Marc Lore: Urban Planning Wizard

Cities have been a thing for what, ten thousand years? And Serial Entrepreneur and Investor has been a job description since never, so I guess what I'm saying is that I don't have a ton of faith that former Diapers.com founder and Walmart e-commerce CEO Marc Lore is going to be reinventing cities anytime soon.

Look out Uruk, here comes the Diapers.com guy with a better idea!

He didn't specifically mention hover
cars, but there's probably hover cars, right?

Does that make me a nay-sayer? Maybe, nevertheless, nay I say. According to Lore, telos was a term coined by Aristotle meaning end goal or purpose. I'm not sure how Lore would know that since Aristotle died twenty-three hundred years before the invention of the Ted Talk but here we are. Anyway, Lore is embarking on a project to build a planned city named Telosa--so like, telos with an "a." Lore says that Telosa will be as diverse as New York, as clean and as efficient as Tokyo, and as wisely and as equitably run as Stockholm. 

It will be ecologically sustainable and house five million people. The whole thing will cost about four hundred billion dollars and will be built over four decades, somewhere in the desert, the exact location is still TBD. Holy shit, a brave new world is dawning! 

I mean, most of the planet will be a desert soon, so really, they could built this anywhere.

Pictured: everything wrong
with capitalism. 

Great, sign me up. Except don't sign me up because good intentions aside, serial entrepreneur and investor isn't a job and this whole thing smacks of the kind of billionaire bullshit that gave us rich people riding a dick rocket into low orbit. I'm not trying to be a jerk to Marc Lore. In his promotional video he touts the project's goals of equity and sustainability, and these are laudable. But his idea is basically why not build a city that doesn't suck? which is what everyone has wanted since the hunter gathers settled down and built roads and sewers and Starbucks. 

Maybe he can put together the investors to pull it off, but when it comes down to it, he's a capitalist rounding up other capitalists to invest in his city. And isn't capitalism the thing that's created the unequal and unsustainable situation we find our planet in in the first place? The answer I'm looking for is yes. I'm not saying I have a better idea, but leaning in to the one that set the Pacific Northwest on fire might not necessarily be the way to go.

"What are you talking about? Unfettered capitalism has worked out great for us."

-Rich people

"Sure, it seems unfair now, but wealth is going
to start trickling down any minute. Trust us."

-What the rich have been

 telling us for forty years

Like, investors don't invest their money in things without some assurance of a return, so right from the start, this thing is already fundamentally about making money and not, as Lore says in his commercial, "people centered." Am I just being cynical? Sure I am, but it's hard not to be. I mean, look at literally anything happening in the world right now. But I'm also hugely suspicious of utopian billionaires. Marc Lore is no Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk in terms of net worth but he's still a rich I think we've all learned not to pin out hopes on the rich because they're not looking out for anyone but themselves.

Above: and artists rendering of
basically every billionaire in America.

I mean if they--that is the people who control most of the world's wealth--wanted to, they could, as a class, wipe out hunger or homelessness or cut global carbon emissions. But they don't because then they wouldn't have the one thing that gives them power over the rest of us. So it's all oversized checks and grand charitable gestures, but at the end of the day they're still sitting atop their hoards like tax-dodging Smaugs, so what's in it for them?

"Sure, that would make more sense,
but I've already made up a name so..."

-Marc Lore

But let's say Lore comes up with the billions of dollars to build his city. Wouldn't that money be better spent fixing cities that already exist? Having potable drinking water in 21st century America is not a given, so why not do something about that? In California, PG&E shuts off our power because they spent all the money we gave them to fix the grid on bonuses for their CEO's, so maybe give us a hand? Or he could slap four hundred billion dollars worth of solar panels on everyone's roofs. My point is there's probably better, more efficient people centered things he could do with the money, but they're not as sexy and don't make for great pitch videos for investors.

Or, and I don't know, go with me on this, but instead of waiting for a bunch of billionaires to play Sim City with real money, what if there was some kind of system where people had to contribute a portion of their income to say, some kind of governmental agency, and then they use that money to provide municipal services or improve infrastructure? 

Yes! Like taxes, except what if rich people had to pay them too?