December 2017 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold, the site of Bill Gates’s City of the Future! No, that’s not Mars. That’s 25,000 acres of barrel cactus and scorpions in the neighborhood of Tonopah, Arizona, about fifty miles from Phoenix. I suppose it seems a smart place for a city if you think water comes from iPhones, or that you don’t have to grow food anywhere near where people live, or that Happy Motoring will continue indefinitely by other means than gasoline. A lot of people believe these things — especially the “intellectuals-yet-idiots” beloved of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, Antifragile, and other books. Many of the people running things in America these days are exactly those intellectuals-yet idiots. They have no idea where this society is actually heading, only techno-narcissistic fantasies about a future of ever-more stuff materialized out of thin air (like the “money” issued by the Federal Reserve). Bill Gates has so much of this money, you wonder if he even knows what the managers, Cascade Investment LLC, and a real estate development outfit called Belmont Partners, are doing in his name. I predict that the $80 million so far given to this project will go up in a vapor and that nothing will ever be built here. Bill G can just write it off as a tax loss.