DISNEYLAND WITHOUT DISCO BALLS

The politics of pleasure in Singapore

Hallo from Singapore, the dystopian garden city where I’m lurking this month. America’s Omicron winter is giving severely bleak realness—the decline of Western civilization has never felt more crude. Drained by the absurd nihilism of this pandemic stage, I decided to change the channel on reality and visit my family for the first time in two years—a prodigal return possible thanks to new “VTL” flights that allow the fully vaxxed to enter the country without quarantine.

Getting here was crazy: I had to download a surveillance app called TraceTogether that lets the government track my location at all times—data that could be weaponized to prosecute my ass if I commit a crime. When I touched down at Changi Airport, attendants plastered me with colorful stickers that indicated where I should go. My gold and green stickers meant that I had to enter a warehouse roaring with industrial ventilators where workers in goggles and Hazmat suits checked my vaccination status via QR codes and stuck a rapid test swab down my throat. (I tried to take pics several times btw but people kept jumping out of nowhere to tell me to delete them.) 

Honestly? It felt nice to swap the chaotic flailing of Omicron America with Singapore’s military precision, even if these tactics don’t really make sense in a country with 92% vaccination. (Obviously, I’m pro-Denmark.) My smooth brain no longer had to question, “Do I still need to wear a mask…? Is it unethical to forge a rapid test to enter a rave? Is it my fault that cases are spiking?!” No, I just shut the fuck up and followed the (outdoor!) mask mandate, scanning my TraceTogether app at every door like I was told. 

I don’t write much about my hometown of Singapore, a city with anti-drug laws so draconian, you can be tested at the airport and jailed for having weed in your system. Even though wild shit still goes down here, I’ve made a calculation: hell fucking no I’m not risking getting caught in the soft authoritarian government’s dragnet by spilling illicit underground secrets. (Well, maybe sometimes.) 

Back in 1993, Singapore was infamously described as “Disneyland with the death penalty” by William Gibson in WIRED, when the magazine sent him to “see whether that clean dystopia represents our techno future.” The adage still holds: Singapore remains a glassy simulacrum of techno-capitalist perfection that belies a simmering ennui; it is a place where darker psychic impulses are mostly subsumed to dutiful rule-compliance, and public paranoia has reached such hair-raising heights that it doesn’t even matter if the state is watching: there’s always a policeman in our heads. 

Until recently, Singapore was known to the cognoscenti but obscure in the popular consciousness. This is what I said about it back in 2013, in an essay for the New Inquiry: 

Even though Singapore has been successful in attracting a certain type of tax-avoiding young billionaires, it has (so far) failed to produce a seductive local culture that plays well on the global stage. The average American’s knee-jerk response when posed the question, “What do you think of Singapore?” is, “That’s the place where you can’t chew gum, right?” Ouch.

Then, in 2018, Crazy Rich Asians arrived. I’m not even kidding, this Hollywood rom-com changed everything. Suddenly Singapore was known on the streets as the Switzerland of Southeast Asia—this fabulous mecca for the filthy rich with the highest billionaires per capita. Clueless Americans who previously would ask if Singapore was in China now cooed, “Oooh, dyinggg to visit, sooo cool.” This PR makeover was amusing, because who would have thought a blockbuster chick-flick could single-handedly shift an entire country’s narrative?

Of course, the truth is always so much more gnarly up close. 

So I guess I’m interested in writing about Singapore now as an alternate pandemic reality where the same questions I’ve been chasing are refracted through a different prism: What are the politics of pleasure in a country where nightlife has been shut down for two years? Where disco lights are banned, pre-recorded music must be played below the volume of the streets, and DJs are prohibited from mixing? Also, what are the billionaires up to when expats have been deported for partying on yachts? (You know they always find a way to carry…)

I’m going to spend the next few weeks pursuing these questions, so if you’re in Asia, lmk what’s popping! More soon, sweeties.