Disneyland with the Death Penalty

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Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. CONTENTS Introduction: African Thumb Piano Rocket Radio Since 1948 Any ’Mount of World The Baddest Dude on Earth Talk for Book Expo, New York Dead Man Sings Up the Line Disneyland with the Death Penalty Mr. Buk’s Window Shiny Balls of Mud: Hikaru Dorodango and Tokyu Hands An Invitation Metrophagy: The Art and Science of Digesting Great Cities Modern Boys and Mobile Girls My Obsession My Own Private Tokyo The Road to Oceania Skip Spence’s Jeans Terminal City Introduction: “The Body” The Net Is a Waste of Time Time Machine Cuba Will We Have Computer Chips in Our Heads?

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There’s a certain white-shirted constraint, an absolute humorlessness in the way Singapore Ltd. operates; conformity here is the prime directive, and the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply. The physical past here has almost entirely vanished. There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty. But Disneyland wasn’t built atop an equally peculiar nineteenth-century theme park—something constructed to meet both the romantic longings and purely mercantile needs of the British Empire. Modern Singapore was: Bits of the Victorian construct, dressed in spanking-fresh paint, protrude at quaint angles from the white-flanked glitter of the neo-Gernsbackian metropolis.

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Published here for the first time. “Dead Man Sings” copyright © 1998 by William Gibson. First published by Forbes ASAP magazine, November 30, 1998. “Up the Line” speech delivered at Directors Guild of America’s Digital Day, Los Angeles, May 17, 2003. Published here for the first time. “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” copyright © 1993 by William Gibson. First published by Wired magazine, January 2004. “Mr. Buk’s Window” copyright © 2001 by William Gibson. First published by www.williamgibsonbooks.com. “Shiny Balls of Mud: Hikaru Dorodango and Tokyu Hands” copyright © 2002 by William Gibson.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

For instance, some elevators have been outfitted with urine detection devices to detect urine’s scent, close the doors, and call the police. For its draconian penalties on offenses such as spitting and chewing gum, author William Gibson, no stranger to dystopian visions of the future, once described the city as “Disneyland with the Death penalty.” Nevertheless, as carbon emissions are heating up our atmosphere and urbanization is disrupting our natural system, Singapore remains a test bed for a more sustainable urban future—one centered around the greenest skyscrapers. SINGAPORE PROVIDES AN EXAMPLE of how cities and skyscrapers can coexist with nature.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

By the 1970s, as he explains in his memoirs, he had abandoned any illusion that socialism made sense: It was causing “the inevitable decline of the British economy.”3 By the 1990s he was reading Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism and pursuing an “open-door policy” to international business, with a well-educated labor force, the rule of law, and low taxes. He went on to create one of the smallest governments in the world. It is easy to make fun of his creation. Singapore is Disneyland with the death penalty, paradise as designed by McKinsey, a supersized shopping mall where chewing gum is banned and litterbugs given a thrashing. For all his talk about “Asian values,” Lee was a pragmatic opportunist with sharp elbows. Opponents have been sent to prison and citizens treated like children.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Despite a constitution modelled on the British parliamentary system, with frequent compulsory elections, it has had only one party in power since gaining self-governing status in 1959 and independence in 1963: Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP). Singapore has been called many things, from ‘Disneyland with the death penalty’10 to ‘one of the cleanest, safest, richest and dullest cities in the world’,11 but there is no question that, in its first fifty years, it became one of the great global cities of our times. This confused picture is reflected in Singapore’s standing within the many rankings that now catalogue the different faces of the world’s cities.