"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. His first major piece of non-fiction, it was first published as the cover story [1] for Wired magazine's September/October 1993 issue (1.4). [2] [3]
The article followed Gibson's observations of the architecture, phenomenology and culture of Singapore, and the clean, bland and conformist impression the city-state conveyed during his stay. Its title and central metaphor—Singapore as Disneyland with the death penalty— was a reference to the authoritarian artifice the author perceived the city-state to be. Singapore, Gibson detailed, was lacking any sense of creativity or authenticity, absent of any indication of its history or underground culture. He found the government to be pervasive, corporatist and technocratic, and the judicial system rigid and draconian. Singaporeans were characterized as consumerists of insipid taste. The article was accentuated by local news reports of criminal trials by which the author illustrated his observations, and bracketed by contrasting descriptions of the Southeast Asian airports he arrived and left by.
Though Gibson's first major piece of non-fiction, the article had an immediate and lasting impact. The Singaporean government banned Wired upon the publication of the issue. [3] The phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" came to stand internationally for an authoritarian and austere reputation that the city-state found difficult to shake off. [4]
There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.
— Gibson, William. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" [2]
The title "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" referred to the subject of the article, the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, whose strictly guarded sterility Gibson described with horror. [5] After opening the article with the Disneyland metaphor, Gibson cited an observation attributed to Laurie Anderson that virtual reality "would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it" in relation to the immaculate state of Changi Airport, Singapore's international airport. Beyond the airport, he noted that the natural environment had been cultivated into "all-too-perfect examples of itself", such as with the abundance of golf courses. Singaporean society was a "relentlessly G-rated experience", controlled by a government akin to a megacorporation, fixated on conformity and behavioural constraint and with a marked lack of humour and creativity. [2]
Gibson found it painful to try to connect with the Victorian Singapore, of which few vestiges remained. In an attempt to uncover Singapore's underlying social mechanisms, the author searched fruitlessly for an urban underbelly, rising at dawn for jetlagged walks on several mornings only to discover that the city-state's "physical past ... has almost entirely vanished". [2] [5] He gave an overview of the history of Singapore from the founding of modern Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 to the Japanese occupation and the establishment of the Republic in 1965. He concluded that modern Singapore, effectively a one-party state and capitalist technocracy, was a product first and foremost of the vision of three-decade Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. [2] As an aside, he quoted a headline from the South China Morning Post detailing the trial of a cadre of economists, a government official (current President, Tharman) and a newspaper editor for divulging a state secret by revealing the Singaporean economic growth rate. [2]
Gibson deplored the absence of an authentic metropolitan feeling, [5] something which he blamed for the "telling lack of creativity". [2] He gave a psychogeographic account of the architecture of the city-state, noting the endless parade of young, attractive and generically attired middle class through the host of shopping centers, and comparing the city-state to the convention district of Atlanta, Georgia. He found the selection in music stores and bookshops unrelentingly bland, musing whether this is partially attributable to the efforts of the Undesirable Propagation Unit (UPU), one of several state censorship agencies. [2] Amidst the near-total absence of bohemianism and counterculture, Gibson found no trace of dissidence, an underground, or slums. [2] [5] In the place of a sex trade, the author finds government-sanctioned "health centers" – in fact massage parlours – and mandatory dating organized and enforced by government agencies. "[T]here is remarkably little", he wrote of the city-state "that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt carefully deliberated social policy." [2]
The creative deficit of the city-state was evident to the author also in the Singaporeans' obsession with consumerism as a pastime, the homogeneity of the retailers and their fare, and in what he characterized as their other passion: dining (although he finds fault with the diversity of the food, it was, he remarked "something to write home about"). [2] He returned then to the theme of the staid insipidity of the city-state, observing the unsettling cleanliness of the physical environment and the self-policing of the populace. In detailing Singaporean technological advancement and aspirations as an information economy, Gibson cast doubt on the resilience of their controlled and conservative nature in the face of impending mass exposure to digital culture – "the wilds of X-rated cyberspace". [2] "Perhaps", he speculated, "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable ... weirdness." [2]
Toward the end of the essay, Gibson briefly covered two applications of the death penalty by the Singaporean justice system; he excerpted a report from The Straits Times about Mat Repin Mamat, a Malay man sentenced to death for attempting to smuggle a kilogram of cannabis into the city-state, and followed this with a description of the case of Johannes van Damme, a Dutch engineer found with significant quantities of heroin with the same consequence. He expressed reservations about the justice of capital punishment and described the Singaporeans as the true bearers of zero tolerance. After hearing the announcement of van Damme's sentencing, Gibson decided to leave, checked out "in record time" from the hotel, and caught a cab to the airport. The trip was conspicuous for the absence of police along the road, but there was an abundance of them at the Changi Airtropolis, where Gibson photographed a discarded piece of crumpled paper, incurring their ire. Flying into Hong Kong he briefly glimpsed the soon-to-be-destroyed shantytown Kowloon Walled City at the end of one of the runways at the chaotic Kai Tak Airport, and mused about the contrast with the staid and sanitized city-state he had left behind. The essay ended with the declaration "I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace." [2]
The Singapore government responded to the publication of the article by banning Wired from the country. [3] The phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" became a famous and widely referenced description for the nation, [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] adopted in particular by opponents of Singapore's perceived authoritarian nature. [13] The city-state's authoritarian and austere reputation made it difficult to shake the description off; [4] [14] Creative Review hailed it as "famously damning", [15] while The New York Times associate editor R. W. Apple Jr. defended the city-state in a 2003 piece as "hardly deserving of William Gibson's woundingly dismissive tag line". [16]
Reviewing the work in a 2003 blog post, Gibson wrote:
That Wired article may have managed to convey the now-cliched sense of Singapore as a creepy, anal-retentive city-state, but it didn't go nearly far enough in capturing the sheer underlying dullness of the place. It's a terrible *retail* environment. The endless malls are filled with shops selling exactly the same products, and it's all either the stuff that kicks Cayce into anaphylactic shock or slightly sad local-industry imitations of same. You could easily put together a smarter outfit shopping exclusively in Heathrow. [17]
In 2009, John Kampfner observed that the phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" was still being "cited by detractors of Singapore as a good summary of its human rights record and by supporters of the country as an example of foreign high-handedness." [18] "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" was assigned as reading on the topic of "Singaporean progress" for a 2008 National University of Singapore Writing & Critical Thinking course. [19] The piece was included in a 2012 compilation of Gibson's non-fiction writing, Distrust That Particular Flavor .
In a 2017 episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown , filmed in Singapore, Bourdain told a group of native Singaporeans that many Americans might think of the city as "Disneyland with a death penalty". [20] Bourdain also referenced Gibson’s essay in a written summary of the episode. [21]
The article provoked a strong critical reaction. The Boston Globe characterized it as a "biting piece on the technocratic state in Singapore". [22] It was recommended by postmodern political geographer Edward Soja as "a wonderful tour of the cyberspatial urbanities" of the city-state. [23] Journalist Steven Poole called it a "horrified report", and argued that it showed that the author "despises the seamless, strictured planes of corporate big business" and is "the champion of the interstitial". [24] In a review of Gibson's 2010 novel Zero History for The Observer James Purdon identified "Disneyland" as one of the high points of Gibson's career, "a witty, perceptive piece of reportage, hinting at a non-fiction talent equal to the vision that had elevated Gibson to digital-age guru". [25]
Philosopher and technology writer Peter Ludlow interpreted the piece as an attack on the city, and noted as ironic the fact that the real Disneyland was in California—a state whose "repressive penal code includes the death penalty". [26] Urban theorist Maarten Delbeke noted that Gibson cited the computerized control of the city-state as responsible for its sanitized inauthentic character, a claim Delbeke called "a conventional, almost old-fashioned complaint against technocracy". [5] In a 2004 article in Forum on Contemporary Art & Society, Paul Rae commented that "[w]hile an ability to capture the zeitgeist is to be taken seriously in a context such as this one, Gibson's journalistic reportage is inevitably unrefined", and cited the accusation of Singapore-based British academic John Phillips that Gibson "fails to really think [his critiques] through". [27]
In S,M,L,XL (1995), urbanist and architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas took issue with the acerbic, ironic tone of the article, condemning it as a typical reaction by "dead parents deploring the mess [their] children have made of their inheritance". [5] [28] Koolhaas argued that reactions like Gibson's imply that the positive legacy of modernity can only be intelligently used by Westerners, and that attempts such as Singapore's at embracing the "newness" of modernity without understanding its history would result in a far-reaching and deplorable eradication. [5]
Singaporean Tang Weng Hong in turn wrote a critical response to both Gibson and Koolhaas. [29]
Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It is located about one degree of latitude north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bordering the Strait of Malacca to the west, the Singapore Strait to the south along with the Riau Islands in Indonesia, the South China Sea to the east, and the Straits of Johor along with the State of Johor in Malaysia to the north. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet; the combined area of these has increased by approximately 25% since the country's independence as a result of extensive land reclamation projects. It has the third highest population density of any country in the world, although there are numerous green and recreational spaces as a result of urban planning. With a multicultural population and in recognition of the cultural identities of the major ethnic groups within the nation, Singapore has four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. English is the common language, with its exclusive use in numerous public services. Multi-racialism is enshrined in the constitution and continues to shape national policies in education, housing, and politics.
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the Information Age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
Sook Ching was a mass killing that occurred from 18 February to 4 March 1942 in Singapore after it fell to the Japanese. It was a systematic purge and massacre of 'anti-Japanese' elements in Singapore, with the Singaporean Chinese particularly targeted by the Japanese military during the occupation. However, Japanese soldiers engaged in indiscriminate killing, and did not try to identify who was 'anti-Japanese.'
A hawker centre or cooked food centre is an open-air complex commonly found in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. They were built to provide a more sanitary alternative to mobile hawker carts and contain many stalls that sell different varieties of affordable meals. Dedicated tables and chairs are usually provided for diners.
Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Technocracy follows largely in the tradition of other meritocracy theories and assumes full state control over political and economic issues.
Singapore Airlines Flight 006 was a scheduled passenger flight from Singapore Changi Airport to Los Angeles International Airport via Chiang Kai-shek International Airport near Taipei, Taiwan. On 31 October 2000, at 23:18 Taipei local time, the Boeing 747-412 operating the flight attempted to take off from the wrong runway at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport during a typhoon. The aircraft crashed into construction equipment on the runway, killing 83 of the 179 people aboard. Ninety-eight occupants initially survived the accident, but two passengers died later from injuries in hospital. It was the first fatal accident involving a Boeing 747-400.
Capital punishment in Singapore is a legal penalty. Executions in Singapore are carried out by long drop hanging, and usually take place at dawn. Thirty-three offences—including murder, drug trafficking, terrorism, use of firearms and kidnapping—warrant the death penalty under Singapore law.
Singapore 2006 was a group of several concurrent events that were held in Singapore in support of the 61st Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group. The opening ceremony and plenary sessions for the main meetings took place from 19–20 September 2006 at the Suntec Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre (SSICEC) in Marina Centre. The ministers of G8, G10 and G24 coincided with the event on 16 September. Registration for event delegates began on 11 September 2006 at City Hall, and the three-day Program of Seminars from 16 September 2006 at the Pan Pacific Singapore. Other concurrent events that were held at various venues include the Singapore Biennale 2006, the Raffles Forum 2006, Indonesia Day and the Global Emerging Markets Investors Forum and Networking Reception.
Human rights in Singapore refers to rights both legal and in practice. Since Singapore's independence in 1965, the legal rights of its citizens have been set out in the Constitution of Singapore and include rights found in subsequent amendments and referendums. These rights have evolved through Singapore's history as a part of the Straits Settlements, its years under Japanese occupation, its position as a separate self-governing crown colony, and its present day status as a sovereign island country and city-state.
The mass media in Singapore refers to mass communication methods through broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet available in the city-state. Singapore's media environment is a duopoly - it is dominated by two major players, Mediacorp and SPH Media.
"The Gernsback Continuum" is a 1981 science fiction short story by American-Canadian author William Gibson, originally published in the anthology Universe 11 edited by Terry Carr. It was later reprinted in Gibson's collection Burning Chrome, and in Mirrorshades, edited by Bruce Sterling. With some similarity to Gibson's later appraisal of Singapore for Wired magazine in Disneyland with the Death Penalty, as much essay as fiction, it depicts the encounters of an American photographer with the period futuristic architecture of the American Atomic Age and Art Deco when he is assigned to document it for British publishers Barris-Watford, and the gradual incursion of its retro-futuristic hallucinations into his world. "Gernsback" in the title alludes to Hugo Gernsback, the pioneer of early 20th century American pulp magazine science fiction.
Although the legal system of Singapore is a common law system, the criminal law of Singapore is largely statutory in nature and historically derives largely from the Indian penal code. The general principles of criminal law, as well as the elements and penalties of general criminal offences such as assault, criminal intimidation, mischief, grievous hurt, theft, extortion, sex crimes and cheating, are set out in the Singaporean Penal Code. Other serious offences are created by statutes such as the Arms Offences Act, Kidnapping Act, Misuse of Drugs Act and Vandalism Act.
Disneyland is the original Disney theme park in Anaheim, California.
The works of William Gibson encompass literature, journalism, acting, recitation, and performance art. Primarily renowned as a novelist and short fiction writer in the cyberpunk milieu, Gibson invented the metaphor of cyberspace in "Burning Chrome" (1982) and emerged from obscurity in 1984 with the publication of his debut novel Neuromancer. Gibson's early short fiction is recognized as cyberpunk's finest work, effectively renovating the science fiction genre which had been hitherto considered widely insignificant.
Van Tuong Nguyen, baptised Caleb, was an Australian from Melbourne, Victoria convicted of drug trafficking in Singapore. A Vietnamese Australian, he was also addressed as Nguyen Tuong-van (阮祥雲) in the Singaporean media, his name in Vietnamese custom, as well as in most Asian customs.
Boo Junfeng is a Singaporean filmmaker. Boo's films, Sandcastle (2010) and Apprentice (2016) have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, beginning with his debut film, Sandcastle, which was an Critics' Week nominee.
Distrust That Particular Flavor is a collection of non-fiction essays by American author William Gibson, better known for his speculative and science fiction novels.
Japan–Singapore relations or Singapore–Japan relations refers to the bilateral relations between Japan and Singapore, two highly developed Asian countries which share historical, economic, and political ties. While the two countries first established bilateral relations in 1966, some of the earliest relations date back from before the 15th century during the Muromachi period as well as the Ryukyu Kingdom. This continued for centuries until the most notable interaction with Japan's invasion of Singapore during World War II. The invasion led to a takeover of the country, after which Japan occupied Singapore for approximately four years before withdrawing following their loss in the war.
Ravi Madasamy, better known as M Ravi, is a Singaporean former human rights lawyer and activist. Known for his work as a cause lawyer, he has served as counsel in multiple high-profile court cases in Singapore, many of which have become leading cases in Singaporean constitutional law and Singapore's approach toward capital punishment and LGBT rights.
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean journalist and social activist. In 2017, she co-founded the Malaysian-based online journalism platform New Naratif with Sonny Liew and Thum Ping Tjin, and served as its editor-in-chief till March 2020.
Gibson's travel report is not bad, but it's pretty much summed up by the line the editors stole for the cover: "Disneyland with the Death Penalty".
He turned Singapore into an immensely rich, alarmingly clean, politically repressive city-state, described by the science-fiction writer William Gibson as "Disneyland with the death penalty".
Famously referred to as "Disneyland with the death penalty" by writer William Gibson, Singapore has had its fair share of criticism.
Another explanation for Singapore's comparative success in containing SARS is its single-minded determination to take whatever steps necessary, with scant regard for such individual liberties as the right to travel and associate freely. This is the city-state the cyber-punk writer William Gibson once described as "Disneyland with the death penalty": While free trade is largely embraced, chaos is verboten.
But with prosperity has come blandness: the stereotypical view of Singapore is of a financial hub, an ex-pat paradise, a strictly run, litter free state with little cultural activity or interest. Disneyland with the death penalty is one famously damning description.
Since these articles are an attack on Singapore, it is ironic that the real Disneyland is in California—whose repressive penal code includes the death penalty
While an ability to capture the zeitgeist is to be taken seriously in a context such as this one, Gibson's journalistic reportage is inevitably unrefined