← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

‘[There is] a growing movement to build [superbillionaire] communities that are “privatized, fortified, unequal.” By 2015, more than 11 million Americans had retreated to [some version of] these “secured communities,” compared with 7 million a decade earlier. But rather than making residents feel safer, … the intense focus on security and privacy only serves to cut them off from the public and stoke their anxieties about outsiders. Walled-off communities, by their very nature, lead to ever higher walls.’

“Indian Creek [Florida] is a great extreme example of trying to pull out completely from having anything to do with the rest of the world,” [one observer] says. “The more you enclose yourself, the more you’re reminding yourself of a sense of risk.”

Worth reading in its entirety.

It’s kinda like the paradox of the burqa; you walk around proclaiming you want to “pull out completely from having anything to do with the rest of the world,” but the gesture is so pathologically extreme that it actually rivets the attention of the rest of the world directly onto you.

Indian Creek has given itself an absolutely magnetic North Korean aura (like Pyongyang, the place is eerily empty; like the DPRK altogether, Indian Creek is paranoid and massively armed, etc. etc.); the reason Business Insider and scads of other publications can’t stop writing about it is because of its nutso exoticism, its collective-insanity charisma. Paranoia being bottomless, the more Indian Creek elaborates its high tech bedlamite withdrawal, the more the rest of us will want to figure out a way to approach it and get a sniff of this Nabokovian Nova Zembla, its superweird existence-loathing technologies, on view right here in the USA.

Margaret Soltan, September 22, 2024 1:21PM
Posted in: kind of a little weird

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=77268

Comment on this Entry

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories