By the way, everyone could be writing about how on every American or European-adjacent topic, those governments are involved in terrible things too (need we talk about torturing people, killing civilians, colonization, genocide, racism, etc.) Anyways, with American support for Saudi, everyone is "implicated" in this.

Let it speak for what it is, and stick to the topic. There's a place for these criticisms, and they are sometimes necessary, but they drown out the idea we should be discussing for low-hanging, emotionally-charged fruit.

Unlike the paragraph you devoted to "what about the US/Europe" (and discussion of US/European political problems seems to crop up in every discussion of smart city tech in the US/Europe anyway...), which is of no relevance to whether a culturally Saudi $500bn city designed for Mohammed bin Salman's needs would be a utopian dream or a stylish dystopian nightmare. City planning isn't orthogonal to politics either; ask anyone who's paid any attention to Nay Pyi Daw.

As for changes, whether the Crown Prince decision to reduce the formal powers of the "moral police" and make them subordinate to his civil police are characterised more by [slightly] liberalising an extremely illiberal society, window-dressing for Western observers or increasing his personal authority and whether such reforms would accelerate or sharply regress under his successor(s) might have been a more interesting tangent than whether I should shut up. I can understand if you don't wish to speculate on such things, though, especially if you can potentially see yourself living where such discussion is banned in future... in an efficiently monitored, fully-enclosed space shaped like a line.