Neom - The Line - The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia

May 7, 2024 12:57 PM

a video review by Patrick Boyle Well, what it says on the tin...
posted by mumimor (43 comments total)

Can someone provide me a little more of a summary than just the title, or at least some details on why this video is worth my time? I'm not willing to commit to a 32-minute video on the title alone.
posted by foldedfish at 1:11 PM on May 7 [10 favorites]

The reason I didn't put in any details is that part of the entertainment value comes from surprise. But it is a discussion of the KSA project for a new city called The Line, conceptualized by the American design studio Morphosis. I can tell you that Boyle has a dry sense of humor, and also that the review is built on real facts.
posted by mumimor at 1:15 PM on May 7 [9 favorites]

It's also in the wake of KSA seriously dialing back on the ambitions for NEOM, tuning them down from embarrassingly impossibly ridiculous to merely hilariously ridiculous. I just like to see the animated digital architectural mockups of the big silver line through the desert like some lost book of Dune.
posted by chavenet at 1:23 PM on May 7 [4 favorites]

For a shorter intro on the subject, let Adam Something lay it all out for you. Now I'm off to watch the linked one in this post.
posted by NoMich at 1:33 PM on May 7 [5 favorites]

The folks at the Trashfuture podcast are in mourning over the drastic reduction of The Line. And by "mourning," I really mean more of a cry-laugh emoji than outright sadness.
posted by stannate at 1:46 PM on May 7 [5 favorites]

or at least some details on why this video is worth my time?

3 simple rules for life:
- are you dodging an oncoming bus? you do not have time for this video
- are you within 24 hours of breathing your last due to terminal illness? Chances are, you have better things to do with your time
- are you browsing MeFi looking for interesting and/or distracting uses of your time? then make your bed and lie in it
posted by elkevelvet at 2:00 PM on May 7 [47 favorites]

But will there be a Burger King?
posted by Czjewel at 2:05 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

More like a Berber King, amirite?
posted by chavenet at 2:14 PM on May 7 [12 favorites]

I wonder how the Trojena ski resort is going as part of Neom and if they are scaling back as well. The resort has aggressive timelines (less then 5 years till it hosts the 2029 Asian Winter Games), wildly optimistic forecasts in its ability to make snow, and it will pretty embarrassing for Saudi Arabia if it can’t hold the 2029 Games there as awarded. (Though I’m sure they could scale back events dramatically to indoor oriented sports and those that can be done with limited snow, plant a flag and declare it a success)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 2:24 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

Not to be confused with neon, Nome, Neo, Nemo, The Omen, Meno, or Kristi Noem.
posted by grimmelm at 2:32 PM on May 7 [4 favorites]

Summary: Patrick Boyle has videos covering finance and economics, some serious, but most dryly mock their subject with feigned sincerity. In this one he tackles Saudi Arabia's plan to build a 110 mile long city that's 200 meters wide and taller than all but the tallest buildings in the world. Basically "the wall" from Game of Thrones, but in the desert and less practical.
posted by justkevin at 2:37 PM on May 7 [9 favorites]

Well, that was pleasant and informative. And The Line is a really stupid project.
posted by hippybear at 2:44 PM on May 7 [4 favorites]

Also similar failing projects are Dubai's Palm Islands. People with extreme escape velocity wealth are often suckers for grandiose cons that are completely obvious to other 99.99%.
posted by srboisvert at 2:57 PM on May 7 [5 favorites]

Saudi Arabia would be better served trying to claim the World's Longest Bagguette title.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:59 PM on May 7 [8 favorites]

Someone should ask Kristi Noem if they named Neom after her. She'd probably say yes.
posted by aramaic at 3:17 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

From TFV:

This seaside corner of northwest Saudi Arabia is so barren that the only abundant resources that a group of consultants were able to identify were sunlight and salt water

...and consultants.

OMG can you imagine the consultancy grifts that one could run on a country like KSA? I am proximate to work budgets 4-5 orders of magnitude lower than a KSA megaproject and the consultants swarming around that comparatively shallow pool are relentless, well-organized, and affably useless. What do those ghouls look like when they level up into the large money?
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:20 PM on May 7 [9 favorites]

tired: Noem
tired: Neom
wired: No to 'em.
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:21 PM on May 7

chavenet. I hear the camel burger is to die for.
posted by Czjewel at 3:41 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

Also similar failing projects are Dubai's Palm Islands

Ug. Who could have possibly predicted that narrow weird shaped artificial waterways with minimal ability to flush out bordered by chemically induced green lawns would quickly silt up, but not before becoming festering bogs of algae choked soup. Other than anyone with a basic understanding of hydrodynamics. You can smell it before you see it.
posted by kjs3 at 3:49 PM on May 7 [7 favorites]

OMG can you imagine the consultancy grifts that one could run on a country like KSA?

I have seen it, and I still have trouble imagining it. "GDP of some countries" amounts of corruption.
posted by kjs3 at 3:52 PM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Fallout 5: NEOM

(I don't like Fallout but I would play this)
posted by phooky at 4:31 PM on May 7 [3 favorites]

This is the acknowledgement that fossil fuels have a limited shelf life, and these countries are planning on how to create relevance in a future without them. So they want to build the infrastructure to accept as many true billionaires as they can, effectively this has potential to be a tax haven for these techbro libertarians. More importantly, this is the money that nobody fathoms. This is thousands of years of generational wealth that fuel the world economy. This is, how much does it cost? Insane number provided, and insane number of money shows up. This insane idea is funded. This is utopia or exactly the opposite.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:14 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

I will ride my giant turtle yacht to the islands of palm then stroll The Line with its shining towers of omg this is so ridic how much $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
posted by supermedusa at 5:54 PM on May 7

This seaside corner of northwest Saudi Arabia is so barren that the only abundant resources that a group of consultants were able to identify were sunlight and salt water

sounds like a good opportunity to do some real work on solar based desalinization. For example , developing this idea

Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive desalination
posted by MikeHoegeman at 6:11 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

The last time Metafilter recommended a four hour video with little introduction a great time was had by all so I don’t see much risk in this one. I’m going for it.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 6:31 PM on May 7 [7 favorites]

This is the acknowledgement that fossil fuels have a limited shelf life, and these countries are planning on how to create relevance in a future without them.

Corruption and oppression aside, they'd be astronomically stupid if they didn't, right? I mean, yeah, "making a better world" would be nice, but consider the source.
posted by kjs3 at 6:43 PM on May 7

Sometimes after the inauguration:

"The music from the balconies was overlaid with the sounds of sporadic acts of violence....."

(JG Ballard)
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 6:48 PM on May 7

Oh I guess thunderf00t's been entirely rehabilitated now. Okay then.
posted by dumbland at 6:51 PM on May 7

previously (Dec 2022), focused on McKinsey
previously (Jan 2021), MbS's keynote announcing it
previously (Aug 2019)

(please add the tags "theline" and "saudiarabia" to this post)
posted by intermod at 7:00 PM on May 7 [2 favorites]

dumbland, is there something I should know about the guy in this video other than that you just kind of nebulously don't like him? A quick googling doesn't seem to raise any red flags serious enough to merit a context-free "surely he is obviously innately irredeemable" sort of reaction
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:14 PM on May 7

Even before the massive floods that made the international news this year in Dubai, I know people living in KSA who'd occasionally update about this or that grand flood which became somewhat normal with all this built-up modern architecture. I'm only glad this thing is scaled down, but it would've been better to not have existed at all in this current design. But where's the grift in that.
posted by cendawanita at 9:09 PM on May 7

Metafilter recommended a four hour video with little introduction

The Line goes… up?
posted by clew at 9:34 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

is there something I should know about the guy in this video [thunderf00t] other than that you just kind of nebulously don't like him?

He was pretty prominent in Gamergate back in the day. It does seem like he's been rehabilitated - I was surprised the other day to see an Adam Something video quoting him positively.
posted by wilberforce at 9:41 PM on May 7

dumbland, is there something I should know about the guy in this video other than that you just kind of nebulously don't like him?

thunderf00t is a YouTube guy who was a Gamergate sort of guy at some point and he appears to have his own video about NEOM but he’s also not the main guy in the main video so I’m not sure what that comment is about. Does he appear in the video or something?
posted by atoxyl at 9:42 PM on May 7

Generational billionaires? I thought the Line was just going to house the slaves who build it.
posted by rhizome at 10:31 PM on May 7

I got recruited last year for a director-level construction technology position at NEOM. It paid more than 3x my current salary (VP at a 10k+ person engineering firm), along with free housing, free American school education for my kids, and 4 r/t first class tickets back to California every year for everyone.

I didn’t take it because of morals, ethics, and a deep desire to not be bonesawed into luggage. But they have been absolutely throwing money at people and until very recently I was seeing good people bounce from their stateside jobs to the kingdom every week. I hope they kept physical control of their passports.
posted by turbowombat at 10:56 PM on May 7 [11 favorites]

thunderf00t is a YouTube guy who was a Gamergate sort of guy at some point and he appears to have his own video about NEOM but he’s also not the main guy in the main video so I’m not sure what that comment is about. Does he appear in the video or something?

So it's just some random who talked about the same thing, somewhere else?

(Slowly and with intense solemnity) Lol
posted by Sebmojo at 3:47 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

Generational billionaires? I thought the Line was just going to house the slaves who build it.
posted by rhizome

Yes, Generational Billionaires. The money that noone talks about is fundamentally invested here. Here's a hint, I'm not saying whose money it is for a reason. This is the money that lures politicians into silence and compliance.

This is designed to maximize capital flight to a tax haven and pull the talent there as well. They are building a place designed with every luxury so this talent never has to leave. They want this to be where top science and technology minds live, work, and play. And lest you think I am kidding about this, I think they are putting something like 3 ski mountains in the desert because they can. As turbowombat says, 3x salary for construction tech... it is also 3x silicon valley salaries for the IT infrastructure going in place as well. Several large cloud providers are altering TOSes and services to match the need state for what is going in. You think infrastructure in China is tough? This is being designed from scratch to be impervious and permanent.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:04 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

This is (was?) a swindle. Why would anyone with enough money to buy and staff a personal island move themselves into a politically unstable, burning hot area with no water on the say so of one man? If you don't want to pay your taxes, just hire a law firm! It just would have been a tourist trap if it had been built. They still want to move data centers and nuclear energy out there, though...
posted by kingdead at 4:38 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

atoxyl: thunderf00t is a YouTube guy who was a Gamergate sort of guy at some point and he appears to have his own video about NEOM but he’s also not the main guy in the main video so I’m not sure what that comment is about. Does he appear in the video or something?
Sebmojo says it more sarcastically, well, yeah. The piece quotes Thunderf00t's video (which says that 100 years of current GDP could probably fund Neom) and the slyt here builds on that analysis. There's so few videos, sponsored or free-standing, that look into detail about Saudi Arabia or its projects like Neom, so I appreciate what this one does and how little other output is available to work with.
posted by k3ninho at 5:00 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

I’ve never understood why it has to be built in a line and not, say, hub and spokes like a spiderweb. Yes, the whole project is irredeemably stupid and serves mainly to siphon off massive amounts of money from the KSA Sovereign Wealth Fund but “the train that runs from end to end in 20 minutes” and Boyce’s dry analysis of exactly how fast the train would need to travel (MACH 3) to accomplish that and still include stopping at a few stations, taking into account acceleration and deceleration (with added Elon Musk), well it’s worth a watch just to hear that.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:38 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

But they have been absolutely throwing money at people and until very recently I was seeing good people bounce from their stateside jobs to the kingdom every week. I hope they kept physical control of their passports.

My electrician dad was recruited in the 70s by an engineering firm doing projects in Taif and Riyaddh, and he did it for several years because the money was amazing. It was tough on his marriage, because my mom either was raising 4 kids alone in the US or leaving three with grandparents and raising me in a huge villa on the edge of a desert with no one but a couple of servant guys (yeah I know, they were part of the deal) for company. She and I could not wander freely alone so we only went out with Dad when he wasn't working. We did get in lots of trips to Europe going back and forth, but Mom was pretty relieved when he quit. Living in a theocracy is a bummer.
posted by emjaybee at 7:40 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

Neom: Saudi forces 'told to kill’ to clear land for eco-city
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon at 4:12 AM on May 9