Everything about this to me is funny in a kind of terrible way.

Really exemplifies a lot of what's going on in architecture, what's going on in politics, what's going on in tech.

It's the perfect intersection of BS, essentially.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Kate Wagner.

Kate is an architectural critic and journalist who's written for a bunch of publications, including The Baffler, The Nation, and The New Republic.

She's also the creator of McMansion Hell, a blog that digs into the worst McMansions you can ever hope to find.

I was excited to have Kate on this week's episode of the show because I feel like there are a lot of similarities between

things that happen in the tech industry and in the architecture industry.

You know, in particular, a lot of focus on PR, especially for projects that might not have

a lot of public benefit, but, you know, we'll certainly benefit some corporations and some

capitalists down the line, no pun intended. Because we start this week's episode by talking about what has been going on

in Saudi Arabia recently, with projects such as Neom, the line, and other, you know, major

architectural projects that focus on these big kind of buildings that have all of these

wild attributes to them that are supposed to

give Saudi Arabia some positive PR by using architecture in this way.

And certainly, you know, right from the outset, we can see that many of these projects are

pretty ridiculous, are unlikely to ever be built, and certainly if they are built will look

nothing like the images

that they put out there but are designed to get some credibility abroad you know they certainly make

some money for some of these architectural firms that work on them and they suggest that Saudi

Arabia is something more than a bloody dictatorship built on oil money.

But then we go beyond that to talk about the broader architecture industry, you know,

...