Disneyland with the Death Penalty

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.

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] 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.

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] 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").

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".

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.

[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.

[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.

[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".

[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".

[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".