31 Years On: "Disneyland and the Death Penalty"

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Disneyland with the Death Penalty - Wikipedia

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Disneyland With the Death Penalty

WIRED sent William Gibson to Singapore to see whether that clean dystopia represents our techno future.

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It'll be thirty-one years this September since writer William Gibson penned one of the most controversial critiques of the island nation of Singapore with his article in Wired magazine entitled "Disneyland and the Death Penalty". Per the Wiki,

The title "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" referred to the subject of the article, the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, whose strictly guarded sterility Gibson described with horror.After opening the article with the Disneyland metaphor, Gibson cited an observation attributed to Laurie Anderson that virtual reality "would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it" in relation to the immaculate state of Changi Airport, Singapore's international airport. Beyond the airport, he noted that the natural environment had been cultivated into "all-too-perfect examples of itself", such as with the abundance of golf courses. Singaporean society was a "relentlessly G-rated experience", controlled by a government akin to a megacorporation, fixated on conformity and behavioural constraint and with a marked lack of humour and creativity.

As Gibson himself wrote,

There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.

Suffice it to say, reaction was.....well,

The Singapore government responded to the publication of the article by banning Wired from the country. The phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" became a famous and widely referenced description for the nation, adopted in particular by opponents of Singapore's perceived authoritarian nature. The city-state's authoritarian and austere reputation made it difficult to shake the description off; Creative Review hailed it as "famously damning", while The New York Times associate editor R. W. Apple Jr. defended the city-state in a 2003 piece as "hardly deserving of William Gibson's woundingly dismissive tag line."

Anyway, thoughts?
Does Gibson's article still pass the test of time or has it become incredibly dated and values-dissident?