In recent years, Dubai has transformed into a global playground for influencers, cryptocurrency evangelists, and anyone eager to sell a picture-perfect life under the desert sun. But as regional security tensions across the Middle East have prompted some of that crowd to pack their bags and move on, a quieter question has resurfaced: what was Dubai actually like before TikTok and selfie rings took over? Journalist Portia Jones visited the city in late 2012, back when it was still shaking off the effects of a financial crisis and had none of the polished influencer infrastructure it boasts today. Her account paints a portrait of a city that was fascinating, strange, and deeply unfinished in ways that feel almost unimaginable now.
Jones recalled arriving in Dubai with what she described as “an oversized backpack on her lap,” staring out at “a surreal, futuristic urban landscape that looked more like a science fiction film than reality.” The Burj Khalifa was already there, already towering over everything, but her reaction to first seeing it was apparently underwhelming enough to disappoint her taxi driver. She described the city as being in an unusual in-between phase at the time, balanced somewhere between economic recovery and explosive growth. There were no glowing selfie rings, no parade of gym-wear-clad social media personalities, just gleaming real estate rising out of the desert sand.
She and her friends stayed in an affordable hotel in the Al Jaddaf neighborhood, quickly discovering that the area was difficult to navigate and largely unfinished. When they ventured out the next morning, the city’s contrasts hit immediately. The Dubai Mall was already a landmark, and the Burj Khalifa dominated the skyline, but a large portion of the horizon was still filled with cranes and half-built towers. That unfinished quality left Jones with a lingering sense of unease. “You cannot catapult from a small fishing village into a global megacity in one generation without leaving a trace of something synthetic,” she wrote.
The feeling stayed with her throughout the visit. She described Dubai as frequently resembling “a carefully staged Disneyland version of a city rather than one built for real life,” an observation that carries even more weight now that the city has spent years carefully curating its image for an international audience. Palm Jumeirah, which she called one of “Dubai’s crown jewels, gleaming with luxury,” was a highlight of the trip. A visit to Atlantis and its beaches and aquarium was her favorite part of the whole journey, a moment of genuine enjoyment amid the broader sense of spectacle.
What Jones was less aware of during that 2012 visit, and only addresses more directly looking back, is the city’s darker undercurrent. She notes that “this glittering metropolis of wealth and skyscrapers was built largely on the backs of workers operating under questionable conditions,” and acknowledges that this side of Dubai rarely makes it into the content people post online. She frames the silence around it with biting clarity, asking why anyone would ruin a brunch straight out of Instagram by bringing up modern labor exploitation. It is a pointed observation that captures something real about the way Dubai has been packaged and sold to the world.
The contrast between that 2012 visit and the Dubai of recent years is stark. What she experienced then, stripped of the influencer machinery, has since become a magnet for cryptocurrency promoters, motivation-peddling online personalities, and what she calls “dead-eyed male sphere influencers.” When regional tensions briefly sent sirens and images of aerial defense systems flooding across social media, Jones noted that influencers immediately pivoted into amateur war correspondents. Just as quickly, those posts disappeared, replaced by content once again celebrating Dubai as the safest and most glamorous place on earth. One phrase she spotted circulating, “We know who protects us,” struck her as sounding less like genuine patriotism and more like, in her words, “a hostage video filmed beside an infinity pool.”
Dubai was a fishing and pearl-diving settlement as recently as the 1960s, and the entire emirate had fewer than 100,000 residents when oil was first discovered there in 1966. The Burj Khalifa, which remains the tallest building in the world at just over 2,700 feet, was built by a workforce that at its peak numbered around 12,000 laborers working simultaneously on the structure. Palm Jumeirah, that famous palm-shaped island Jones visited, is entirely man-made and required enough sand to fill 2,500 Empire State Buildings.
Have you ever visited Dubai before or after the influencer era took hold, and what was your experience like? Share your thoughts in the comments.
