Indianapolis: How the World’s Most Forgettable Megacity Quietly Runs the Apocalypse
Indianapolis: A Flat, Friendly Fiefdom Where the World Quietly Reboots
By our man in the corn belt, still wondering why every flight here lands next to a steakhouse
Most foreigners can’t find Indianapolis on a map that already has a red “You-Are-Here” arrow pointing at it. That’s a pity, because the city is a low-stakes laboratory for how the rest of the planet will spend the next decade pretending everything is fine. On the surface it’s harmless: a tidy grid of brick warehouses converted to artisanal gin, a downtown canal that looks suspiciously like a Dutch architect’s gap year doodle, and more “Hoosier Hospitality” signs than a UN peacekeeping mission could distribute. Yet beneath the Midwestern grin lurks a global parable—equal parts cautionary tale and spa weekend—for a world exhausted by its own headlines.
Take the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a 2.5-mile asphalt Colosseum where 300,000 bipeds gather annually to inhale ethanol fumes and pray for fiery spectacle. To Europeans it’s vulgar; to Americans it’s heritage; to the sponsors it’s the last place on Earth where television still works like 1998. Formula 1’s glitterati scoff, but Liberty Media (a company that sounds like a Bond villain’s NGO) just bought the track’s parent group, proving that when the globe runs out of new markets it simply rebrands the old ones. Expect “The Indy 500 presented by Dubai Data Cloud” any season now, complete with NFT tire smoke.
The city’s other export is subtler: the 1899 invention of the gasoline pump at a downtown bicycle shop. This single gadget doomed us all to the climate crisis yet is remembered here with the same civic pride usually reserved for minor saints or winning basketball teams. A plaque outside the former shop invites selfies; no mention of the slow-motion apocalypse it unleashed, because that would be impolite. If you want to understand humanity’s talent for congratulating itself while sawing off the branch it’s sitting on, Indianapolis offers a master class.
Meanwhile, the international supply chain—our collective panic attack wrapped in cardboard—runs through a FedEx hub so vast locals call it “Area 51 with barcodes.” Every night, 150 cargo jets descend like silver locusts, disgorging the world’s impulse purchases. Stand outside at 2 a.m. and you can watch global capitalism land, refuel, and take off again before the locals have finished their tenderloin sandwiches. Rumor has it a single lost iPhone in 2018 rerouted 200 flights, an efficiency miracle now cited in MBA programs from Singapore to São Paulo as proof that chaos is just poor logistics.
Refugees from pricier coasts have noticed. Over the past decade the foreign-born population quietly doubled, lured by cheap Victorians and the promise that nobody asks where you’re really from unless you volunteer it at a potluck. The newcomers—Burmese doctors, Honduran line cooks, Ukrainian coders—have turned strip-mall taquerias into diplomatic summits where the salsa verde is hotter than any UN resolution. Their children learn to say “ope, sorry” in perfect Hoosier cadence, proof that assimilation is mostly a matter of apologizing for existing.
All of this happens under a sky so wide it feels like God left the lens cap off. There’s room here for delusion, ambition, and the serene confidence that whatever the world breaks, it can be fixed with duct tape and a church raffle. That’s Indianapolis’s real gift to the international order: the illusion of spaciousness in an era when every other city feels like a crowded elevator with bad Wi-Fi. The planet may be on fire, but here the sirens are politely distant, muffled by soy fields and the faint smell of ethanol exhaust.
So come for the race, stay for the existential soft landing. Indianapolis won’t save the world, but it will offer it a casserole and directions to the nearest craft brewery, which in 2023 is as close to salvation as any of us are likely to get.
