I've had an enduring fascination with Dubai for a few years now. This is mainly because the very concept of Dubai is - no matter how you look at it -  absolutely fucking ridiculous. Like, completely insane. If Dubai were a man, he'd be the kind of guy that, while he seemed innocuous enough to the local townfolk, simply vanished from public view one day, and then when a curious neighbour finally went months later to investigate the strange smell emanating from the guy's house, they discovered him feverishly moulding and constructing life size replicas of characters from Star Wars using nothing but his cat's accumulated excrement. Dubai is that wacky. And that odious.

I mean, let's not beat around the bush here: Dubai is a gigantic, ultra-modern, technologically excessive city built in a region that is so inhospitable to humans that its peoples never developed the concept of agriculture. The surprise isn't so much that Dubai just collapsed, it's that it has taken this long for the people involved to realise that those impressively detailed Star Wars characters are actually made out of cat shit.

You can understand why Dubai was so ambitious though. A relatively oil-poor region in a belt of the world that has grown insanely rich out of humanity's reliance on petroleum, it was perhaps unsurprising that at a certain point Dubai would want to move on from a history rich in sand, camels and colonialism. But the primary lesson that this ongoing financial crisis seems to be telling us is that building an economy out of nothing but property development and banking services (i.e. money itself) overlooks the fact that money itself doesn't really exist. Trillions of dollars worth of hypothetical currency is traded on the international currency markets every single day, a sum that far, far outstrips the total gross domestic product of the entire world. The point being that money is a symbol, not a resource, and to build an entire economy out of symbolism alone is really just to invite disaster. First it was Iceland (a nation whose economy was 98% banks, 1% fish and 1% Bjork), then Ireland began its slide (a country of whiskey, potatoes and property debt) and now people have begun to realise that perhaps Dubai has borrowed a tiny bit more than a city whose primary export, oil, accounts for less than 6% of its wealth, should.

Dubai's debts currently stand at $US59 billion. This is quite a lot for a city of just over two million people, the majority of whom aren't actual Emirati's, but are in fact itinerant Indian and Pakistani workers, kept in slave like conditions and forced to work for no money in order to keep this bloated beast breathing. A brilliant account of the distinct unpleasantness fuelling Dubai's growth can be found here. Apparently, human rights, not hugely on the agenda. But giant manmade islands shaped like palm trees are. It's a question of priorities really. But even beyond all these qualms, it's hard to know where Dubai might actually go from here. Currently the only thing keeping it from collapsing entirely is the suggestion that Abu Dhabi, a rich, powerful neighbouring Emirate might cover some of Dubai's debts if it came down to it. But this poses two problems for Dubai: first, it puts it increasingly under the control of Abu Dhabi, a far more conservative Emirate that thoroughly disapproves of Dubai's Westerner luring licentiousness; and second, you can't really expect to fuel a growing economy with nothing except the hope that someone else will pay for everything if things really cock up. It's not what one calls a 'stable economic platform'.

Perhaps Dubai won't disintegrate overnight. Perhaps it will take a number of years for all the wanton construction to be abandoned. And hell, perhaps it might even somehow weather the crisis and people will once again turn to it as a handy, politically neutral place to do business. But right now, I get the feeling that the illusion of sustainability and the delusion of greed that allowed Dubai to become what it did over the past decade has well and truly evaporated. And at this point in time, a lesser writer might make some conclusive allusion to Dubai shimmering in the desert like the mirage of an oasis that never existed. But I like to think I'm a better writer than that, so I will merely identify the possibility of the allusion, and instead will finish up with three rather simple words: Dubai, you're fucked.

And for the sake of pretension mixed with high irony, here's a video of Ben Kingsley reading Shelley's ode to transience, the poem 'Ozymandias', accompanied by some overwrought strings and terrible camera work. Oh, and it's an ad for a Swiss bank now largely owned by Singapore after suffering massive losses during the selfsame finanical crisis that took down Dubai. I row knee.