reading:
Mouawad, Jad. “The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia.” New York Times, 20 Jan. 2008. Comprehensive review of the project, emphasizing its funding from the surge in oil prices in the early 21st century.
2) SurvivaBall
2006, 1 min., USA
Producers: Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno
On-line Digital Videos (at www.theyesmen.org/agribusiness/halliburton/about/history.html)
The Yes Men, media anarchists or “culture jammers” (led by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno), who been ever helpful in the past by posting on the web instructions on how to print your own bar code stickers for things you want to buy even more cheaply from Wal-Mart or by giving lectures to Finnish trade executives on repositioning the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a trade organization for the poor, have ventured into post-apocalyptic planning with an invention called SurvivaBall. They debuted this indispensable disaster suit at a conference of catastrophic loss experts in Florida in 2006 as a new tool for executives who might find themselves caught in an emergency whilst working in their megalopolian office suites. Their website offers a Power Point presentation replete with seven short (five to ten seconds) CGI videos demonstrating their SurvivaBall.
The Survivaball imitates a Kyrgyzstani portable yurt and is the material response to the question the Yes Men asked rhetorically of any corporate executive team: “How will you not only survive, but also continue to function and thrive in the chaos of a disaster?” In short, how can you make money in a crisis?
The Yes Men’s answer comes in the form of a roomy ovoid disaster suit, presciently provided by the Halliburton Corporation, the leading fabricator of world wide construction projects in emerging American markets (like Afghanistan and Iraq), often under no-bid contracts facilitated by their old executive leader, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Of course the real Halliburton Corporation has no such product, although the Yes Men have no trouble satirizing their corporate strategy: they take risks because “sometimes danger presents broad new opportunities.” Without the Black Plague, for example, “the old business models of the medieval Europe would never have been overturned by the entrepreneurs of the Renaissance.” Noah himself understood the concept: after the flood he had a monopoly on the sale of animals.
The Yes Men’s videos are very short, some more amusing than others, but all feature the SurvivaBall and its savvy exec skimming over and through disasters:
Finding Nutrition
Escaping Malibu
Surviving the Ice
Avoiding the Surface
Defending Acquired Rights
Forming a Managerial Aggregate
Dancing with Joy
All of these spoof post-apocalyptic cinema, such as the final piece featuring a cyber-woman dancing through deserted canyons of skyscrapers, but the second to the end offers a model for competitive future executives: form a pile of your SurvivaBalls with your peers, create a floating colony, and then “dispense with unneeded units.”
Further Reading:
Becker, Colleen. “Yes Men.” NY Arts Magazine, May-June 2007. Reviews the hoax, concluding that the Yes Men see the Survivaball as “a parasite, an apt metaphor for the corporation.”
