Dubai as Neuroplastic Civilization?

Dubai is becoming increasingly visible these days. Since my wife and I considered moving there for a while, and had a marvellous holiday checking out what was going on, I've been following what is occuring there with interest. More than any other city in the world, Dubai represents some new in the development of cities and civilizations.

The 21st century city is more likely to resemble an aerotropolis than a metropolis. The metropolis grew from the industrial manufacturing age, with the focus being heavy industry and its associated infrastructure. Now that whole cities like Dubai are being built around information, media, tourism and finance, they are more likely to be conceived as a global hub that centers around intelligence based industry, and the transportation capability of a major international airport. Dubai is developing into such a city. Its built on a baking stretch of featureless sand 100km wide, with the only physical feature aparment from miles of glorious golden sand beaches, being jagged inhospitable mountains in the distance.

Everyone comes and goes through the international airport, with a huge port for goods and services located some distance from the city. Dubai is a city-state built from the perfect storm of globalization, rapidly accumulated oil weath and the control enabled by the city state model (the benevolent dictatorship). Selling the excitement of a new business, finance, media and tourism center using cheap third world labour but marketing it to the rich world luxury tastes.

Why Dubai is an important model for us to study, and use to predict the developments of civilizations in other parts of the world is that its development is so staggering fast. And it represents some concepts that will contribute to the development of a new type of thought based civilization. Without knowing it, this new type of civilization will have the rapidly developing concepts in the field of neuroplasticity as its core meme.

Neuroplasticity is the ability to deliberately rewire the human brain though conscious intention and mental training. This means it has profound implications on our very idea about what our limitations as individuals and societies are.

In Dubai, we see a city state that created itself from little more than audacious vision, concentrated attention, and effective utilization of generous amounts of financial capital. Dubai represents a incredibly pure example of the idea that whatever humanity can dream, it can create. In being a place that was created out of nothingness using sheer power of vision, it has called into being a whole new concept for civilisation - what I call 'Neuroplastic Civilisation'. A Neuroplastic Civilisation is one that is only really limited by the imagination of it creators.

Why this is an important concept is that in completely created cities like Dubai, there is huge opportunity to bring in many new important ideas - like ecological building design, alternative energy (Dubai is ripe for fields of Solar cells just outside the city limits, or wind farms off the coast). The way Dubai evolves is probably going to be one of the most interesting sociological phenomena of the early 21st century.

Keep watching - Dubai is just warming up, and will get to be a very hot place indeed...

I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity

Thanks to my mother in New Zealand for this…

This is a short poem made up entirely of actual quotations from George W. Bush. These have been arranged, only for aesthetic purposes, by Washington Post writer, Richard Thompson. A wonderful Haiku poem like this is too good not to share.

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope,
Where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!

I am the Decider!