The Works: A Sardonic World Tour of Humanity’s Grandest, Most Doomed Masterpieces
The Works: A Global Tour of Humanity’s Monuments to Itself
There is a moment—usually around 3 a.m. in the departure lounge of a second-tier airport—when the seasoned traveler realizes that “the works” is not a single project, achievement, or apocalypse, but an endless buffet of human folly served on a planetary platter. From Dubai’s rotating skyscrapers to Reykjavik’s bitcoin mines, from the Belt & Road’s concrete spaghetti to the metaverse’s vaporware suburbs, “the works” is what we collectively call our frantic attempt to turn the brief candle of civilization into a floodlight no one asked for.
Begin, if you must, with the literal works: dams, bridges, tunnels, and railways. China alone has poured more concrete since 2003 than the United States managed in the entire twentieth century, a statistic so absurd it has become the Cold War joke no one on either side finds funny. Meanwhile, the Netherlands keeps building taller sea walls so the North Sea can audition for the role of Noah 2.0. Each megaproject is presented as salvation, but the global ledger reveals a darker punchline—rising debt, rising seas, rising tempers. The International Monetary Fund now classifies some infrastructure as “non-performing assets,” a euphemism for a bridge to nowhere with a tollbooth that still charges.
Shift attention to the digital works: platforms, cryptocurrencies, AI prophets promising to optimize the human condition right up until the redundancy notices arrive. Estonia runs its entire bureaucracy on blockchain, a sentence that would have sounded like gibberish in 1995 but today merely sounds exhausting. The Central African Republic adopted bitcoin as legal tender, apparently on the principle that if you’re going to gamble, you might as well use a currency that double-spends as performance art. Somewhere in a server farm outside Tbilisi, rows of GPUs mine Dogecoin to pay for a war that’s also being crowdfunded on Telegram. It’s globalization as absurdist theater, with complimentary Wi-Fi.
Then there’s the soft works: culture, cuisine, and the export of lifestyle. K-Pop choreography is studied in Peruvian dance academies; Italian grandmothers binge Korean dramas subtitled in Neapolitan dialect; American teenagers pay extra for Japanese Kit-Kats flavored like sake, a taste none of them can legally verify. These exchanges are charming until you notice they’re lubricated by supply chains that still run on coal and the tears of underpaid couriers. UNESCO lists “intangible cultural heritage,” a phrase that sounds like a hedge fund’s latest synthetic derivative. Last year France nominated the baguette; this year Brazil lobbied for the footvolley flip-flop flick. The planet is now a vast open-air museum gift shop, and we’re all stuck in line behind a guy trying to pay with NFTs of his own passport.
Of course, there are the dark works nobody brochures: refugee camps that become permanent cities, border walls that become Instagram backdrops, space programs that double as ICBM internships. Every G20 summit ends with a communiqué promising “net-zero by 2050,” a date so distant it might as well be the next season of “The Winds of Winter.” The same leaders fly home on aircraft whose contrails spell out “we tried” in disappearing ink. Climate reparations are negotiated like a group dinner where everyone insists they only had the salad, while small island states quietly Venmo-request the cost of new homelands.
And yet—because hope is the most expensive work of all—people still queue. They queue for vaccines, visas, and Taylor Swift tickets. They queue on Mediterranean beaches for NGO rafts and on LinkedIn for unpaid internships. They queue to upload consciousness to a cloud that still crashes when too many users try to watch the World Cup in 4K. The anthropologist in me takes notes; the cynic in me buys popcorn; the realist in me knows the concession stand only accepts dollars, euros, or WeChat Pay.
So what is “the works,” ultimately? It is the sum total of our species’ greatest hits and deleted scenes, a blooper reel with a platinum record. It is the dam, the damned, and the damnedest. It is every skyscraper reaching for heaven while the foundation sinks into subsidized clay. It is every algorithm trained to optimize happiness until it discovers outrage pays better. It is, in short, the grandest pyramid scheme ever built—only this time the pyramid is inverted and we’re all clinging to the inner walls wondering why the view never changes.
And still the construction cranes pivot, the satellites blink, and the next departure board flips to an exotic destination you can’t pronounce but your credit card already has. The works, dear reader, are never finished; they merely go on sale in a different currency.
