The budding bromance between authoritarianism and tech

[Celerity]

Before he was killed, Jamal Khashoggi described the dark side of Saudi Arabia’s push to modernize.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/29/mbs-saudi-arabia-big-tech-authoritarian-embrace/

https://archive.ph/q2YXe



When he started as a Post contributing columnist in the fall of 2017, Jamal Khashoggi was trying, constructively, to pierce the futuristic illusions about Saudi Arabia that Mohammed bin Salman was selling to the world. MBS, as the Saudi crown prince is known, was pushing a gleaming vision of a cutting-edge Saudi Arabia, one with gaggles of robots, cities like something out of science fiction and tech investment galore. He was also ordering mass arrests across civil society, showing that his Saudi Arabia — present and future — would not tolerate dissent, activism or, in particular, vocal women.

In October 2017, I edited an op-ed from Jamal headlined “Saudi Arabia’s crown prince wants to ‘crush extremists.’ But he’s punishing the wrong people.” The piece came about as MBS was hosting an investment conference, asking the world to pour money into his vision of an “open” and modern Saudi Arabia. To make a splash, the country proudly granted citizenship to Sophia, a robot with Western features and a smooth American accent. Meanwhile, Saudi human beings — journalists, activists and women — were being arrested, jailed and told to keep quiet.

“Can we really present a compelling image of a modern society, complete with robots, foreigners and tourists when Saudis, many miles from ‘Neom,’ are silenced?” Jamal wrote, referencing the crown prince’s planned city on the Red Sea. “Is this truly ‘modern’ Arabia?” A year later, Jamal was murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The CIA determined that MBS had authorized the brutal operation.

Seven years have gone by, and there is so much to remind me of Jamal and the conversations we had — about the illusions that were being sold, about the trampling of people when necessary to make way for “modernization.” Jamal would often point out that Saudi Arabia was not as rich as its image might suggest — that 20 percent of the country was in poverty and dependent on government aid. After Jamal’s murder, the West recoiled from dealing openly with MBS’s Saudi Arabia. At the time, the world was rightly focused on the repression behind this promised techno-utopia.

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