I went to an all inclusive holiday resort for the first time ever over Easter. I can see why people like it, you don’t have to think about anything apart from “do I want a drink” and “what time is dinner?” I guess that is relaxing, although after a few days I found it quite limiting and almost unnerving. I didn’t have to think about where my next meal was coming from because I knew, but equally I had barely any agency in the situation. I could only eat what was presented to me (which was admittedly largely quite nice) at the times when it was available. Equally I could go to the pool whenever I liked, as long as it was within the times specified. I’m not sure I’ve had to conform to that many rules since I left school. Towards the end of our stay, we broke out and went to explore the city. It was my first time in Marrakesh, but in the resort I could have been anywhere. Indeed if global heating means UK summers like the one we’re currently having, we might as well build a load of these resorts here and save the air fare.
An odd thing happened to me about halfway through the stay. I was sat in the dining room taking a break from my buffet lunch and looking around the room, I suddenly had a vision of it abandoned, empty and reclaimed by the desert. I could see where the sand would pile up around the pillars and against the walls with their (then) faded decorations. Once I had seen this it was hard to unsee. Everywhere in the resort I could see it in some future state of abandon and decay, a post-apocalyptic vision that somehow seemed inevitable.
I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a poster in a tube station for one of the big holiday firms showing a picture of a couple floating in giant pool surrounded by beach huts and palm trees. Judging by the number of ‘x’s and ‘c’s in the name, the resort was probably in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, most likely in or around Cancun or Playa del Carmen. I went to that part of the world ten years ago, staying mainly in Tulum, which in those days was a sleepy backpacking resort town with a couple of high end eco-resorts down one end of the beach. It was eminently instagrammable authentic Yucatan beach life for hipster-adjacent dickheads like me, but it was also supposed to be subject to strict rules that were designed to sustain the natural ecosystem. There were no buildings more than two stories high and indeed no hotels at the beach itself (apart from the aforementioned cluster of eco resorts down by the lagoon). As I understand it that has all changed and whilst the beach front at Tulum is not as developed as the other resorts further up the coast, the town certainly has many more luxury resorts of the sort depicted in the poster.
As I wrote about at the time, that stretch of coastline was already suffering from a climate change induced seaweed invasion, which I thought would be harmful for the tourism industry in that region. Of course I was assuming people wanted to go and swim in the sea, lie on a beach or engage with the scenery in any kind of direct way. What I hadn’t factored in (mainly due to the ignorance of inexperience) was the compound-type resorts of the kind I stayed at in Morocco or saw in the poster. At such a resort the beach and the sea are at best backdrops, something to add character to the infinity pool. From that distance, the seaweed is less noticeable, or even lends a sense of realism to the scene. People who want to see Mayan ruins can be bussed to Chichen Itza and back again without having to engage with the locals. The whole thing can be de-risked as much as possible by hermetically sealing it from the world outside, which is there partly for its scenery, partly for its (tightly curated list of) attractions, partly for its weather and partly for its abundance of cheap labour. Indeed this last is probably the reason why my idea of these resorts opening in Britain will never happen: in order to staff them, we’d have to let immigrants in. I mean we could try and staff them locally, but my country is not renowned for its hospitality industry and I doubt the money saved on airfares would entirely cover the additional labour costs. As an alternative, we could go the Dubai route and allow workers to come here with no rights as citizens, effectively as indentured servants to the resort. Either way such resorts become bastions of global north privilege, keeping the increasingly climate ravaged populations of the global south either securely locked in or securely locked out. It doesn’t matter if their water table is progressively depleted in order to feed the growing number of infinity pools, because they need to work at the holiday compound to be able to afford the bottled water they have to buy as a substitute. Increasingly as the polycrisis accelerates, fortress Europe and fortress America will holiday in literalised simulacra of their states, where the main novelty (apart from the abundance of stolen water) will be direct encounters with the people who make their luxury possible.
I’ve recently encountered a number of reports of the ‘new age of robotics’, where contrary to the bold claims of humanoid robots controlled by AI managing all your domestic chores, most of them are actually remotely operated by teams of operators in countries like the Philippines or India. This is not unique to new robots, there is the common joke amongst some on the Indian subcontinent that ‘AI’ stands for ‘Another Indian’ and ‘GPT’ for ‘Gujarati People Typing’. The parts of the current technological ‘revolution’ that are not actually Mechanical Turks still rely on the abstraction of labour and, in the most part, the abstraction of labour in the global south. A prime example of this is the Kenyan data labellers, who give all the data ingested by LLMs its context. The real intelligence in AI is entirely sourced from the workers of the global south. I’ve spoken before about technology’s ability to abstract labour to hide the true human cost of the end product, but in a fracturing world of privilege and poverty accentuated by the environmental meta-crisis it serves the key purpose of reinforcing borders without diminishing the pool of cheap labour. If you no longer have to have your Filipino maid actually come to your house to clean it, you don’t need to care whether they have enough to keep themselves clean, or fed. Indeed you don’t even need to know they exist at all, you can pretend that your house is cleaned by a smart machine with no input from tele-operators, stolen creative labour or mind numbing data labelling work at all. You can marvel at these ‘autonomous’ machines and simultaneously wonder why those slackers in the global south expect handouts just because they were too stupid not to be born in a climate ravaged country. That is assuming you’re on the right side of the divide.
The divide is key to the future that we are currently being guided towards with a strong understanding that a future extrapolated from current systems and goals cannot be achieved for all. Longtermism acknowledges this explicitly, but it is also implicit in the actions and goals of the Epstein class. Their island bunkers are a worst case option, the last resort if (when) their other versions of techno enclaves don’t work. It must take some high grade self-delusion to build a bunker inside a volcano and not have the billionaire version of that Mitchell and Webb sketch: “Mark, are we Bond villains?” Of course the Bond villains’ motivations were easy to understand, I was more interested in the chumps riding round in golf buggies dressed in a boiler suit and a hard hat, with a machine gun slung over their shoulder. I could never see what their motivation was when outside the bunker was all the glory of the 1960s, but in the bunker of the future the motivation is obvious: outside is nothing but the climate ravaged hordes, desperate to come in and share the bounty of your collective wealth, or at least your cumulative wealth. No one would be so gauche as to collectivise it, you’re all independently wealthy after all, otherwise how could you justify being in the bunker? The other day I heard Wendy Liu talking about tech workers in Silicon Valley wanting to avoid becoming part of “the permanent underclass” as a motivating factor for sleeping in their offices and working seven days a week at wildly overvalued companies that produce nothing of use but consume vast amounts of resources. In such comments, they reveal two things: first that they are happy to don the proverbial boiler suit and helmet and second that they see the bunker (in some form) as inevitable. They have effectively given up on the rest of humanity, having already consigned them to the permanent underclass, doomed to wander the cursed earth outside the bunker, with little hope but to serve the needs of those within for scraps off the table.
Some people may read this and think it is fantastical nonsense but others will say it’s a description of the world we already live in. To some extent it is, but the boundaries of the bunker are often not yet clearly defined, at least not to those of us who live in the global north. We don’t notice the boundaries of the bunker because currently we are inside it. If we only holiday at closed resorts (I include places like Dubai in this description) we never leave the bunker. The bunker is all we know and the divide that separates inside from outside may be so big that we are unaware of It. It may be the border of the EU or the US. It could have until recently been seen as a vast swath of the global north until Trump put paid to that. His disruption of the ‘international rules based order’ has shrunk the bunkers to national (or in the case of the EU a smaller super national) size. For many (neo) liberals, this is a temporary blip in the new world order that can be corrected once the Trump administration has been replaced. The bunker builders see it differently, they’ve done the maths and know that they can’t keep on consuming disproportionate amounts of the world’s resources and keep accumulating wealth without reducing the pool of people who can do so. They understand that with the end of abundant cheap fossil fuel energy and a destabilising climate, they are moving into a zero sum game. Their networked states and planned communities are a logical step in the shrinking of the bunker. Their media conglomerates and AI slop generators are designed to simultaneously create desire to consume more and fear the collapse that consumption hastens. You are supposed to be both paralysed and distracted by this paradoxical consumerism whilst they shift the divide around you, gradually moving you to the outside. Or more likely (initially at least) a lower tier bunker, so there are still ‘others’ outside who you want to keep that way. Such a tiered bunker world - where there are always ‘others’ outside even for those outside- allows the illusion of order, fairness even, to be sustained in the myth of meritocracy.
I was telling my wife that I didn’t think an all inclusive holiday would ever be a satisfactory experience for me as it would never fully cater to my wants. She replied that it absolutely could, the implication being that I just hadn’t spent enough money on one and possibly that I don’t actually have enough money to pay for the kind of all inclusive holiday that would give me everything I wanted. I’m not so sure. I’m sure that if I had enough money, there would be an all inclusive holiday available that would let me swim when I wanted and eat the food that I really wanted whenever I really wanted it, but I suspect I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. I suspect that the wokey dokey leftie in me would be entirely uncomfortable knowing that the food I wanted that was available when I didn’t want it would largely go to waste, that the energy and resources used simply to make everything available whenever I might want it were several times the energy and resources I’d use up simply providing myself with these things as and when I actually wanted them. The additional bonus of me getting these things myself is that I might encounter the people who produced them (or at least those who sold them) in their own shop, restaurant or cafe. I would encounter them as people whose lives I must interact with, rather than faceless uniformed ‘staff’ there to service my whims, staff who could be replaced by robots, or at least placed at a distance via the medium of a robot.
The bunker world relies on those ‘outside’ being unknown and unknowable, at best unfortunate but more usually undeserving (because… insert justification of privilege here). If the outsiders are seen as people who can be related to as equals, as just other people, the need to stay inside the bunker diminishes. We may even question the need for a bunker at all. We may decide that whilst the world’s abundance may not be what it was, we can look at better ways of distributing what is available amongst all people, rather than hoarding it for those in the bunker. We might begin to believe that a bunker world isn’t inevitable, which is a critical danger to the bunker world itself, as it relies on inevitability to drive the need to be one of the ones on the inside, to avoid being part of the “permanent underclass.” A combination of fear and greed driven by a belief in the inevitability of collapse is the only thing that makes the bunker world possible. As soon as we look outside for a moment and think “why exactly are we doing this?” We will start to question the apparently inevitable and start to think about alternatives that might help us avert catastrophe. We need other perspectives to know what that might look like. A disaster capitalist model is so ingrained in the psyche of the global north, that we have to look elsewhere for definitions of thriving, of success that are not the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the rest of the world. Maybe spending time with the people who live in the places we go on holiday we might find some of these alternative definitions, but only if we step outside the resort and meet our fellow humans where they are.
I’m sure some people will read this and think it doesn’t sound very restful having to engage with other people on holiday. I suspect those people also go to a resort and try to avoid the other holidaymakers there as well (or pretend they’re not there). I’m not suggesting you spend all your time in deep conversation with the locals, but maybe just try to engage with their life a bit. Go to their shops, restaurants and cafes, try their food, get some joy from the company of people who don’t spend all their time desiring more stuff. Or maybe they do, maybe they spend all their time staring at their phones too, maybe that is just another way they’re not so different from you. If the alternative is a holiday where you are increasingly hiding in a form of bunker, increasingly aware that those outside are suffering to sustain your lifestyle, where you are subject to arbitrary rules that only money can buy you out of compliance with, maybe having to learn how to order a beer in the local language isn’t so bad. If the kind of holiday you’ll accept reflects the kind of society you’ll accept, then I know how I want to holiday.
But what of my vision? Which of these futures is it a result of? It could be either. In the bunker future, the resort has been abandoned as Morocco is no longer considered viable as a destination for the bunker societies, whilst a changing climate for has starved the Atlas mountains of snow and rainfall, allowing the desert to reclaim Marrakesh. In an engaged world, maybe the city has been reshaped by the need to adapt to the climatic changes and the resort is deemed unnecessary and allowed to deteriorate as part of a kind of firebreak of buildings that form a buffer against the encroaching desert, allowing the city oasis within to persist. Honestly who knows, it could just be my overactive imagination, but it is a useful vehicle for exploring the the concepts of futures that may be extrapolated from desires of the present. In one, we are just boiler suit minions in the bunker, when we’re not working to get the sun eclipsing satellite launched, we’re so exhausted that we just want to be in a kind of null space, a luxury nowhere, sensorially deprived, switched off. We may as well be the machines that capitalism so desperately wishes we were, because neither at work or play are we actually engaging with life as anything more than a process that allows us to accumulate wealth. We’re just making the numbers up. Literally. In the other we engage with the world and work and play and society and life are messy and difficult and interesting. We get drawn to bunker world by the promise that we might be able to become the Bond villain sitting in the big chair, but for 99.9999575% of us, that is not going to happen. Why sacrifice your whole life for lottery odds?
I’m not saying you should quit the rat race and become a permaculture farmer, but life is about the experiences we have whilst we’re living it, the things we do and share with people who matter to us. If your holiday is your opportunity to live the most of your life to make those memories, why would you want to make it uneventful?
