#technocracy '''''fanblog'''''

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Adam Tooze giving some pitch-perfect pornography targeted at me specifically with Israel's "Gaza 2035: A three-step master plan to build what they call the Gaza-Arish-Sderot Free Trade Zone", capped with an AI generated Gaza-Dubai:

I'm in love, this is so glorious. "The world if Israel could play around with Gaza like a little set of Legos" tell me this is not identical energy:

Except its not a shitpost its an actual report from the Office of the Prime Minister. And folks we have got it all! The most convoluted administration system you could possibly imagine for no reason:

The new free trade zone would be administered by Israel, Egypt, and what the Israeli Prime Minister calls the Gaza Rehabilitation Authority (GRA)—a proposed Palestinian-run agency that would oversee reconstruction in Gaza and “manage the Strip’s finances.”

A cutesy little minimalist graphic of all the brand new industries that will magically become globally competitive in export markets because Israel says so:

The beach resorts are in my beloved!! But what are the little factories you ask? Oh nothing, just electric car production facilities!

Remember, before building your first factory, you need 18 Burj Khalifas. We economists call this "infrastructure development", take notes.

It will have high-speed rail through its center, oil projects on the coast, and of course, I'm saving the best for last - a rail project to NEOM:

 🥳The 🥳Line 🥳Mentioned 🥳

The legend on the map literally just says "a mega project" like, oh yeah, one of those! See em all the time.

Now, you might be asking - Ash, if this is your goal wouldn't you have not destroyed every square inch of habitable urban infrastructure in Gaza and shredded their economy into scraps of paper soaked in blood if your plan was to Singapore-on-the-Sea the place? You sweet summer child, those apartments? They are apartments of the past, darling, you don't need organically developed urban ecologies built over time to compliment human habitation. That is for fucking libs. All of this "war" thing was just set-up to create a blank slate for the construction of The Line 2: Its Definitely Real This Time!

I am going to murder James C Scott myself just so I can hover this plan over his corpse and watch the sheer hubris of this monument to the state's desire for legibility and technocratic solutionism resurrect him from the goddamn grave.

"Well....at least after all this they would have to recognize Palestine as a stat-" Woah woah woah woah, hold on:

The final stage would be when Palestine signs the Abraham Accords signaling “Palestinian self-rule,” albeit without statehood

Lets not...lets not get overambitious here. Baby steps, you know? We have to be careful.

Anyway this is the most ludicrously ill-considered and ill-presented reconstruction plan I have ever seen in my life and I shudder to think that, instead of it being an off-hand drip of propaganda intended solely to brush off nosey reporters and diplomats, it might actually be serious. Bibi hasn't let me down yet on the "thinking things through" front!

But tbc if this was fiction - instead of a ruthlessly grim reality - the Regional Deputy Minister of Trade charged with implementing this technocratic abortion would be my precious little blorbo and I would stan her to hell and back.

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You, an art-cel: Paintings of idk people on your walls

Me, a technocrat-rotator: The Economic Development Map of the USSR from the VDNKh Central Pavilion, Moscow, 1970, on my walls:

(Source)