There is something darkly comedic about Jeff Bezos recent presentation of his ideas for a gargantuan space station. He is taking a cue from Elon Musk’s penchant for making media savy tech project presentations that garner a lot of positive PR primarily. Although Bezos does not state it directly his utopic space station would essentially be comprised of a string of jazzed up capitalist factory towns (separated by farms) One can look to Celebration, Disney’s nostalgic ideal American small town tourist site and Las Vegas casino’s that borrow European and Egyptian historic landmarks as elements for the type of merging of function and form one could expect to find in the Bezos new world order up in the sky.
(Jeff Bezos is as much a real-estate developer as he is a tech leader. He mentions that Earth, in his scenario, would be “zoned light industrial and commercial,” but what, specifically, would happen to the old world?
At his presentation, Bezos showed a slide with a simple binary: “Our Choice: Stasis & Rationing or Dynamism & Growth.” The motives behind this false choice seem suspicious when presented by the head of a company notorious for its ravenous pursuit of expansion at any cost. But there’s another contradiction here: Bezos sees himself coming down squarely on the side of dynamism and change, when really, he’s the standard bearer for an old status quo.)
This dope maps the past to future. These other ones do the reverse. Same delusions of grandeur.
Yeah, it’s all getting surreal, Trump talking “Space Force” and Ted Cruz talking “space pirates.” All we need now is space cowboys. Bezos wishes.