NEOMbies

Walden Green on the influencers putting it all on The Line.

In theory, Neom is many things. A luxury island resort and a linear “cognitive city” and an upside-down skyscraper built into a mountain and a biotech research hub and a patron of international athletics. None of those things exist yet, but no matter: Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and chair of Neom’s board of directors, has called it a “human-first civilizational revolution.” And last week, the wider internet became intimately familiar with a few of those humans.

It started with a video posted by MomTok influencer @jessica.ashley.herman—“My Evening in Neom, Saudi Arabia (As a mom of two)”—captivating for the recognizability of its format and deep uncanniness of its setting. Watch the whole thing if you haven’t already, but I’ll run down some of my (and Twitter’s) personal highlights: Jessica wiping down the already clean kitchen counter; her remark that “it’s finally cooling down,” i.e. actually safe to go outside; the desolate city streets; “we have the best fruit here”; and the small patch of grass watered by what looks like about 7 sprinklers. I have seen the setting compared to the films The Zone of Interest (more on that later) and Don’t Worry Darling, a space mining colony on a foreign planet, a military base, Bakersfield, CA and Glendale, AZ.

Regardless of one’s cultural touchstones, these limited glimpses of Neom are a far cry from the promotional materials; “it appears the reality is pure Ballard.” But Neom Community One—or NC1, where Jessica lives—and its counterpart, NC2, aren’t really a part of the Neom vision proper. They’re company towns, built to house the employees of the Neom corporate offices and their families. Neither a futuristic metropolis nor a luxury pleasure palace, NC1 and NC2’s claims to fame are, per one post on the Neom subreddit, a dining hall with “decently good” food and “some activities over the weekend.” So why center your influencer promotions around these regions, unless, of course, it’s all you have to show of your 1.5 trillion dollar megaproject?

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Shortly after going viral, Jessica put her TikTok account on private, as did at least four other influencers who had been posting videos from Neom. The ones who’ve stuck around are even stranger. There’s @JuliaSaudiArabia, who doesn’t speak in most of her videos but likes to post selfies in her Neom-branded hard hat and safety vest. @GGNEOM is a straight-up evangelist, reposting Neom advertorials whole cloth on her personal feed. One thing GG does that I find especially amusing is reusing the same clip two or three times in one video, as if there’s not enough worthwhile content to fill the 59 seconds.

@ggneom

احب العيش في المملكة العربية السعوديةLOVE LIVING IN SAUDI ARABIA😍#tabuk #saudiarabia🇸🇦 #saudiarabia #ksa🇸🇦 #riyadh🇸🇦 #dubai

There is also a truly dark side to the Neom enterprise. About 20,000 members of the native Howeitat tribe will be forcibly expelled from their land and homes if the project goes ahead as planned. Some more outspoken activists have already been killed or sentenced to death. In 2020 one vocal detractor, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, posted videos online detailing the forcible eviction, mentioning in one that he “expected the authorities to plant weapons in his house to incriminate him.” When al-Huwaiti was later killed by Saudi security forces, a statement from the State Security, like clockwork, alleged he had opened fire first, forcing retaliation. Here, those Zone of Interest comparisons come sharply into focus.

Life in NC1 or NC2, though, seems far from idyllic. Look closely at Jessica’s video, and spot the security cameras mounted on most of the light posts. Baked into the plan for Neom’s linear city—appropriately named The Line and described in the New York Times as a “postmodern ecotopia”—is the idea of “data as currency,” offering financial incentives to mine the data of a proposed 9 million residents and creating, effectively, a surveillance state. Also worth noting: these Neom-fluencers either work for or are married to people who work for NEOM the company, whose chief executive Nadhmi al-Nasr has gone on record to proclaim “I drive everybody like a slave.”

A representative for Neom told NBC that they do not pay influencers. Even if we accept this as true, employing someone’s husband—as we can assume is the case with Jessica—certainly gives a company other levers to pull. Any smart content creators will take the money, wherever it comes from, and book it out of there; the real mistake would be to buy into the vision, as did the poor souls who ended up in the mountains with “no shop barbers or pharmacy…2.5 hours [away] from any civilization.”

So who is Neom for, really? Certainly not the über-wealthy, who would probably much rather go to Dubai. Obviously there will be no hover-taxis, or man-made moon. And yet, the goal of these influencers and employees is to realize a vision that doesn’t have much room for them in it. It’s hard to imagine Neom going any other way than Disney’s Star Wars Hotel: a glut of money and grandiose promises, built for no one.

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