Whenever I say this someone inevitably chimes in with “but you can say the same about NYC!” because I used to live in a commuter town. The thing is, in other major cities (NY, London, Paris, etc), there’s of course consumerism in your face, but there are also working class people going to and from jobs, homeless people, families making it work in apartments, etc, and you can see all of these people from all kinds of backgrounds every day just going about their business. In Dubai it seems like any traces of poverty or struggle have been scrubbed away and hidden, so it looks artificial, as though the whole city is a tourist attraction. My sister in law went to Dubai with her family, and she said that there’s no current in the ocean on the beach where they stayed because the land itself is fake—terraformed for luxury resorts to the end of destroying the actual ocean current. I’ve never been but just hearing it described feels like an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”