“It’s just that all of these Caribbean resorts look exactly the same to me. It’s just a random beach.”
“Oh I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You sit at your laptop, and you select… I don’t know, that all-inclusive resort for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what cookie-cutter consumerist hotel your parents made you go to.
But what you don’t know is that hotel isn’t just all-inclusive, it’s not Ixtapa, it’s not Zihuatanejo. It’s actually Cancún. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in the late 60s, Mexico ran a huge trade deficit with the US. They were industrializing rapidly, importing machinery and materials that had to be paid for in dollars. Then I believe it was INFRATUR, wasn’t it, that actually spent months building a computer model, feeding data to an IBM 360 to analyze Mexico’s entire coastline, evaluating climate, beach quality, accessibility, and development costs.
Then they identified Cancún as a strategic tourism development zone, deliberately modeled on postwar Mediterranean resort economies. By the mid-1990s, major U.S. and European hotel chains standardized the all-inclusive resort model there. That model was then replicated, refined, and exported across the Caribbean.
Eventually, that choice filtered down through Expedia algorithms, airline bundle deals, and trickled on down into some TikTok’s influencer video which you no doubt watched in bed doom scrolling. However, Cancún represents billions of dollars in coordinated state planning, private capital, labor arbitrage, and tourism dependency. Tens of thousands of jobs. Entire regional supply chains.
And it’s sort of comical that you think you simply picked "a random beach" when in fact you’re sipping a piña colada at a resort selected for you by the Mexican federal government’s years-long optimization process… from a bunch of random beaches.”
@skgreennz@TimAdams76 I agree with Steve Cram's comment on the BBC - think he was carrying an injury into the race as it's unlike him to just sit near the back for some long
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