The Line, Saudi Arabia’s megacity in the middle of the desert, was a pipe dream from the start. For nine years, consulting firms, largely bankrolled by the Kingdom’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, have been cooking up a 170-kilometer-long, 100% renewable-energy-fueled, physics-defying Revolution in Urban Living. The proposal for the “smart-city” includes a year-round regulated microclimate, high-speed public transport, extensive green spaces, and AI that predicts residents’ daily needs. So far, the project’s vertebrae are state-of-the-art 3-D mockups, which endow Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s hallucinations with a sense of awesome possibility.
Architect Rodrigo Martin Iglesias has described Persian Gulf cities as “theme parks of neoliberal urbanism”—metropolises that develop without passing through the historic processes that generate cities organically. That’s because they’re not built to be lived in, but to project ostentation to tourists and global investors. Phenomena like the Dubai Opera House and Riyadh Comedy Festival exude prestige and exoticism, promising visitors a buffet of novel pleasures. The cities’ financial underworld mirrors this limitless sensory enjoyment, boasting a padded playground for capital and the chance to stake one’s lot in the Great Project of Human Progress.
If Dubai is your local theme park, The Line is Disney World in a rainbow. But the project isn’t just a grander version of what came before it: as a permanent residence, The Line is an inflection point in the “urban simulation” tradition. The project proposal emphasizes long-term social cohesion and a sense of belonging, making ample appeals to family-style living and tight-knit communities. Yet remarkably, the isolated city has no proposal for a local government, constitution, or political process. It’s not clear how legal violations would be addressed or who would be responsible for mediating social conflicts. The idea that any of the international socialite residents would accept the Quran as their constitution is out of the question, but no alternative is suggested. In fact, it’s not clear that the problem of social organization in this self-sufficient community crossed any of the designers’ minds. Apparently, they assumed that, past a certain technological threshold, social conflicts blow into the wind.
The Line makes the extraordinary wager that technology, when sufficiently integrated into a community, can generate complete social harmony. If techno-optimism is the belief that social unrest decreases with technological advancement, The Line takes this theory to its conclusion by proposing to achieve political stasis with the force of technological progress. The project’s complete lack of concern for social organization is not an oversight, but evidence of its designers’ bullish faith in technology to make formal social agreements, procedures, and institutions unnecessary.
Recently, drops in oil prices, rising cost estimates, and an overdue consultation with materials science have created “headwinds” for Saudi Arabia’s Revolution in Urban Living. Without repeating here the project’s extensively detailed human abuses, environmental damage, and architectural oversights, suffice it to say that reality is rapidly closing in on bin Salman and his almighty digital mockup team.
And yet, against all odds, The Line continues to mobilize raw materials, working bodies, and liquid capital en masse. Last year, a construction contractor began working on a $189 million ready-mix concrete plant to provide the “zero-carbon” structure with a bottomless supply of the most destructive material on Earth. In June, three remote-controlled Ship-To-Shore and Electric Rubber-Tyred Gantry cranes travelled 7,000 nautical miles from Shanghai to the futuristic Oxagon port, where they will welcome container ships to the Gates of Progress. All told, in 2025 alone, the Kingdom has signed tens of billions of dollars in contracts for luxury hotels, construction, data centers, and surveillance technology to bring The Line to life.
The project’s construction is simultaneously the undoing of bin Salman’s grand vision. Staring at current pictures of The Line—a dizzying open pit in the middle of the desert—one is faced with the question: how did such a delusional project gain traction at all? Why did investors and techno-optimists, eternally wedded to rationality and efficiency, bite at such a spectacular, vaporous fantasy—and why do they refuse to let it go?
Kurt Vonnegut has a few ideas. Written in 1952, his first novel, Player Piano, takes place in the post-war techno-utopia of Ilium, New York. In Ilium, social class is simple: humans are divided according to their utility to machines, which have replaced humans in almost every sector of the economy. Any man who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine is employed by the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, affectionately known as the Reeks and Wrecks.
In the words of Sadok Bouhlila, “utopia poses but does not solve the problem of the consequences of change and alteration.” Player Piano drives a wedge into this utopian blind spot by exploring the human costs of “technological progress unaccompanied by social and political progress.” The Reeks and Wrecks are spiritually obliterated, the middle-class is hopelessly one-dimensional, and both are suffocated by a slough of overengineered gadgets. Mass-produced M-17 houses are pre-furnished with ultrasonic dishwashers, radiant floor heating, and a high-frequency radar range that cooks dinner in 28 seconds. Society is smoothed over; preferences and personalities are bleached, averaged, and duplicated. As George Kateb says, “by making life’s path more smooth and men more able to walk it, utopian society eliminates numerous kinds of individuality from the world and also impoverishes the kinds of individuality that manage to remain.”
Against this social backdrop, Vonnegut thrusts readers into the minds of the utopia’s so-called top brass: the ever-shrinking circle of “men at the head of the procession of civilization, the openers of doors to undreamed-of new worlds.” Vonnegut’s psychological commentary emerges in the opening chapter, when the protagonist and manager of Ilium works, Paul Proteus, finds that a mouse has chewed through several factory wires. In a display of his one-track mind, Paul tells his coworker to design an electronic signaling device that can tell a cat where to locate the rodent. To design such a contraption, his coworker muses, “you’d need some kind of sensin’ element that could smell a mouse.” By satirizing the quotidian manifestations of unbridled ingenuity, Vonnegut introduces what he sees as the fundamental characteristic of technocrats’ psyche: an irrepressible impulse to view problems, regardless of context or scale, exclusively through the lens of mechanical innovation. The full implications of this worldview become clear in a scene that foreshadows both the novel and the seven decades of American history since its publication, when Paul’s secretary asks him if he thinks there will be a Third Industrial Revolution.
“‘In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines,’ Paul replies. ‘That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking.’”
In what is now a painfully familiar pattern, it becomes clear that Ilium’s elaborate quality-of-life contraptions are merely the cosmetics of progress. For the defining characteristic of Player Piano’s utopia is not an endless array of everyday niceties, but a single supercomputer, EPICAC, that singlehandedly organizes all aspects of American society.
EPICAC (its fourteenth iteration, to be exact) is responsible for calculating how many refrigerators, turbine-generators, hub caps, doorknobs, and TVs will be produced each year; how many jobs are required in every sector of the economy; and what their pay scale will be. EPICAC XIV assigns humans to jobs based on their aptitude in various fields, such as I.Q., grades, criminal record, and exam scores in theory, creativity, and “personality.” As one government tour guide explains, the computer can “consider simultaneously hundreds or even thousands of sides of a question utterly fairly, is wholly free of reason-muddying emotions, [and] never forgets anything—in short, EPICAC XIV is dead right about everything.”
Under EPICAC XIV, a country of working, eating, consuming individuals is broken into a set of statistics and inputs, turning political deliberation into a programmable series of calculations. Messy social problems are resolved by reducing humans to their constituent parts, measuring them, and feeding them into an infallible machine. Culture, religion, and social unrest are distortions; mere deviations from the appropriate trajectory of humanity—nothing that can’t be fixed in the computer’s next iteration.
This is not merely a matter of job automation: EPICAC XIV symbolizes the wholesale displacement of politics and social organization onto an external entity. The collective act of self-determination is performed by a whirring, buzzing, clicking “flow of electrons… shuttling through a maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that [is] translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.” Society is mathematically optimized, seemingly random causes of social change are identified and eliminated, and political institutions become redundant.
In the minds of the top brass, the scientific rationalization of society eliminates the outdated roles of religious faith. Elites’ conviction that they are spearheading a purely secular society is developed by way of the Shah of Bratpuhr, “the spiritual leader of 6,000,000 people somewhere else.” The Shah is visiting America for the first time and requires explanations via an interpreter for the most basic aspects of American life. Through these interactions, Vonnegut constructs a “two-world system” in which utopian society repels, gnashes, and jarringly fuses with a foreign one. Notably, the rational utopia and its primitive, mythical opposite are not divided by space or time, but by language. As the Shah continues his tour with his guide, Halyard, they constantly reinterpret each other’s respective worlds in their own terms. The Shah’s interpreter often substitutes English words with “equivalents” that Halyard deems outrageous, such as when the Shah asks “who owns these slaves we see all the way up from New York City.” Halyard insists that they are not slaves, but citizens with equal rights: “free speech, freedom of worship, the right to vote.” Although the Shah’s vocabulary and worldview are seen as unfit for the modern world, his naive observations call into question the “self-evident” truths of American society.
The incongruence between the Shah’s and the Americans’ respective worlds comes to a head when the Shah comes face-to-face with the US president and EPICAC XIV. As soon as the president enters the room, the Shah asks whether he is the spiritual leader of the American people. In response, Halyard explains the separation of Church and State, and is met with “the Shah’s usual disbelief and intimations that he, Halyard, hadn’t understood the question at all.”
After a speech by the president, the Shah begins to perform a religious rite before EPICAC, “fill[ing] the entire cavern with his mysterious, radiant dignity… communing with a presence no one else could sense.” The president remarks that Shah is a “crazy bastard,” and points out that “you can’t just talk to [EPICAC]… you have to punch out the questions on that thingamajig.” The Shah is ridiculed for his mystical interpretation of the machine, displaying the elites’ perception that their logical society is incommensurable with the Shah’s spiritual worldview.
Lewis Mumford writes of two-world systems that “one suddenly realizes that the distance between the positive ideal and the negative one was never so great as the advocates or admirers of utopia had professed.” Indeed, despite the top brass’s insistence that EPICAC is the crown jewel of a perfectly rational nation, the Shah’s framework of slaves, masters, and absolutist spiritual leaders maps all too neatly onto Ilium. Vonnegut fully develops his argument for the religious structure of mathematically optimized utopias at “the Meadows,” an annual Ilium retreat rife with indoctrination.
The cornerstone of ideological regimentation at the Meadows is a play that enacts Ilium’s founding narrative. The performance, which Vonnegut writes out in full, is a court battle between an “unkempt young radical” and a young engineer, who passionately debate the merits of Ilium. They verbally duel before the “Sky Manager,” whose “duties require that [he] be the sworn enemy of emotion,” over whether to keep Ilium’s star hanging bright in the sky. The radical argues that the wages of John Averageman have decreased steadily since Ilium’s star shone, and that his spirit has been degraded. The young engineer retorts that, “under [the star], civilization has reached the dizziest heights of all time!” He declares that John Averageman has more than Caesar or Napoleon could have dreamed of, and rattles off America’s staggering quality-of-life statistics: “Thirty-one point seven times as many television sets as all the rest of the world put together! Ninety-three per cent of all the world’s electrostatic dust precipitators! Seventy-seven per cent of all the world’s automobiles!” As the audience cheers zealously, bringing tears to the eyes of some, Paul reflects that the play “seemed to satisfy [the employees] completely as a picture of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who was against them.”
The play is a direct indictment of secularism in techno-utopias, as it demonstrates the need for a sacred, unifying origin story among civilization’s professed “procession leaders.” It exposes the contradiction of treating technological progress as an untouchable force for good while claiming to live in a secular society, as the goodness of progress itself becomes a dogmatic creed. The play’s courtroom setting implies that society’s moral progress is determined on logical, scientific grounds—free of religious faith. However, the performance is saturated with religious parallels, such as when the Sky Manager says that his supervisory position is derived from “One far wiser than [himself], infinitely good.” This recalls an earlier declaration by Paul’s boss that the work of engineers and managers is “strength and faith and determination… There is no higher calling.” Between the play’s strong religious elements and binary simplicity, Vonnegut satirizes the inviolable sanctity of progress in a society that champions rational deliberation. Ironically, the foundation of Ilium’s “maximally logical” utopia is a dogmatic conviction that the society is free of dogmatism.
In addition to ritual indoctrination, Vonnegut uncovers the quasi-religious foundations of techno-utopias by demonstrating how “non-believers” are perceived as a grave threat to social order. The Elite Defector archetype—“the brilliant liberal, the iconoclast, the freethinker”—is embodied by Finnerty, a top Ilium engineer who becomes disenchanted with the system and quits his high-ranking job. By living on the fringes of society, Finnerty feels he inhabits a hidden reality: “I want to stay as close to the edge [of society] as I can without going over,” he tells Paul. “Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” This deviant way of thinking is perceived as a threat by the Ilium elite, who label Finnerty a “potential saboteur[] who should be put where [he] can’t do any harm.”
Paul shares Finnerty’s skepticism of “the center,” but for most of the book, his comfortable lot in life impedes him from acting on his deeper inhibitions. He ascribes his growing doubts to mental illness, and admits early on that he “had been thinking of hiring a psychiatrist to make him docile, content with his lot, amiable to all.” In the final chapter, it is revealed that pathologizing spiritual degradation is a central strategy of preventing revolution. Paul is put on a nationally-televised trial for his leadership role in an anti-machine resistance movement, the Ghost Shirt Society. During his defense, he advocates for putting limits on technology to defend the human spirit, and contends that “machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In response, the judge declares that Paul has an Oedipus complex and is misplacing resentment for his father onto the great civilization of America. By ascribing Paul’s deviance to his individual psychology, the judge turns the alienating effects of widespread technology into “a problem singularly [Paul’s] own.”
As the top brass indoctrinate rank-and-file engineers, ostracize non-believers, and individualize alienation, we see how a society governed by a machine is held together by absolute loyalty to that machine’s decisions. For Vonnegut, this is an authoritarian turn: in handing over political decisions to an algorithm, humans to cede their volition to shape the world as they see fit.
Shortly after the judge’s armchair psychoanalysis, the court hearing is interrupted by a battalion of the Ghost Shirt Society, who rescue Paul and successfully carry out a violent revolution. The belief that EPICAC is creating a morally good society crumbles, and, as a result, so does the machine’s power over the country. In the wake of the revolution, it becomes clear that EPICAC had never organized the country autonomously; it always relied on a human chain of command to execute the decisions it deemed optimal. The computer’s ability to translate “electrical qualities and quantities [into] a high grade of truth” was not the result of society being fundamentally mathematical, but of humans believing—and behaving as if—it were so. By rejecting the “divine right of machines, efficiency, and organization, just as men of another age [rejected] the divine right of kings,” the Reeks and Wrecks break out of the algorithmically-determined world and reclaim their right to make history.
What makes The Line unique? Is it the amenities, the spark, the gadgeteering? The Line is special precisely for what it lacks: a proposal for political organization. That’s not just because the project is a pipe dream: it’s because its creators—a dictator and a few consulting firms—assume that, past a technological tipping point, large-scale social conflicts melt away. They believe in the EPICAC proposal: the possibility for social harmony to be calculated away by brute technological force. Humans require certain conditions for life which are knowable, measurable, and technologically satisfiable. By entering The Line, visitors would be entering “frozen historical time”—one where the vector of progress stretches to infinity, while society, having reached its final evolution, simply stands still.
This, on the one hand, is the promise of AI: a future of pure efficiency, in which the intelligence about the ideal form of social organization can be determined by a machine. One article details ten ways AI is reaching this promise in The Line, including its implementation in environmental management, healthcare, and education. The Line also proposes a “software assemblage that converts the human face into a continuously monitored, algorithmically actionable data point,” recalling EPICAC as it converts every inch of human bodies into data points to enhance society. As these dazzling automations approach the total excision of communal decision-making from society, Player Piano reminds us that such proposals are not underpinned by logic or efficiency, but by sacrosanct faith in the inherent power of technological progress to resolve social ills.
Seen in light of Player Piano, it doesn’t seem so contradictory that the ever-logical, rational, calculating forces of global capital acted on such a short-sighted fantasy as The Line. The techno-optimists—the top brass, the bin Salmans, the McKinseys—were never proposing a “more logical” world in the first place. They are architects of faith, whose doctrine is the “new holy trinity: ‘Efficiency, Economy, and Quality.’” The Line’s physical construction is less relevant than the ideological commitment it signals to global investors, and the grip it continues to exert on labor and capital. The project’s raison d’etre is a proclamation of faith before the world: We Believe in Progress. With this horizon fixed, everyday life hums along: remote-controlled Ship-To-Shore and Electric Rubber-Tyred Gantry cranes; facial recognition surveillance; immigrant labor camps. Thus, the vector of innovation is not guided by empiricism or rationality, but “a geometrical and scientific drunkenness”—optimized fantasy and blind faith in technology alone to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
Rather than a neoliberal theme park, to which a physical structure is vital, The Line may be better conceptualized as an “oneiric technology.” Oneiric technologies, in the words of Philip Ball, dress a far-off aspiration in scientific robes “so that the uninitiated onlooker, and perhaps the dreamer, can no longer tell it apart from what is genuinely on the verge of the possible.” The aim of The Line is not to revolutionize urban living, but to blur the lines of the real; to sow a seed of doubt that maybe—just maybe—technology can save us from the very mess it got us into. As long as that seed germinates, circulating in boardrooms and blueprints, it provides cover for the unjustifiable status quo. The Line may forever remain a scar in the desert, but if it fans the flames of the techno-pipe dream a little longer, it will have succeeded.
What do we do? Vonnegut says, rebel for rebellion’s sake. Rage, rage, against the machine. The only way The Line truly dies is when we stop believing that it proposed a desirable way of life. The beauty of Player Piano is that it rejects the fully-automated, mathematically-determined society as a desirable goal in the first place. Despite being written seventy years ago, Vonnegut identifies the tyranny of techno-utopia with more clarity than many of us can today. We are so awash in neoliberal theme parks, oneiric technologies, and promises of futurism that it can be difficult to think that more technological innovation might not be the best way to meet human needs.
As Paul Proteus surveys post-revolution Ilium, in awe that nearly every machine has been smashed, he joins a crowd watching a mechanic repair a juice machine. Paul observes that the mechanic was “proud and smiling because his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Paul supposed—replacing men like himself with machines.” For Vonnegut, it is an ironic and inescapable possibility that humans may revolt, only to recreate their problems all over again. And yet, the potential futility of revolution is no reason to accept machine-generated tyranny. “Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption,” reads the Ghost Shirt Society’s manifesto. And if a revolution against progress is a step backward, so be it: “a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”