Provo, Utah: The World’s Nicest Surveillance State You’ve Never Heard Of
Provo, Utah: Where the World’s Moral Panic Gets a Parking Pass
By Dave’s Locker International Desk, 14 June 2024
If you squint hard enough at the Wasatch Range, the peaks look like the Alps having an identity crisis—too polite, suspiciously sober, and funded by a venture-capital trust fund. Provo, Utah, population 115,000 and home to the cleanest-cut software engineers this side of Singapore, has quietly become a geopolitical Rorschach test. To the European Union, it’s a case study in how to launder moral rectitude into IPO valuations. To Beijing, it’s proof that even Americans can build a surveillance state if you swap facial-recognition cameras for genealogy apps and call it “family history.” And to the rest of us, it’s the place where binge-drinking is a sin but binge-coding is a sacrament—proving once again that humanity’s real addiction is to cognitive dissonance.
Consider the statistics: Provo routinely tops “Best Places to Raise a Family” lists compiled by magazines whose readers think diversity is having both Coke and Pepsi at the barbecue. Yet the city also incubates unicorns like Qualtrics and Divvy, disproving the old Marxist maxim that opium is the religion of the masses—turns out it’s actually subscription-based SaaS. While Brussels frets over GDPR compliance, Provo’s data brokers are quietly hoovering up ancestral records from Iceland to Ibadan, selling the global south its own past at 9.99 a month. The colonial instinct never dies; it just pivots to freemium.
In geopolitical terms, Provo functions as the United States’ moral exurb. Washington outsources its virtue signaling here the way it outsources torture to friendlier climates. Need a wholesome counter-narrative to TikTok’s algorithmic hedonism? Cue the soft-focus drone shots over Brigham Young University, where students sign honor codes pledging not to drink coffee—because nothing terrifies the Chinese Communist Party like a decaf American. The city is what you get when Manifest Destiny discovers meditation apps: expansionism with better branding.
Meanwhile, the global climate crisis politely knocks on Provo’s door, only to be told the thermostat is set by God and the HOA. The state’s largest lake is drying into a dust bowl of arsenic-laced nostalgia, yet local leaders still preach growth like it’s 1847 and the wagon wheels are greased with prophecy. If the lakebed does become the next Aral Sea, at least the selfies will be heavenly—#repentandfilter.
Of course, the international press parachutes in only when something deliciously ironic happens—say, a polygamist-cult raid that shares a zip code with a Fortune 500 campus. The resulting think pieces write themselves: “Puritans with Profit Margins.” Yet few reporters linger long enough to notice the subtle cosmopolitanism fermenting beneath the perma-smiles. Korean taco trucks park outside ramen shops run by returned missionaries who learned Mandarin knocking on doors in Guangzhou. The lingua franca is Python, the missionary zeal directed toward Series B funding. If this is cultural imperialism, it’s wearing Patagonia and asking to speak to your cap table.
And so Provo drifts into the 21st century as both punchline and prophecy—a city that proves you can build Zion with fiber-optic cables and tax incentives, so long as you keep the beer laws medieval. The rest of the planet watches with a mixture of envy and schadenfreude: envy for the municipal solvency, schadenfreude for the inevitable reckoning when the aquifers run dry and the last glacier-fed ski season melts into memory. Until then, Provo remains what the UN would call a “special administrative region of American exceptionalism,” passport-free but spiritually gated. Come for the mountains, stay for the moral arbitrage—just don’t forget to hydrate. Bottled water only; the lake’s on back-order.
