Disney Land with the Death Penalty by William Gibson
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Author: William Gibson
Title: Disneyland with the Death Penalty
Original copyright year:
Genre: short story
Version: 1.0
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WIRED 1.4
Disney Land with the Death Penalty
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WIRED sends William Gibson to the future: Singapore
By William Gibson
"It's like an entire country run by Jeffrey Katzenberg," the producer had
said, "under the motto 'Be happy or I'll kill you.'" We were sitting in an
office a block from Rodeo Drive, on large black furniture leased with
Japanese venture capital.
Now that I'm actually here, the Disneyland metaphor is proving impossible
to shake. For that matter, Rodeo Drive comes frequently to mind, though
the local equivalent feels more like 30 or 40 Beverly Centers put end to
end.
Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they
learned how to put some dirt in it? Singapore's airport, the Changi
Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL
world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred fractal edge to
things. Outside, the organic, florid as ever in the tropics, had been
gardened into brilliant green, and all-too-perfect examples of itself.
Only the clouds were feathered with chaos - weird columnar structures
towering above the Strait of China.
The cab driver warned me about littering. He asked where I was from.
He asked if it was clean there. "Singapore very clean city." One of those
annoying Japanese-style mechanical bells cut in as he exceeded the speed
limit, just to remind us both that he was doing it. There seemed to be
golf courses on either side of the freeway. . . .
"You come for golf?"
"No."
"Business?"
"Pleasure."
He sucked his teeth. He had his doubts about that one.
Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state
that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If IBM had ever
bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have
had a lot in common with Singapore. There's a certain white-shirted
constraint, an absolute humorlessness in the way Singapore Ltd. operates;
conformity here is the prime directive, and the fuzzier brands of
creativity are in extremely short supply.
There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich
operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent
microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well,
Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.
But Disneyland wasn't built atop an equally peculiar 19th-century theme
park - something constructed to meet both the romantic longings and purely
mercantile needs of the British Empire. Modern Singapore was - bits of the
Victorian construct, dressed in spanking-fresh paint, protrude at quaint
angles from the white-flanked glitter of the neo-Gernsbackian metropolis.
These few very deliberate fragments of historical texture serve as a
reminder of just how deliciously odd an entrepot Singapore once was - a
product of Empire kinkier even than Hong Kong.
The sensation of trying to connect psychically with the old Singapore is
rather painful, as though Disneyland's New Orleans Square had been erected
on the site of the actual French Quarter, obliterating it in the process
but leaving in its place a glassy simulacrum. The facades of the remaining
Victorian shop-houses recall Covent Garden on some impossibly bright
London day. I took several solitary, jet-lagged walks at dawn, when a
city's ghosts tend to be most visible, but there was very little to be
seen of previous realities: Joss stick smouldering in an old brass holder
on the white-painted column of a shop-house; a mirror positioned above the
door of a supplier of electrical goods, set to snare and deflect the evil
that travels in a straight line; a rusty trishaw, chained to a freshly
painted iron railing. The physical past, here, has almost entirely
vanished.
In 1811, when Temenggong, a local chief, arrived to resettle Singapura,
the Lion City, with a hundred Malays, the jungle had long since reclaimed
the ruins of a 14th-century city once warred over by Java, Siam, and the
Chinese. A mere eight years later came Sir Stamford Raffles, stepping
ashore amid a squirming tangle of kraits and river pirates, to declare the
place a splendid spot on which to create, from the ground up, a British
trading base. It was Raffles's singular vision to set out the various
colonial jewels in Her Majesty's crown as distinct ethnic quarters: here
Arab Street, here Tanjong Pagar (Chinese), here Serangoon Road (Indian).
And Raffles's theme park boomed for 110 years - a free port, a Boy's Own
fantasy out of Talbot Mundy, with every human spice of Asia set out on a
neatly segmented tray of sturdy British china: "the Manchester of the
East." A very hot ticket indeed.
When the Japanese came and took it all, with dismaying ease, the British
dream-time ended; the postwar years brought rapid decay, and equally rapid
aspirations for independence. In 1965, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, a
Cambridge-educated lawyer, became the country's first prime minister.
Today's Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yew's
vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles's.
Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party has remained in power ever since; has
made, some would say, quite drastically certain that it would do so. The
emblem of the PAP is a cartoony lightning bolt striking within a circle;
Reddi Kilowatt as the mascot of what is, in effect, a single-party
capitalist technocracy.
Finance Data a State Secret
SINGAPORE: A government official, two private economists, and a newspaper
editor will be tried jointly on June 21 for revealing an official
Singaporean secret - its economic growth rate.
Business Times editor Patrick Daniel, Monetary Authority of Singapore
official Shanmugaratnam Tharman, and two economists for regional brokerage
Crosby Securities, Manu Bhaskaran, and Raymond Foo Jong Chen, pleaded not
guilty to violating Singapore's Official Secrets Act.
South China Morning Post, 4/29/93
Reddi Kilowatt's Singapore looks like an infinitely more liveable version
of convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building supplied with a
festive party-hat by the designer of Loew's Chinese Theater. Rococo
pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic
footage of atria to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies.
Along Orchard Road, the Fifth Avenue of Southeast Asia, chocka-block with
multi-level shopping centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly.
Young, for the most part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the
local Gap clone, they're a handsome populace; they look good in their
shorts and Reeboks and Matsuda shades.
There is less in the way of alternative, let alone dissident style in
Singapore than in any city I have ever visited. I did once see two young
Malayan men clad in basic, global, heavy metal black - jeans and T-shirts
and waist-length hair. One's T-shirt was embroidered with the Rastafarian
colors, causing me to think its owner must have balls the size of durian
fruit, or else be flat-out suicidal, or possibly both. But they were it,
really, for overt boho style. (I didn't see a single "bad" girl in
Singapore. And I missed her.) A thorough scan of available tapes and
CDs confirmed a pop diet of such profound middle-of-the-road blandness
that one could easily imagine the stock had been vetted by Mormon
missionaries.
"You wouldn't have any Shonen Knife, would you?"
"Sir, this is a music shop."
Although you don't need Mormons making sure your pop is squeaky-clean when
you have the Undesirable Propagation Unit (UPU), one of several bodies of
official censors. (I can't say with any certainty that the UPU,
specifically, censors Singapore's popular music, but I love the name.)
These various entities attempt to ensure that red rags on the order of
Cosmopolitan don't pollute the body politic. Bookstores in Singapore,
consequently, are sad affairs, large busy places selling almost nothing I
would ever want to buy - as though someone had managed to surgically
neuter a W.H. Smith's. Surveying the science fiction and fantasy sections
of these stores, I was vaguely pleased to see that none of my own works
seemed to be available. I don't know for a fact that the UPU had turned
them back at the border, but if they had, I'd certainly be in good company.
The local papers, including one curiously denatured tabloid, New Paper,
are essentially organs of the state, instruments of only the most
desirable propagation. This ceaseless boosterism, in the service of order,
health, prosperity, and the Singaporean way, quickly induces a species of
low-key Orwellian dread. (The feeling that Big Brother is coming at you
from behind a happy face does nothing to alleviate this.) It would be
possible, certainly, to live in Singapore and remain largely in touch with
what was happening elsewhere. Only certain tonalities would be muted, or
tuned out entirely, if possible. . . .
Singaporean television is big on explaining Singaporeans to themselves.
Model families, Chinese, Malay, or Indian, act out little playlets
explicating the customs of each culture. The familial world implied in
these shows is like Leave It To Beaver without The Beave, a sphere of
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