"(ebook txt) William Gibson - Disney Land with the Death Penalty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

most fulsome public sense of itself in the mid-1950s.


"Gosh, dad, I'm really glad you took the time to explain the Feast of the
Hungry Ghosts to us in such minutely comprehensive detail."

"Look, son, here comes your mother with a nutritious low-cholesterol treat
of fat-free lup cheong and skimmed coconut milk "


And, in many ways, it really does seem like 1956 in Singapore; the war (or
economic struggle, in this case) has apparently been won, an expanded
middle class enjoys great prosperity, enormous public works have been
successfully undertaken, even more ambitious projects are under way, and a
deeply paternalistic government is prepared, at any cost, to hold at bay
the triple threat of communism, pornography, and drugs.

The only problem being, of course, that it isn't 1956 in the rest of
world. Though that, one comes to suspect, is something that Singapore
would prefer to view as our problem. (But I begin to wonder, late at night
and in the privacy of my hotel room - what might the future prove to be,
if this view should turn out to be right?)

Because Singapore is one happening place, biz-wise. I mean, the future
here is so bright.... What other country is preparing to clone itself,
calving like some high-tech socioeconomic iceberg? Yes, here it is, the
first modern city-state to fully take advantage of the concept of
franchise operations Mini-Singapores! Many!

In the coastal city of Longkou, Shandong province, China (just opposite
Korea), Singaporean entrepreneurs are preparing to kick off the first of
these, erecting improved port facilities and a power plant, as well as
hotels, residential buildings, and, yes, shopping centers. The project, to
occupy 1.3 square kilometers, reminds me of "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong"
in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a sovereign nation set up like so many
fried-noodle franchises along the feeder-routes of edge-city America. But
Mr. Lee's Greater Singapore means very serious business, and the Chinese
seem uniformly keen to get a franchise in their neighborhood, and pronto.


Ordinarily, confronted with a strange city, I'm inclined to look for the
parts that have broken down and fallen apart, revealing the underlying
social mechanisms; how the place is really wired beneath the lay of the
land as presented by the Chamber of Commerce. This won't do in Singapore,
because nothing is falling apart. Everything that's fallen apart has
already been replaced with something new. (The word infrastructure takes
on a new and claustrophobic resonance here; somehow it's all
infrastructure.)

Failing to find any wrong side of the tracks, one can usually rely on a