The world’s first matcha labubu genocide

When did we stop caring about Sudan?

There is a hidden entity that’s been trying to lure me to Dubai. These days I can’t go online without having to flick through endless ads for an exclusive selection of one, two and three bedroom properties in the prestigious al-Gahbah Waterfront. Blonde East European women grinning unconvincingly, skin like pleather, puffy cheeks, tight red skirt, great slabs of teeth: when you’re picking your address for your new life in Dubai, choose luxury, choose al-Gahbah Waterfront. Apparently other men get porn. Maybe it’s the same blonde East European women in their feeds too, maybe they adopt different forms to tempt you with your own shameful desires. I am midway through my thirties and plastic-titted strangers don’t do it for me like they used to, but I have been jadedly nosing around Rightmove, end of terrace nice, ungh high ceilings, oh fuck yeah solid wood floors, and let’s see they want how much? In fucking Walthamstow? Drooping, slackening, return to rest. Meanwhile the entire internet seems to be intoning with one cheerily insistent voice: YOU WANT TO MOVE TO DUBAI. YOU WANT TO BUY AN APARTMENT IN DUBAI. I’ve never once expressed any such interest, but if I didn’t want it, why would they be advertising it to me? Why would I be followed by jangly ukelele music and footage of a two hundred storey tesseract folding in on itself for gorgeous five-dimensional sunset views? Call to action: what’s your budget for property in Dubai? The options are all in dirhams, as if I’d have any idea how much that is. Check the exchange rate. Oh. It’s really not that much. You could have a mould-splattered carbon-monoxide hovel in London, above the vape shop where they fence your stolen phone, twelve-year-old kids having machete fights at the bus stop, marginal tax rate two hundred and thirty-four percent so they can pay off the waspi women for not checking their post—or you could move to Dubai, pay zero income tax, and have a swimming pool in your balcony at al-Gahbah Waterfront. Did you know that the United Arab Emirates never formally abolished slavery? There’s no taxes, they’ve got this chocolate with pistachio cream inside, and if you want they’ll let you own slaves.

This entity is so determined to show me images of Dubai, it’s even been showing me the sort of images you’re supposedly not allowed to see. Nishant lives in Dubai and has 296 followers on Instagram, but for reasons I can’t explain I’ve been getting regular updates on his life. He lives in a dormitory for migrant workers. A lot of his videos are filmed in a large, long room with two long benches where about a hundred skinny South Asian men stand, each bent over a small gas cooker, each frying their own chapati to eat with their own little pot of chana masala. No air conditioning in there; great sweaty patches on everyone’s sleeveless tops; fat drops of sweat dripping into the food. Later Nishant’s in his bedroom, which he shares with five other people, doing his laundry in a plastic bucket on the floor between the two stacks of bunk beds. Then he sleeps. He is not posting this as an exposé. He is not lodging some kind of protest against his living conditions. The captions all say Dubai ke ladke followed by lots of heart and money emojis. In some of his other videos he’s lip-syncing to Bollywood songs on a rooftop at dawn, with that hypodermic skyline all pink and glowing across the desert behind him. Nishant is from Arrah in Bihar, and I’ve seen what it’s like there. He’s bragging about his enviable life abroad.

But this is part of the appeal, the misery. What the Emirates represent is a way out of the Arab world’s long cold twentieth century. After all those failed experiments with Baathism, pan-Arabism, socialism, anti-imperialism, enlightenment, modernisation, dragging the region out of the historical rut it’s been in since the Mongol sack of Baghdad, back to the forefront of world civilisation, all those Levantine intellectuals, all those dashing fedayeen with their linen shirts open three buttons down, handsome 70s stache, Kalashnikov, cigarette—after all that, the Emirates found another way. Forget enlightenment; just embody all the most feverish Orientalist imaginings and build your new Arab modernity on that. The whole country is spun out of some diseased Frenchman’s odalisque. Sybaritic and cruel, liberality without liberalism, smell of camel shit and rosewater, a yellow-grinned procurer defiling some flawless nude with his big coarse hands. They pay Instagram models to fly there, let them drink hundred-year-old champagne, then once everyone’s done with the selfies they debase them in ways you can’t imagine. Fantastic minarets obviously, half a mile high; dream-palaces, indoor ski slope in the middle of the desert, artificial archipelago in the shape of the entire world; all the follies a mad sheikh needs. Bungee jumping, paragliding, jetskis. Top floor restaurant, wagyu steak covered in gold leaf, ten thousand slaves entombed in the concrete.

It worked. For the rest of the world, modernisation no longer means Westernisation. No one wants to be like the West, pompously dysfunctional liberal democracies where you need to spend a hundred million on planning documents before you can put in a catflap. Even the West doesn’t want to be like the West any more. The great global attractor is the UAE. Development is Dubaification: more sensuous, more childlike, more sinister. Life as a series of toys and gimmicks, the Emiraticore culture that’s now ascendant everywhere, matcha labubu sober rave Kaws Mr Beast Benson Boone. A new and unsettling class of commodities, that no longer try to obscure the social relations that undergird them. You enjoy the labubu precisely because it’s annoying: this is one small way of guaranteeing that somewhere in the production process, someone has suffered. The Sultan drowning his concubines for fun. Everyone gets to worship Satan. That’s part of the deal too, baked in to the whole project. Vathek abjures the Prophet; Tamburlaine desecrates the Qur’an; the Orientalist fantasy always involves making war against Heaven. You get the sense that the emirs would rather have as little as possible to do with Islam. Hoping that if they build enough malls their population will quietly stop believing in God. Replace Him with Japanese food and Italian cars and Ukrainian girls. No more holy wars. No desperate flights across the desert. Your only reward is in this dunya, but the dunya can be a very nice place.

Meanwhile, two thousand miles away, they’re shooting, hacking, butchering men women and children until the bloodstains can be seen from space.