Free I can make you hate by Charlie Brooker

Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai’s The World archipelago hadn’t even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.
    In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots twenty-four hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.
    Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who’d managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300-foot buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity. To my dumb, uncomprehending eyes it looked like a collection of impossible follies. But what did I know? Clearly the people actually paying for all this stuff knew precisely what they were doing.
    But ah and oh. It appears my uninformed gut reaction – that slightly worried vertigo shiver, the hazy sense of ‘but surely they can’t do that’ – may have been precisely the correct response. Now it’s in trouble, the world’s financial markets seem shocked andsurprised, like Bagpuss being disappointed to learn that the mice from the mouse organ couldn’t really create an endless supply of chocolate biscuits from thin air. They should’ve phoned me for advice. If only I’d known. I could have charged a fortune. But then I’m so dumb I’d probably have blown it investing in an artificial Dubai archipelago shaped like Snoopy’s head or something.
    In the cold light of 2009, Dubai resembles a mystical Oz that was somehow accidentally wished into existence during an insane decade-long drugs bender. Those psychedelic structures, pictured in a fever by the mad and privileged, physically constructed by the poor and exploited, now look downright embarrassing, like a Facebook photo of a drunken mistake, as though someone somewhere is going to wake up and groan, ‘Oh my head … what did I do last night? Huh? I bankrolled a $200bn hotel in the shape of a croissant? I shipped the workers in from India and paid them how little? Oh man! The shame. What was I thinking?’
    The world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Dubai, is due to open in January. It looks like an almighty shard of misplaced enthusiasm, a lofty syringe injecting dementia directly into the skies, a short-lived spike on a printed readout, or a pin pricking a gigantic bubble. Not a shape you’d want to find yourself unexpectedly sitting on, in other words. Just ask the world’s financial markets, once they’ve finished screaming.

Fill your own bucket
05/12/2009
     
    TV advertising used to work like this: you sat on your sofa while creatives were paid to throw a bucket of shit in your face. Today you’re expected to sit on the bucket, fill it with your own shit, and tip it over your head while filming yourself on your mobile. Then you upload the video to the creatives. You do the work; they still get paid.
    Hail the rise of ‘loser-generated content’; commercials assembled from footage shot by members of the public coaxed into participating with the promise of TV glory. The advantages to the advertiser are obvious: it saves cash and makes your advert feel like part of some warm, communal celebration rather than the thirty-second helping of underlit YouTube dog piss it is.
    Witness the current OXO campaign. According to the website: ‘Has your Family got the OXO Factor? It’s 2009. There’s no such thing as “the OXO Family” any more. We’re all OXO Families! That’s