Tag: globalization

Foreign pageant queens

I was hired to cruise around in a fake gold Mercedes golf cart with 5 other girls for 3 days, to lure investors for a miniature replica of Versailles. Pageants serve as infomercials: “Visit Ordos, or Dunhuang, or Dalian, or Chengdu: wealthy enough to import foreign pageant queens!”

in a fully globalized economy, you are now exotic.

End of surprises

In the 60s and 70s anyone could get to anyplace for very little money and when they arrived, it was still not touched by globalization. There were no maps, no guidebooks, no cafes, ATMs, no forums, even no hotels. It was all surprises.

just wait another 5 years when everyone has smartphones, and no one will ever get lost again, or require the services of a local instead of staring into their device for information.

Shanghai Expo

Organizers of Shanghai’s World Expo have been holding trial runs this week. Officials now estimate the 6-month event, themed “Better City, Better Life”, will attract up to 100m visitors, 95% of them Chinese. Shanghai has spent $58.6b preparing for the Expo – more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics. Collected here are photographs of last-minute preparations in Shanghai as they prepare to welcome the world this weekend.

world expos are so weird. what is on display / sale here? competing 70s-era utopias?

Manba

An underground youth culture in Japan with distinctive music, fashion and make-up, where the skin is darkened using tanning products is spreading worldwide. Young people in the UK have been learning about the intricacies of ‘manba‘ by making friends on the other side of the world using social networking sites and learning how to re-create the style through videos on YouTube.

paging bruce sterling for OMG globalization commentary