I delay actual reviews for another week to give further thoughts on the corruption of hotel, restaurant and travel systems… and the new mass-luxury economy that is its own type of sheep-shearing.
This is a follow up to the introduction to this series you can read here,
Magenta Notebooks Hotel and Restaurant Reviews: Introduction
The United States is a sheep-shearing operation and one of the easiest ways to see the giant fraud is to look at hotel prices in other countries. This includes countries developed or not…or even just compare to the expectations of common sense. In 2015 or so you could get a very basic but decent room in central Madrid, a few blocks from the opera house, for about $30 per night. This was your own proper hotel room, with private bathroom, daily cleaning and so on, not a hostel, in one of Europe’s most pleasant cities. I’ve paid in the past even less for a room with private bathroom in a “pension” outside the central plazas of Lisbon. Around 2000-2005, you could get such a room for $5 a night. They had at the time a freaklike beggar with elephantiasis outside the Praca Figueira in the center, besides African idlers by the subway stations selling posters with a map of Angola. Prices are a bit higher now in the gentrified and happy Lisbon that’s a refuge for American tech and crypto profes…
On top of the general scam-call-center nature of the everyday economy in America since at least the 1990’s, there’s also the parallel phenomenon of a glut of new rich, flush with cash but not sense, who live to get rinsed by whores and whore-a-likes in the supposed luxury-purveyor sectors.
Since at least the year 2000 marketing to “the rich” has been a scam. Why is it possible in most of the world to rip off those who want to spend money or on occasion splurge? Tokyo is the world’s largest luxuries market. For a people with relatively good taste sharpened by centuries of obsessive attention to high crafts, good food since birth, and decades-long prosperity, frauding someone on a luxury-price-tier carries real costs there. Bad restaurants go out of business fast. Selling a false luxury product at premium-tier price makes Japanese outraged. At the least you’ll get flooded with bad reviews. And you might get a brutish old short-haired Japanese matron chimp at you…the Japanese can also act out in public. But anyway, you go out of business fast: the restaurant and hotel market there is brutally Darwinian for sorting price-quality relationship. This can be confirmed by various blind taste-test experiments. A friend took his visiting American parents to a charcoal-skewers robata-yaki-style restaurant and accidentally ordered a premium fish, the ayu. This is a much-prized seasonal river sweetfish, slightly bitter innards. And then while eating it he was surprised to find it was one of the best and most distinctive fish he’d ever had. Then he saw the bill…$40 for one small grilled fish. He had ordered it by mistake, but it paid off; similarly you can buy one of the $100-$200 melons or mangoes in the Shinjuku Isetan department store, sneak it in on guests without saying anything, and be assured they will appreciate as a perfect and distinctive fruit. In Japan even if a higher price will be a product that sometimes lets you down per personal tastes, it will always in some way be justified objectively. This is why Tokyo and very few other places in the world with similar traditions of good taste—Paris, still—is somewhere you can reliably splurge and not feel cheated. But in the rest of the world this isn’t usually true.
About the Gypsoid-rich for who the spending of money is the psychological ritual or display final aim, nothing can be done. I’ve known a few Balkanoid greasers and boasters who have very brutish manners and tastes indistinguishable from various Third World slum dwellers; such types are still found in civilized post-Europe. This is the type who married a neurologist wife and so came in to what he thought was “money”; then he brag about spending $3000 for a hotel room per night. There’s no helping such people. Andrew Tate caters to a large sector of mostly mystery-meat males who need to spend a lot of money on e.g., bottle service for $1000 vodka at the club out of insecurity or, at best, the practical but false belief it will get them puccy. Above these there are newly rich tech and cryptocurrency lottery winners and such who are truly wealthy, decamillionaires and up. Many of these may feel this same way or they may just not pay attention to price anymore at all…either way they then get grievously taken advantage of by variety of “luxury” product and service peddlers…they too finish by paying exhorbitant sums for Lady Gaga-edition gold-leaf cappuccino pudding in a Dubai mall cafe and feeling they’re now “ballers,” in the language of their people.
I don’t write to reach such people but the problem is that there are so many of them now and they’ve thrown around so much money that their creeping anti-taste, their stupidity and naivete have greatly distorted the rest of the economy, and now spills over to others. Entirely normal people who now want to splurge for a rare special occasion are at risk of getting caught up in the tow of one or the other of these fraudulent economic biomes. I am greatly disturbed by the possibility of a young couple going on their honeymoon, a husband or wife wishing to celebrate a special occasion for their spouse, a son wanting to treat his parents to a special vacation getting defrauded and ending up with bad memories.
Ideological manias cause other types of review distortions. In the United States the racial hysteria that’s been simmering for decades and had a recent outburst in the “woke” moments of 2020 has made booking a “five star” hotel especially risky. I’ve never tried staying at nice hotels in America myself but I’m told that most of the independent “grande dame” signature hotels like the Palmer in Chicago are entirely staffed now by aggressive and contemptuous sheboons who will make your stay miserable. I heard stories of incompetence from the Mandarin Oriental in Miami as well: bags lost and gangbanger-affect maitre’d doing the obsequious shuck-n-jive, “Imma do you good you hear, Imma find it for you, Imma offer you credits for afternoon drink in the bar knowmsayin, bottle service Chandon” and such. Google and other ratings sites are ideologically distorted here too: they will simply not allow negative reviews of “properties in underprivileged areas,” or hide them. I assume Conde Nast and similar travel and lifestyle magazines are also regularly lying now for ideological and sensitivity-ethics reasons, and that LLM’s are probably trained to do the same as well.
And again this all takes place at the same time that social media and influencers constantly promote images of enticing luxury, and while the big-brand luxury houses have become democratized and mass-produced. In the recent decade has been introduced the absurd idea of the big-brand as requirement of feeling a citizen: many girls are trained to think if you don’t have one of the big fashion names for clothes or sunglasses, that you must be a piker. The idea that a reader’s hard-earned vacation is ruined because they’re expected to stay and splurge at a five-star hotel, or their bitch girlfriend demands it…and they don’t know what they’re getting into…again, this upsets me…
Pedestrian corruption is the most frequent reason reviews are false. In some cities Google maps reviews of restaurants are relatively accurate in the sense that something with many votes of long-standing 4.6 and above will be quite good. But if you rely on these in, say, Paris you could have a bad meal every day of a brief stay there. There are many ways Google and other “crowdsourced” reviews can be frauded, but it’s without a doubt a big problem in Paris and also often in parts of Spain. These could be farmed out to a social media sweatshop in Manila, for example; it could also be the Sri Lankan owners or staff of many of these places getting their 300 cousins in Colombo to updoot, but I’ve had terrible meals especially in Paris when I went to restaurants with Google maps ratings even of 4.8 and 4.9. In Paris and most European cities, the Michelin guide is a requirement for good eating consistently, and they have a pretty good app now with locator and such. The problem is that outside of Europe Michelin is famously inaccurate and possibly corrupt (and this may be the case also in the periphery of Europe like in Athens). In a place like Rio de Janeiro there will be some good restaurants listed but also many bad ones that clearly paid the reviewer or are his friends (I will give reviews of restaurants in future posts). There was an old article or blog post from the 2000’s that made clear how much of a scam the Michelin guide is in Tokyo:
There are some very good restaurants listed on Michelin Tokyo, but also many others that are well below the quality of any average mom-and-pop izakaya drinking-snacks casual bar there.
In Tokyo Google maps reviews are also frequently wrong in both directions. I often use instead Tabelog, the local reviews site, which is much more accurate. I tried an old ramen restaurant that appeared well below a 4.0 on Google Maps but had a high rating on Tabelog. The Google maps number was obviously wrong…this place served excellent intense-flavor classic Tokyo ramen. I supposed the owners nuked their own ratings on the foreigner-preferred site to keep out non-Japanese. Regardless, the new casino rip-off internet extends the fake-ratings problem also in this other negative direction on matters far beyond hotels and restaurants: very recently for example the Oasis app specializes in apparently entirely fraudulent negative reviews of sometimes good brands, damaging the legitimate businesses of many probably hardworking and decent people:
In this case this is done for attention agitation. It’s also a way of gaming apps rankings on app stores through contrived controversy. This tactic is an extension of the broader “exposure” style of accusation that’s also at the bottom of conspirashit posting psychology. People get a pornographic rise out of slander of others and the feeling that they’ve been betrayed. The same psychology is behind the style common both to establishment “high human capital” media outlets and the new “dissident” media biome: both focus entirely on accusation, insinuations about their target’s personal life or associations, historical genealogies of words in question…a calm discussion of ideas and facts almost never enters into it. See the threads just linked regarding the “Oasis” app: it appears to be the same PR-style of sophistic and intemperate accusation, taken to product reviews…
The many corrupt financial and psychological incentives for bad reviews from both directions, and the subsequent worthlessness of all modern review systems—crowdsourced or professional—calls for a new publication. There is needed a genuine high quality review magazine with a few intrepid writers of developed good taste and a record of impeccable honesty. Until then I will try to provide in my own way this same kind of information in this travel & leisure series of the Magenta Notebooks.
“Rising world wealth” and the social-media aspiration environment that possibly also contributed to global falling birth rates are distorting luxury prices and opportunities from another direction. The big luxury houses have mostly themselves to blame for the present democratization and I think future collapse of their brands. The Hilfiger and Courvoisier phenomena will now be replayed globally as new Global South rich chase status allure and smear good things with airport terminal feels…but the big fashion names didn’t have to ramp up production to meet this demand. Even in cases where that’s not possible though, like for certain cigars and wines, I take this opportunity to wring my hands on a dystopian side effect of “rising global living standards.” In 2021 you could get certain Cohiba cigars for $20-$30 or so, but now because they’ve become a mandatory Chinese Instagram status statement, the minimum price is $70. Cohiba is still very good but in my opinion only a fool pays this much for a cigar. The Chinese have genuinely no taste for it and buy it only for social media display…they buy it by the caseload and have also bought out the Cohiba company itself from the Spanish (it’s now based in Hong Kong). They’ve similarly distorted the wine market. Burgundy can be great, but because of Chinese trend-seeking attention, all the winemakers in Burgundy are now insanely wealthy with production for the next 20 years already bought up at astronomical prices. I’m not a wine connoisseur myself, but those I know who are say the current price of a good Burgundy bottle is completely unreasonable and you can get a comparable product from e.g., Piedmont for much less. My favorite wines lately are Spanish dry sherries—oloroso, amontillado and palo cortado styles. You can find an ultra-aged bottle at $90-120 that is maybe equal in quality to certain French wines five or more times that value. My fear is the Chinese will “discover” these at some point. It’s a fear that now accompanies any good luxury product (I’m concerned about the price inflation, not the associations, although I imagine that for people who care about clothes that’s an important consideration). A friend told me an anecdote about a French billionaire who met a Chinese counterpart and talked to him about wines. The Chinese billionaire told him that he owned 4000 bottles of Cheval Blanc Bordeaux wine: this is by our time very much a “finance bro” bottle used at steakhouses to celebrate closing deals and such. The French billionaire asked, “Well that’s wonderful. That’s a great selection…you must have an amazing cellar…what other bottles do you have,” and the answer from the Chinese tycoon was that he had no other bottles, that he’s only ever drank Cheval Blanc. Nothing else but the best will cross his lips! I know that many nations that just come into wealth have newly rich who go through a “growth process” and refinement over a generation or two. I fear something else…something bad with no end is happening here. I fear that for the foreseeable future this is the fate of “luxury.”
Europe and Japan as the remaining ancient taste-developing and taste-making regions of the whole world are I think in a special danger if indeed the Chinese and Global South “upper middle classes” continue to grow. The dystopian effects of this are displayed in the Houellebecq book The Map and the Territory. The financial incentives to rest on these “ancient strengths” will only intensify. Europe then risks becoming an organic-biodynamic theme park for rich Arab, Russian, Chinese and other “high class” tourists who come to sample the cheeses of the various local terroirs, the aged hams and artisanal pates. European man can then be reduced to a high-class restaurateur and sommelier lovingly developing authentic traditional crafts and goods to connoisseur standards. Small-producing wine, champagne and even beer makers could regularly become multi-millionaires as a global “mass luxury” producing class. Europe itself will be an “authentic” open-air museum and wildlife preserve. Many cities would be reduced to modern Dubrovniks, museum-exhibition of “classical architecture” with armies of cruise ship olds flooding the streets at all times of the year; other smaller pristine, preserved “walkable cities” and state-of-the-art $40K-per-head truffle-hunting safari and the like will cater to higher-tier customers. In some ways Europe is such already, but there will be temptations to move further in this direction. This would be a terrible fate for that continent even if all permanent migrants were to leave. White nationalists, the new right, the American right, the left, and the religious could all easily come to agree on the reduction of Europe to such a reservation-province in the not too remote future.
The particular fixations of “dissident intellectuals” with their taste for tradition and classical beauty will I think have contributed to all this in a bad way. As my friend Mr. Star remarks, this all smells of late-Qing-dynasty pretensions to superiority over barbarians and the uncultured on account of your supposedly superior taste and attention to the fine differences between past ceramics, sensitivity to special seasonings, and aesthetic enjoyment of old lacquer designs or what. This kind of antiquarian affectation in a time of technological and cultural stagnation, where nothing new, exciting or great can be believed to take place, must be combatted in good old Futurist form, with a vitalist and confident barbarism. I’d rather all museums burned than live this way.
Coming next week, if I am in mood I will review some of the worst scam places I’ve been to recently, to show you in vivid image this problem of fake reviews and corrupt travel magazines.
In my view a paragon of this systemic rot is found in the "luxury" tea house phenomenon, specifically Singapore’s TWG (founded by a Morrocan). It is the perfect, distilled microcosm of a fake economy engineered entirely for a fake person.
Consider the sheer cynicism of the brand: it shamelessly plasters "est. 1837" on its logo to ape the gravitas of a centuries old Parisian institution, yet it is a private equity creation from 2008 selling overpriced, crusty bland leaves. It exists almost exclusively in airport duty free zones, thriving on travelers from emerging markets who buy it because of garish gold decoration and supposed gilded status. It is a literal luxury skin suit.
But this fake economy cannot exist in a vacuum; it requires a matching fake consumer I.e. the influencer.
Rather than, as is the lazy conservative tradition, putting this all down to a failure of free markets we can look at it as, in part, a phenomenon of techno spiritual degeneration. The moment a person decides to become an influencer, they cease to be a human being with genuine interiority. They transform into a literal slave to a cyber Borg. That is to say, a cybernetic node whose opinions, tastes, and beliefs are entirely formulated by an algorithmic engagement feedback loop.
Influencers don't really like the crusty airport tea, in the same way that TWG's founder Taha Bouqdib is not an authentic Parisian tea connosieur. These people, if they can even be called that, have no real ideas or beliefs left to like it with. They simply react to the metric spike that the shiny gold tin provides on a screen. They have completely surrendered their agency to whatever the internet dictates. Authentic, contiguous beliefs have largely disappeared from any form of public taste making.
The downstream effect is that the public is then house-trained by these hollowed out nonpeople. It is a closed loop system of pure simulation: a fake corporate entity selling a fake product to a fake cybernetic person, who then shills it to a mass of people who have no idea what an authentic and traditional luxury even looks like.
If the blind lead the blind via a TikTok reel, you get a world where ordering a standard, unpretentious box of Twinings becomes a revolutionary act of aristocratic discernment.
Excellent commentary.