Welcome back to Hunter Dumps on Everything You Lo—sorry, I mean welcome back to our occasional look at the future and its seemingly inevitable march to dystopia. You were looking forward to the future, were you? Well get over it, because our post-capitalist near future is going to consist of flying golf carts carrying drunk commuters over your house and movies written by AI, starring AI, reviewed by AI critics, and beamed directly into your skull involuntarily, like when Apple put U2 songs on everybody's phones whether you wanted them to or not.
Today's look at the future focuses on the cruise line industry, which has been dystopian since at least the invention of the slot machine and therefore has a head start on dystopia that few other industries can match. The good news is that the cruise ship future is close, as in it'll be here next year. Currently slouching towards Bethlehem, or at least undergoing slouching-towards-Bethlehem sea trials, is the Icon of the Seas, due to take on its first passengers next spring.
The Icon of the Seas is the latest Royal Caribbean cruiser, and it will be the largest liner in existence. It's nearly 1,200 feet long, weighs five times as much as the Titanic did pre-iceberg, is 19 or 20 decks high depending on how you count, and will have:
more than 20 bars and restaurants, seven pools, nine whirlpools, and six water slides, as well as mini golf, rock climbing and an arcade. It will carry up to 7,960 people — up to 5,610 guests and a crew of 2,350 to pour drinks, turn back covers, swab the decks and keep the vessel on course.
That's underselling it. The six water slides are part of the "largest water park at sea." There's a suspended infinity pool, and a wave pool, and a three-story family suite "with its own white picket fence and mailbox," which seems to exist solely so that other passengers will know which family to eat first if this thing ever runs aground somewhere.
Here's one of the best pictures of what the boat will look like when it's done.
Ooooh boy. Getting a real "What if Waterworld were produced by Nickelodeon" vibe from this one.
The boat prominently features a Thunderdome. Oh, they're not calling it that, they're calling it the "AquaDome," a gigantic domed half-sphere that looks to be part bar, part stage, part waterfall thingy. And the whole thing is going to be candy-colored, 20 stories of it plowing unstoppably through tropical waters as it hunts for its next meal.
Now, there are plenty of people who enjoy cruise ships and go on them willingly, and we're not here to judge them. It certainly sounds romantic: The act of sailing across an ocean, the ship rolling gently with the waves, the spray of the sea occasionally misting your face with the scent of adventure as you make your way to a string of quaint seaside villages that you'd otherwise likely never visit in your life. But the unrelenting trend of the cruise industry is to make their ships larger, and then larger still, and then larger than that. And unless something almost unspeakably bad happens, you're never going to be anywhere near the spray of ocean waves—and you’ll probably never even feel a wave because if you do on a quarter-million-ton boat 20 stories high, then that'll be the last hour in the big chair that your captain ever sees. Not to mention the only quaint oceanside villages you're ever going to get within binocular distance of are ones capable of berthing an aircraft carrier.
This thing? This thing is not a cruise ship. This is a mall.
It may be welded on top of an enormous hull, but 20 bars and restaurants, a water park, a Thunderdome, a rock climbing wall, and an arcade count as a mall. This is the Mall of America with lifeboats attached. And that is what the future brings us: an ever-increasing array of gargantuan floating malls, oceangoing cities in which you and 5,610 of your closest friends can reserve time in the infinity pool between barhopping around your neon-colored, dubiously mobile post-capitalist fever dream.
It's the design that's most intriguing. The ship crams so many disparate elements and activities atop itself that it genuinely looks like something designed by a 5th grade classroom. There's one of everything, and it's all colored in with highlight markers. It looks like a laundry basket stuffed with children's toys—look, there's even a handle on the back for some gigantic aqua-child to drag this thing along behind them. It's not just visually top-heavy, it seems to relish sticking you out on balconies a dozen or more stories up over the ocean. There's not a Russian politician alive who would dare get anywhere near this thing. It is, undeniably, a theme park. And not a good theme park, but a water park, a place that sells itself on its surf pool and promises that you won't be soaking in anything more than 1% pee no matter what time of day you visit.
How do we describe this new cruise architecture? It's very 90s, and very Bratz. It's like Bratz dolls turned to piracy and this is their flagship. It's got a sort of "Barbie's Poseidon Adventure" glam, full of parties and shopping and an undercurrent of silent, unrelenting despair.
It's a 5,600,000,000 piece kit intended for premium collectors: The Lego Norovirus, docking soon.
It seems plain to see, though, that the future from now on will consist only of cruise ships bigger than this one. It's a race between companies to see which of them can cram all nine circles of Dante's hell into one boat before the others manage it. Cruise companies have correctly determined that the thing vacationers hate most about cruise vacations is being on a boat, and the solution is to provide new ships so big that you'll never even notice you're on one unless you go to the fourth of 25 gift shops and buy the map and compass necessary to find your way outside.
And it's all so wasteful, because you know how you could improve the Icon of the Seas immensely, and save a literal boatload of money in the process? Cut the propellers off and park this thing on land. It's a mall. It's a very fancy mall, one with an attached theme park, and you can buy tickets to live inside the mall for a week and everybody will be happy as a polluted dying clam.
What's even the point of turning this thing into a boat? We're pretending it's travel? Here's a better suggestion: Build the next generation of cruise ships as oceanfront hotels. Just stick them on the beach in the general vicinity of Miami and instead tow the quaint Caribbean villages to them.
Do you know how much easier that would be? Forget trying to dock these things in resort destinations like Acapulco or Cancun, and forget turning any small seaside town with a dock into a zombie movie every time several thousand sunstroke-dazed tourists surge down the gangplanks to flood the streets and take pictures of every last building and vista and stray cat. Build new quaint Caribbean towns on barges, keep the luxury malls on land, and just tow each quaint town past the hotel one after another. Every morning the guests will wake up to find a new seaside town outside the door! Do you know how popular that would be? Normal sized hotel rooms. Food that didn't have to be hoisted in on a crane and kept fresh for a week. No passports, no per-port vaccine rules, no overtaxed ventilation systems spraying stomach-exploding fevers into every room.
In fact, we can do even better: We can put multiple cruise ship-sized luxury hotels on one big floating wheel, anywhere in landlocked America. You board from a single entrance, and each evening the wheel slowly spins while you're asleep so that you wake up with a completely new theme park outside your window. Every day brings new sights and new things to do.
Look, we could make something like this:
Why are you still building cruise ships when you could build a floating wheel of theme parks, you losers? Why do I have to explain everything to you?
Sigh. No, the future is still going to suck. We wanted flying cars, we got $300,000 golf carts with safety issues. We wanted to sail off to new adventures, we got floating germ bombs with gift shops. I don't think we're going to bring back bloodthirsty megafauna, even. We'll just get a stuffed tiger in a cruise ship gift shop after all the wild ones have gone extinct, and it'll cost you $10 to get your picture taken with it.
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Welcome to the future, here's your flying golf cart. Try not to die