Real-Time Is Too Late: NEOM’s Digital Air and the Pre-emptive Synthetic City

In 2021, the Saudi Arabian post-smart city of NEOM released a video on its YouTube channel entitled “The Digital Air.” Over a polished sequence of aerial landscape shots, CGI data flows, server corridors, and future-facing applications, reaching desperately for sublimity, the voiceover claims that “NEOM will have its own digital air.”

NEOM is a Saudi Arabian giga-project announced by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund in 2017,¹NEOM was initially made up of four regional sub-projects: The Line, a proposed 170km-long linear city; Oxagon, a partly floating smart port; Trojena, a mountain and winter sports resort; and Sindalah, a luxury coastal tourism hub. Magna, a series of holiday resorts scattered along the Red Sea coast, was added later. pitched as the testbed not for a mere smart city but a “cognitive city.” NEOM Tech & Digital Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the project, was rebranded as Tonomus in September 2022 with a remit to build that cognitive foundation. Four of its public artifacts anchor this article. “Digital Air” is the rhetorical and infrastructural frame in which connectivity is staged as the city’s surrounding atmosphere. “M3LD,” announced in February 2022, is a consent-management platform proposing that data ownership and trust be returned to users through a managed interface. “Mirrana,” presented as a digital-twin platform-as-a-service, supplies the simulation environment in which projects and regions are designed and modeled before they are built. “Tonomus” is the corporate skin under which the other three were assembled, and whose subsequent recession into NEOM’s wider Tech & Digital sector page is itself part of the evidence. We read these four public artifacts through which the cognitive city imagines itself into being.

“Real-time information is too late. The damage is done.” Joseph Bradley, then CTO for NEOM, delivered this line at World Summit AI in Amsterdam in October 2022.²Joseph Bradley, “How AI Will Power Cognitive Cities of the Future, Today,” transcript of World Summit AI keynote, Amsterdam, October 12, 2022, https://josephmbradley.com/get-my-content/interviews/how-ai-will-power-cognitive-cities-of-the-future-today. It sounds at first like executive impatience with latency, the familiar smart city desire to sense faster and respond sooner. But the line’s more revealing move is temporal. It asks the city to shift upstream from response to anticipation, from events to conditions, from the mess of urban life to a field in which the future can be modeled before it has had time to arrive. NEOM’s public materials offer a script in which atmosphere and consent are specified before ordinary urban life arrives: a politics of urban possibility.³C.f. Louise Amoore. The politics of possibility: Risk and security beyond probability. (Duke University Press, 2013). Its videos, launch releases, product pages, sector copy, and redirects, are part of the project’s political imagination. They show how implementation is rehearsed as ordinary life before it has begun.

We use “synthetic” in both senses proposed by the dossier. NEOM’s synthetic city is not simply an artificial or simulated city but is also a synthesis, wherein promotional media, consent platforms, predictive analytics, satellite and fiber infrastructures, digital twins, service interfaces, and prospective residents are imagined as composed into a single urban proposition. Both senses also carry the seeds of NEOM’s ever-shrinking material reality. It is increasingly questionable how much of what is portrayed in NEOM’s slick simulations will ever be realized, as regional warfare, global trade and financial crises, and the basic inability of management and contractors to produce the fantasy that was planned, lead to reductions and cancellations.⁴Alison Killing, “End of The Line: How Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled,” Financial Times, November 6, 2025, https://ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-line/; Peacock, Amy, “Multiple Neom construction contracts cancelled,” Dezeen, March 26, 2026, https://www.dezeen.com/2026/03/26/neom-cancels-contracts-the-line-trojena/.

We read NEOM’s public artifacts as evidence of an urban imaginary. A phrase such as “digital air” is strong evidence of the political imagination through which a project asks to be recognized. The ordinary word does the work. Air is not a product category. Consent is not only a form. A twin is not only a copy. Each term translates a technical arrangement into an apparently common condition of life. The article is about the broader urban AI assemblage through which data capture, modelling, prediction, personalization, and automated service provision are made to appear as the city’s normal operating condition. Although this article focuses on NEOM’s public digital imaginary, that imaginary cannot be read apart from what it sits on top of. UN human rights experts have raised the alarm over executions linked to opposition to NEOM, and rights groups have documented the expropriation, forced eviction, prosecution and other human rights violations of the Howeitat communities indigenous to the region. Any claim NEOM makes about consent, participation, or about whose future the city is for, is made against that record, not alongside it.⁵UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Saudi Arabia: UN experts alarmed by imminent executions linked to NEOM project,” press release, May 3, 2023, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/05/saudi-arabia-un-experts-alarmed-imminent-executions-linked-neom-project; see also ALQST, “The Dark Side of Neom: Expropriation, Expulsion and Prosecution of the Region’s Inhabitants,” report, February 2023, https://alqst.org/en/post/the-dark-side-of-neom-expropriation-expulsion-and-prosecution.

Atmospheric Infrastructure

In 1999, Charles Leadbeater published Living on Thin Air.⁶Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air: The new economy (Penguin, 1999). It seemed archetypical of the combination of neoliberalism and techno-optimism of the cusp-of-the-dotcom-bust tech world in which geography was going to be history and the material would no longer matter for growth and prosperity. Leadbeater was partly building on the concept of ubiquitous or pervasive computing developed by Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC, who foresaw a world in which computing no longer had a separate physical form of its own but was part of everything: our buildings, our clothes, even ourselves.⁷Mark Weiser, “Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing.” Communications of the ACM 36.7 (1993): 75-84. DOI: 10.1145/159544.159617

Both depended on the apparent ongoing dematerialization of communications that had occurred as physical messengers gave way to the wires of telegraph and the telephone, and thence to radio, television and other “wireless” movement of data, as well as optic-fiber cables channeling light.⁸Stephen Graham, “Global grids of glass: on global cities, telecommunications and planetary urban networks.” Urban Studies 36.5-6 (1999): 929-949. DOI: 10.1080/0042098993286

Despite the bursting of the dotcom bubble and successive examples of what Benjamin Bratton, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, called “the revenge of the real,”⁹Benjamin Bratton, Revenge of the real (Verso, 2020). there remains an obsession amongst tech entrepreneurs and futurists with a dematerialized utopia, which has also infiltrated the academy. John Durham Peters’ philosophical account of “the cloud” as elemental media treats media as environments and infrastructures that sustain and condition life, not only as channels for messages.¹⁰John Durham Peters, The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media (University of Chicago Press, 2015). For Peters, the cloud is not a new phenomenon unique to the digital but a return to a much older understanding of media as vessels and environments that manage time, space, and data. In that sense, the very pervasiveness of cloud computing has made it at least on some levels equivalent to the physical atmosphere. However seductive that may be, the shift matters politically in that infrastructures that appear atmospheric are harder to refuse, price, regulate, or perceive as optional. Thus, in Vincent Mosco’s work, “the cloud” appears marvelous only in its presentation.¹¹Vincent Mosco, To the cloud: Big data in a turbulent world (Routledge, 2015). Building on his earlier work on the digital sublime, Mosco’s critical political economy reveals the cloud as a powerful cultural myth that masks a major shift in corporate power. Atmospheric metaphors are brought down to earth as a marketing strategy that hides the reality of massive, energy-consuming data centers, physical cables, and concentrated private ownership of the means of digital production.

It is not merely that the cloud is a digital version of false consciousness. Cultural geographers like Ben Anderson (2012) have shown how atmospheres function in an affective way, and that this generation of affect is politically useful.¹²Ben Anderson, “Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37.1 (2012): 28-43. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x Affective atmospheres are created to modulate feeling and orientation in advance of explicit decision. This is a key feature of what Ball and Wood described as “brandscapes of control”:¹³David Murakami Wood and Kirstie Ball, “Brandscapes of control? Surveillance, marketing and the co-construction of subjectivity and space in neo-liberal capitalism.” Marketing Theory 13.1 (2013): 47-67. DOI: 10.1177/1470593112467264 the creation of an ambient form of governance in which apparent free decisions are always already pre-inscribed neither with threat, force, law, regulation, nor even with normalization, but with the invisible persuasion of the environment, including the air itself.

However, the digital sublimity of the data-filled atmosphere persists, and NEOM has claimed it as its own. The use of the term by NEOM’s developers dates back to at least 2017, when a Public Investment Fund launch announcement described high-speed wireless internet at NEOM as a free good called “digital air.”¹⁴Public Investment Fund, “His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Announces: NEOM — the Destination for the Future,” press release, October 24, 2017, https://www.pif.gov.sa/en/news-and-insights/press-releases/2017/neom-the-destination-for-the-future/. The release describes “wireless high-speed internet as a free good called ‘digital air.’” This was later illustrated with the slick CGI presentation with which we opened this paper.¹⁵NEOM, “THE LINE at #NEOM will transform daily life creating digital sustainability with its own Digital Air,” Youtube, February 3, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNVqP1je8YE. Digital Air names a promise, and the video makes that promise feel like the surrounding condition of a future city. The video’s movement from coastline and desert to luminous networks and infrastructural interiors makes the digital appear continuous with landscape. There is no need for what architects used to call the “recombination” of the digital and material. Digital Air is not something with which one interacts via some user interface, device, or a dashboard. It is staged as surround. The phrase speaks directly to Weiser’s vision of pervasiveness, in which infrastructure disappears into the most ordinary condition of inhabitation since air surrounds before it is noticed. Digital Air thus turns connectivity from service into condition. It imagines computation less as something one accesses than as something one breathes. Digital Air sits at the junction, fusing infrastructural condition and affective modulation.  The official Digital Air still renders that promise as an enveloping data atmosphere rather than a discrete technical system (see article header image).

The metaphor soon acquired a more concrete infrastructural story. In October 2021, NEOM Tech & Digital Holding Company and OneWeb announced a $200 million joint venture for high-speed satellite connectivity to NEOM, Saudi Arabia, and regional markets, alongside a broader stack of low-earth-orbit satellites, subsea and terrestrial cables, 5G, and fiber networks.¹⁶NEOM, “NEOM Tech & Digital Holding Company and OneWeb Sign $200m JV for Satellite Network,” October 26, 2021, https://www.neom.com/en-us/newsroom/neom-and-oneweb; Joseph Bradley, “Powering the World’s First Cognitive Region,” November 13, 2021, https://josephmbradley.com/get-my-content/blog/powering-the-worlds-first-cognitive-region. But it is precisely by framing these very physical products as airy and all-around us, that companies like Tonomus can naturalize a technical and logistical substrate as a condition of life. Bradley’s manifesto then turned the connectivity stack into elemental doctrine: NEOM would make connectivity “ubiquitous as oxygen.”¹⁷NEOM, “NEOM Tech & Digital Holding Company.” Air and oxygen are not ordinary opt-in services, but conditions of inhabitation. The political charge is therefore not simply that NEOM claims strong connectivity. It is that computation is imagined as the element through which the subject would breathe, move, receive services, and become legible. A city wired as anticipatory atmosphere does not merely respond to events but also seeks to condition the field in which events can emerge.

The October 2022 WSAI keynote condensed the logic when Bradley described a cognitive blueprint in which an infrastructure layer provides Digital Air.¹⁸Bradley, “How AI Will Power Cognitive Cities of the Future, Today.” By 2026, the label itself no longer needs to be prominent. On the current NEOM Technology & Digital page, “Digital Air” does not appear as a flagship phrase, while the infrastructural grammar remains across eight focus areas: efficient data centers; adaptable connectivity for 5G+; digital twins; AI and advanced robotics; data privacy; personalization; inclusive innovation and entrepreneurship; and AI insights and scalable systems.¹⁹NEOM, “Technology and Digital,” current sector page, https://www.neom.com/en-us/our-business/sectors/technology-and-digital. The phrase “Digital Air” no longer appears as a flagship label on the page. Once computation has been imagined as environmental, the next question is what kind of subject can inhabit it.

Consent and the Prospective Urban Subject

If Digital Air imagines computation as atmosphere, M3LD imagines the user who would move through it. One of us has previously explored the question of who is envisaged as the subject of platform cities, and concluded that these “platform city people” are rarely portrayed as a whole people or citizens with rights, but a fragmented Deleuzian dividual within a neoliberal frame, possessed of qualities and assigned roles that are aligned with the political-economic and sociotechnological vision of the city.²⁰David Murakami Wood, “Platform City People,” in Being human in the digital world: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Beate Roessler and Valerie Steeves (Cambridge University Press: 2025). Thus, the figure assembled across NEOM’s materials is not a legal citizen but amongst other things, a public-facing role, user, data subject, service recipient, and participant in a consent-managed urban system.

M3LD was announced in February 2022 as a consent-management platform allowing users to identify who possessed their data, monitor use, receive privacy recommendations, manage consent profiles, and potentially participate in an incentive network. The launch release said the platform was in development with select data controllers and scheduled for general release in Q1 2023.²¹NEOM Tech & Digital Company, “NEOM Tech & Digital Co. Announces M3LD, a Groundbreaking Platform Enabling Users to Control and Earn from Personal Data,” February 1, 2022, https://www.prnewswire.com/ae/news-releases/neom-tech-amp-digital-co-announces-m3ld-a-groundbreaking-platform-enabling-users-to-control-and-earn-from-personal-data-840562733.html The public record does not confirm that this became an operative external system with users or third-party incentive participation. That limit is analytically useful. M3LD’s value as evidence is not whether it operates, but what its launch surface proposes about consent. Its launch “surface” is a design proposition in that it shows how the cognitive city imagined consent and data value as a single relation, with user agency as the binding term. Privacy is framed as a managed interface through which the user is made knowable and configurable. Consent is not only a legal threshold, but also a mode of participation where the user becomes legible by pre-defining and managing the terms of legibility.  The official M3LD visual makes that proposition legible as a service-provider dashboard linked to a marketised account of consent (Figure 1).

Here, too, ordinary words become mechanisms. “Control” sounds like protection; “profile” sounds like personalization; “incentive” sounds like benefit. Put together, they describe a subject who is asked to recognize data disclosure as agency. The key political issue here is that the rights-bearing citizen is reduced to a user whose agency is exercised through a managed data relation. M3LD imagines consent as a continuous interface relation, that is, tracked, displayed, incentivized, and updated. A dashboard can display choices without creating the conditions under which refusal is safe and consequential. The launch language makes this subject a market actor. Bradley’s central promise was that M3LD would put data ownership “back in the hands of users” and restore trust in the data economy.²²NEOM Tech & Digital Company, “NEOM Tech & Digital Co. Announces M3LD.”. The figure is not the citizen as rights-holder in a public sphere, but the user as data participant. Trust is the condition for data and data is the condition for value. The platform offers itself as mediator of that conversion.

Critical commentary translated the same arrangement into another register.²³In a 2022 Context report, Marwa Fatafta of Access Now warned that adding money as incentive “distorts” free consent. See Menna Farouk, “Saudi ‘Surveillance City’: Would You Sell Your Data to The Line?,” Context, August 23, 2022, https://www.context.news/digital-rights/saudi-surveillance-city-would-you-sell-your-data-to-the-line. The point is that an urban data economy changes the background conditions of choice. If everyday city services are organized through data participation, consent no longer looks like an isolated click, but becomes a condition of belonging to an environment.

NEOM’s own data-privacy language adds a third register. Its policy page casts NEOM as steward of personal data and addresses “NEOM Representatives” who must maintain privacy standards and respect rights, while using technology to “increase transparency.”²⁴NEOM, “Data Privacy, Our Technology,” corporate policy page, https://www.neom.com/en-us/about/our-values/code-of-conduct/our-technology/data-privacy. The prospective inhabitant is addressed as a user entrepreneurial enough to manage and monetize data, vulnerable enough to require protection, and institutional enough to be administered. The contradiction is that all three address the same person. Mark Andrejevic’s account of the “digital enclosure” helps explain how participation, customization, convenience, and empowerment can become mechanisms of capture.²⁵Mark Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007): 295-317, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420701715365. M3LD’s pitch is not submission to surveillance but its inversion as control, consent, value, trust, and so on. Agency is exercised through the very relation that makes the user legible. The platform supplies the kind of subject the atmosphere requires, someone who can be addressed through data rights, incentivized through data value, reassured through transparency, and acted upon through personalization.

If computation is part of the air that subjects breathe, consent also becomes part of the environment through which the prospective urban subject is configured. By 2026, M3LD need not remain visible as a product for this logic to survive as the current Technology & Digital page still foregrounds “trusted, consent-based data” and “Consent-driven data collection.”²⁶NEOM, “Technology and Digital,” current sector page, https://www.neom.com/en-us/our-business/sectors/technology-and-digital.

The Twin Before the City

The third object is the digital twin. In conventional usage, the twin often appears as a copy of a built object, that is, a model of an existing factory, asset, building, body, or system. In NEOM’s materials, that relation is unstable from the beginning. The twin helps produce the conditions through which the city can be planned, simulated, marketed, and governed. In this sense, the twin is a design and decision environment that helps specify who or what counts within the city and which futures become administratively actionable.²⁷Christoph Borbach, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Tristan Thielmann, “Making Everything Ac-Count-Able: The Digital Twinning Paradigm,” New Media & Society 27, no. 8 (2025): 4369–4384, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251338289. Pre-emption names an urban temporal order in which intervention is justified before the event becomes visible as a shared civic problem. The twin lets the city act on residents, tenants, and flows that do not yet exist, on the basis of conditions modeled rather than encountered. What would otherwise be a political question — who counts, what is allowed, what is foreclosed, etc. — is settled in the model before it can be raised in public.

Louise Amoore’s account is useful for reading NEOM because it refuses the copy relation. The twin is not a passive duplicate. It composes and recomposes data environments into future-oriented possibilities for intervention.²⁸Louise Amoore, “Because the Twin Is Not a Copy: On the Politics of Digital Twins,” New Media & Society 27, no. 8 (2025): 4549-4564, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251338284. Much of the city being twinned is projected, under (failing) construction, or imagined.²⁹Zainab Fattah and Matthew Martin, “Saudis Scale Back Ambition for $1.5 Trillion Desert Project Neom,” Bloomberg, April 5, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-05/saudis-scale-back-ambition-for-1-5-trillion-desert-project-neom.

The twin does not only stand in for a built urban reality but helps make a future reality administratively actionable. Bradley states the reversal bluntly: “the physical is an add on to the digital.” He then ties that logic to The Line, arguing that if it has not yet been built, metaverse technologies can model it during creation.³⁰Bradley, “How AI Will Power Cognitive Cities of the Future, Today.” The physical city is imagined as an extension or instantiation of a prior digital model. This means that the future city is asked to pass first through a model in which spatial relations, infrastructure, users, tenants, flows, and values can be composed before they become urban claims.

Mirrana is where this reversal becomes architectural rather than rhetorical. The archived product page presents a digital twin PaaS for design, construction, and asset operations, emphasizing low-code modular components, multi-source data integration, and schema-less composition.³¹Tonomus, “Mirrana: A Comprehensive Digital Twin Platform,” Wayback Machine snapshot, March 27, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250327173130/https://tonomus.neom.com/en-us/what-we-do/cognitive-solutions/mirrana , accessed March 30, 2026. The product page assembles a world in which planning software, sensor data, gaming engines, and asset management systems can be treated as parts of a single urban assemblage. The use cases are more revealing than the product adjectives. The page describes simulation twins for two modules of The Line and tenant-attraction and economic-discovery applications for Oxagon, alongside internal use cases for Design and Construction and ENOWA, NEOM’s energy and water subsidiary.³²Tonomus, “Mirrana: A Comprehensive Digital Twin Platform.” The Oxagon and The Line examples show two sides of the same politics. In one, the twin supports spatial and economic discovery. In the other, it supports simulation during creation. In both, the city is rendered legible before it is fully inhabited. NEOM’s public materials intensify a tendency already present in smart-city urbanism, that is, the desire to make urban life legible before it appears as collective practice.  The archived page visualises this reversal by overlaying the industrial scene with a synthetic model and data flows (Figure 2).

On the current NEOM Technology & Digital page, “digital twins” remains a focus area even as the Mirrana URL redirects to that sector page.³³NEOM, “Technology and Digital”; the legacy Mirrana URL (https://tonomus.neom.com/en-us/what-we-do/cognitive-solutions/mirrana) returns a 301 redirect to https://www.neom.com/en-us/our-business/sectors/technology-and-digital (verified April 30, 2026). In other words, a specific product page becomes less visible while the twinning logic remains.

What Remains After Tonomus

Air is at once ephemeral and persistent. The public-facing web record does not establish that Tonomus has legally disappeared. Tonomus recedes as a public-facing brand while its infrastructural grammar is folded into NEOM’s broader Technology & Digital presentation. Several Tonomus URLs now resolve to NEOM’s Technology & Digital sector page, and Mirrana’s product URL redirects there as well.³⁴NEOM, “Technology and Digital.” On that current sector page, NEOM foregrounds digital infrastructure, consent-based data, digital twins, AI and robotics, data privacy, personalization, and scalable systems. TONOMUS, therefore, survives publicly as a telecommunications-center reference. The page notes NEOM’s first digital communications facility, the TONOMUS Telecommunications Center, in Oxagon.³⁵NEOM, “Technology and Digital.” Under “Our Progress,” the page states: “We opened our first digital communications facility, the TONOMUS Telecommunications Center. Located in Oxagon, the facility meets today’s needs while enhancing digital connectivity for the growing demands and future vision of the NEOM.” The page still carries the cognitive-city premise, but at lower volume. Its data section is titled “Powering the Cognitive Future of NEOM,” and its copy describes advanced data, AI, connectivity infrastructure, datacenters, cloud systems, and a digital backbone that allows NEOM to “think, learn, and evolve.”³⁶NEOM, “Technology and Digital,” current sector page, https://www.neom.com/en-us/our-business/sectors/technology-and-digital (accessed April 30, 2026). The phrase “Digital Air” no longer appears as a flagship label on the page. The extravagant vocabulary of the cognitive city has begun to flatten into the quieter language of sector pages. The label recedes while the infrastructural grammar remains. In other words, their most revealing claims can survive as ordinary infrastructure language after specific corporate pages or product brands become less visible. If computation is atmosphere, consent is interface, and the twin is matrix, the withdrawal of a brand presence does not undo the political imaginary.

We have argued that NEOM’s conception of Digital Air makes computation ambient and environmental rather than service-bound and portrays disconnection as damage. M3LD orders the subject by framing the prospective inhabitant as a user whose agency is exercised through managed data and dashboard consent. Mirrana orders the model by positioning the digital twin as a matrix that helps compose the city before the city can appear as shared urban life. Tonomus shows that a spectacular brand can attenuate while the ordinary infrastructure of consent-based data, AI systems, digital twins, and personalization persists. This is where the question of refusal becomes harder. If computation is imagined as air, withdrawal is not simply logging off or choosing a different platform. It becomes a question of inhabitation. The synthetic city, in this sense, is not a digital representation of an urban future but the apparatus through which that future is settled in advance, whereby atmosphere, subject, and model are composed before residents arrive to contest them – if residents materialize as envisioned.

Acknowledgements: David Murakami Wood acknowledges the support of the Canada Research Chairs program.

Mehdi Ghassemi

Mehdi Ghassemi is Director of Research at the ISTC School of Communication (Lille, France). In 2023, he co-founded CEThicS, France’s first research centre dedicated to the ethical, political, and discursive implications of algorithmic surveillance. His research draws on media theory, discourse analysis, and social semiotics to investigate the socio-technical imaginaries of AI and AI-driven surveillance, particularly in France and the Middle East.

David Murakami Wood

David Murakami Wood is Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, and Director of CSS/Lab in the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. His current research focuses on the elite construction of special zones, new cities and urban enclaves in an era of planetary emergency, and the relationship of security, surveillance and the polycrisis.

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