Why Dubai Makes the West Uncomfortable
On the politics of selective outrage and who gets to decide what counts as culture.
There is something almost satisfying about watching a glossy narrative crack. The borrowed Maseratis, the rented helicopters, the influencers blinking into a reality they had insisted didn’t exist. It makes for a neat story: illusion meets consequence, fantasy dissolves into truth.
Except it isn’t quite that simple, though a recent British newspaper feature on Dubai’s expat influencers would prefer it were.
For decades, the world admired Paris without interrogating Haussmann’s mass displacement of the poor. We romanticised New York without reckoning with the structural inequality built into its foundations. We built London into a global brand on the quiet understanding that empire was best left out of the brochure. And yet some are positioning themselves as judges of who controls Dubai’s narrative.
Britain’s own record invites pause. The D-Notice system has suppressed British journalism for over a century. The government that lectures Dubai on press freedom is the same one that prosecuted a war crimes whistleblower and let Rupert Murdoch shape three decades of public opinion. The Canary Wharf banker with food banks visible from his office window is not morally troubled by the view. The progressive media reader does not cancel their next-day delivery subscription in solidarity with warehouse workers. To demand that Dubai residents uniquely account for the inequality around them is not a moral argument. It is geography dressed as ethics.
When I shared a video on this subject, the comments arrived on cue. Dubai has no culture, a manufactured city, a theme park built on oil and imported labour, with no authentic history to speak of.
It is a strange charge, and one that is never applied evenly. I have lived across Asia, Latin America, and North Africa, but also in places that sit comfortably within the West’s own conception of wealth, Geneva, the South of France, New York, London. In none of those places was I ever asked whether the city had real history. Nobody ever questioned me on Monaco’s cultural credentials. Nobody writes anxious columns about Geneva’s authenticity. The difference is not scale, or age, or depth of tradition. It is legibility. Those cities exist within a Western cultural frame and Dubai does not. What is really an unfamiliarity with the format gets repackaged as an absence of substance.
What is actually being said, when people say Dubai has no culture, is that its culture has not been made accessible to them. The pearl diving traditions, the Bedouin poetry, the architecture of the wind towers, the oral histories carried across the Gulf for generations, none of this registers, because it was never translated into the formats the West uses to decide what counts. A city’s history does not cease to exist because it has not been packaged for export.
There is a related trap, one I noticed repeatedly living in what we politely call emerging markets: the demand for folkloric authenticity. At its worst, it shades into poverty porn, the expectation that a place is only legible, only real, when it confirms the backward image the visitor already carried.
India is a particular target of this. And, perhaps surprisingly to some, so is Dubai. Because it does not present itself in the pre-modern register that Western consumers have come to expect of the region, its modernity gets read as inauthenticity, as if growth were a form of erasure, and history could only be valid if it stayed still. The expectation is not culture. It is a museum, and preferably an open-air, dilapidated one.
Nobody arrives in London insisting the city is inauthentic because it no longer resembles the Industrial Revolution. London’s poverty is permitted to coexist with its glamour. That same coexistence, in Dubai, becomes evidence of moral failure.
Which makes the next objection particularly rich. These same visitors demanded the glitzy hotels, the luxury brunches, the spectacular skylines, and when their wish was granted, declared the result fake. Dare these arbiters of real culture visit somewhere that does not already agree with them, they might find the world does not begin and end at their local supermarket’s world foods aisle.
And still, influencers get cast as the architects of that fakeness, which makes me question the framing of them as the primary storytellers of Dubai in the first place, because they are not the ones building logistics networks, structuring billion-dollar funds, or designing the policies that turned the city into what it is today. They are downstream of the real story, and the real story is far more interesting.
It is about a region that decided it would no longer wait for validation from Western capital or media to define its relevance. About governments that understood narrative is not just perception but infrastructure, something that can attract or repel billions in investment. About a rebalancing of where opportunity lives. To reduce all of that to influencers selling a fantasy is not just incomplete. It is convenient. It allows us to dismiss what is happening rather than engage with it.
Of course, there is precarity in being an economic migrant, there always has been. Whether you are moving from South Asia to the Gulf or from Britain to Dubai, the trade-off is the same: stability exchanged for possibility. That is not a uniquely Gulf phenomenon. That is the global economy. The difference is that for decades this trade-off was largely invisible to those in the West, because opportunity was local and risk was externalised. Now, as more people move outward towards new centres of growth, that trade-off is becoming visible again. And uncomfortable.
So yes, this moment should prompt reflection but not on whether Dubai was ever a fantasy, but on why that framing feels so compelling in the first place.
Because if a city outside the traditional centres of power can attract capital, talent, and ambition at this scale, then perhaps the illusion wasn’t Dubai. Perhaps it was the idea that opportunity only ever lived in one part of the world.