Moroccan Disneyland

Between Presence and Performance

I love Morocco. For me, it is a place where history is not abstract but alive. Anyone who knows me also knows that I am a history buff, and among all the eras that I have studied, none captures me more than the golden age of Andalus. This was the moment when Islamic Spain and North Africa reached heights of philosophy, mysticism, architecture, art, and science that I still believe represent the very pinnacle of what humanity can achieve.

Whenever I return to Morocco, I am drawn to Fes. It is one of my favorite cities—a place that embodies learning, spirituality, and presence. Fes is home to al-Qarawiyyin, one of the first universities in the world. The city was founded by Moulay Idris II, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad through his grandson Hasan, and it became a base of knowledge and devotion for centuries. Many call Fes the City of Saints for the unbelievable number of Sufi masters who lived and taught there. To walk its streets is to feel their presence. The walls seem to speak, the cobblestones hum, the calligraphy and arches press meaning into every step. Fes does not let you pass through casually—it envelops you.

Fes is also, in many ways, a hidden city: walled, guarded, and difficult to reach. There are few direct flights from Europe or the West, and most visitors must connect through other cities to reach its small airport. This difficulty of access has preserved its character. It is not filled with tourists, and even those who do come are respectful, blending into the space in the way they dress and carry themselves. The city demands you come to it and not the other way around, and as a result it’s literally filled with treasures. Entering the old souk through Bab Boujloud, you step into a living marketplace where people have been practicing their trades for hundreds of years. The smell, the metalsmiths, the leather tanners, the carpenters, the calligraphers, the textile workers—it’s alive with genuine artistry, standing in stark contrast to what you find elsewhere. Fes is a treasure that must be sought, a reality ever present in the unbelievable crafts and craftsmen it teems with. For all its breathtaking beauty, it also has its edges—it’s real, deeply and undeniably real. Its graveyards are as sprawling as its marketplaces. The last time I went, it reminded me in a deep and fundamental way—hard to describe, really—that I’m human.

On my first visit to Fes, I noticed something remarkable: I barely took any photographs. Normally, I document everything when I travel. But in Fes, I kept forgetting my camera. I still took some pictures, of course, but a noticeable amount less than usual.

On my most recent trip to Morocco, I decided in the planning phase to give some other cities a chance instead of beelining straight back to Fes. I looked into Tangier and Tetouan in particular, and also considered Chefchaouen. But something happened—it seemed that within hours of googling Chefchaouen, the algorithm had caught on. Suddenly my feed was awash in blue, flooded with images of the city: blue walls, blue doors, blue steps, blue arches. Blue this, blue that. Though Tangier and Tetouan both looked amazing, I found myself irresistibly drawn to Chefchaouen. In the end, I scrapped my other plans and brought a friend along to see the famous blue city for ourselves.

From the moment we arrived, something felt off. The streets looked staged: fruit stands that didn’t really sell fruit, people in immaculate traditional clothing that felt more like costumes than daily wear, rows of perfect blue houses that didn’t appear to be lived in. From the edges of the city, the homes shift from the natural brown of stone to blue, then bluer, and then bluer still. And the bluer it gets, the more artificial it feels. At one point, it reminded me of Fisherman’s Wharf, in my hometown of San Francisco. But that’s not nearly the worst of it. 

Everywhere you look, at every turn, on every corner, there aren’t just tourists—there are literally dozens of influencers. People with cameras, gyroscopes, and drones, talking into their phones performatively for their scrolling audiences. You find yourself ducking under selfie sticks and weaving through this colonizing army of tourists and influencers assaulting the city with their vanity. My friend laughed and said it was like Disneyland. Moments later, I swear to you, we turned a corner and, unbelievably, there were two young men dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Curious, I began asking some of the people who live there about the city's history. Some shared the familiar legends—that the blue was painted by Jewish refugees in the 1930s to remind them of heaven or of the sea, or that blue repelled mosquitoes. But an older man told me something different. He said that only a handful of houses were blue in the beginning, tucked into a few corners of town. In the  2000s, tourists came, took photos, posted them online, and those images spread. As more visitors came to find those same corners, younger locals seized the opportunity and painted more homes blue. Over the years, Chefchaouen grew bluer and bluer—until now it feels awash in it. (It's funny: if you look up photos by decade, you can literally watch the city turn bluer over time.)

Unsurprisingly, people in Chefchaouen are divided about what this has meant. Many of the older generation feel the soul of their town has been drowned by waves of tourists and their endless photographs. One resident told us he woke up one day to find a Swedish woman taking selfies with his grandmother. Younger people see something else: opportunity—livelihoods, guesthouses, new businesses sustained by the influx. I can understand, and empathize with both perspectives. But the contrast with Fes is striking—where Fes offers authentic handicrafts and genuine artisanship, Chefchaouen has become filled with cheap trinkets from AliExpress and knock-offs. After Fes's depth and presence, Chefchaouen felt like pure performance.

This phenomenon isn't unique to Morocco. You can find similar manufactured tourist experiences across the world; rice terraces of Bali, clan jettys of Penang, wooden sculptures of Tulum, geishas of Kyoto—places where authentic communities have been transformed into photo opportunities, complete with costumes and props designed for the perfect shot. It left me reflecting on "instagrammable" places that seem to be built around social media performance. And reminded me of the Museum of Ice Cream…

The Museum of Ice Cream

In the mid to late 2010s, while living in San Francisco, I remember the rise of what became known as "pop-up experiences." The Museum of Ice Cream was one of the first of these I remember that caught fire. It became a massive success story, heralded as a unicorn direct-to-consumer brand that had blown up overnight and was doing all of these novel, incredible things. At the time, I had investors and advisors recommending that I create a similar 'experience' for my brand Port of Mokha. At one point even, without asking, someone gave me a full proposal for one. I was intrigued by the idea, but at the same time hesitant. I had gone to the Museum of Ice Cream and it honestly felt horrible.

Following that, an article had been circulating about the proliferation of these experiences: "The Existential Void of the Pop-Up Experience" by Amanda Hess. She captured something that perfectly articulated how it felt. Hess spent the summer of 2018 visiting every temporary "experience" she could find in New York—Color Factory, Candytopia, 29 Rooms, the Museum of Ice Cream spin-off spaces.

"By classifying these places as experiences," Hess wrote, "their creators seem to imply that something happens there. But what? Most experiences don't have to announce themselves as such. They just do what they do. A film tells a story. A museum facilitates meaning between the viewer and an artwork. Even a basic carnival ride produces pleasing physical sensations."

This is an incredible point she's making. What is it, in any of these spaces, that we are meant to "experience"? Well, what Hess goes on to realize: you're actually not meant to experience anything. You're meant to do the opposite. You're meant to photograph it.

She says: "While standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon, taking in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, or witnessing a seal pup shimmy onto a rock, we might pull out our phone to take a picture only to find that what we experienced as grand feels dinky through the lens. But these experiences often look cheap and grimy in person. They're made to pop on camera."

This captures it, the distinction between something that you're actually experiencing and wanting to capture through your camera, as opposed to something that's created specifically for you to photograph.

I'm not against brand experiences. When they're done well, they can be meaningful and even enriching. Maybe this goes without saying, pop-up experiences are inseparable from the brands themselves. If the brand has substance—if its products actually deliver—then a well done pop-up can deepen that value. I've been to a few that managed to do this where I walked away feeling educated, enriched, and like I was really given something of substance. But I've also been to plenty that either piqued or confirmed my suspicions that the brand stood for nothing.

Case and point, as the years went on, it was revealed that the Museum of Ice Cream is—to put it lightly— a less-than-ethical brand. A 2020 Forbes exposé revealed it to be an unbelievably hostile work environment. Employees described being publicly berated and intimidated, forced into absurd rituals like adopting ice cream "nicknames" and attending mandatory "Scream Sesh" meetings where they were yelled at and threatened by the CEO, employees even reported being denied bathroom breaks. There were also reports of fat-shaming, and derogatory comments about people's bodies. Turns out, behind the pastel façade was not just hollowness, but a disturbing disregard for human dignity.

At the end of her article, Amanda Hess made what I think is her most devastating observation. She says that walking through these colorful hallways of experiential pop-ups, she felt like she was "witnessing the erosion of meaning itself."

Why? Well, I think there's a sort of circular reasoning effect that happens when places are created only to be photographed. As long as the consumer camera has existed, people have taken photos of monuments, grand natural landmarks, family—these things were photographed because they held meaning for people. You take a photo of your family at a barbecue not because you gathered to take the photograph, but because you wanted to have a token to remind you of the experience. The reason you gathered is to enjoy one another's company—to laugh, eat, reminisce, share, cry. These are the "experiences" you're meant to recall at the sight of the photo, this is its meaning.

So what happens now when the experience is the photo? What does it mean? Well… nothing. It's a void.

The Void

Over 2,400 years ago, Plato expressed concern about the influences of images and art on individuals and society. He saw the material world itself as being a copy of the world of essence—the unseen world of meaning, where truth lays. He saw then, art, as an imitation of an imitation. If the physical world is an imitation of the world of essences, then art depicting the physical world is twice removed from truth, as Plato understood it. Where do the fake fruit stands of Chefchaouen land in this formula? The blue buildings were created as a reflection of the sky, which is a reflection of something even more profound in the world of essence. Someone photographed that building, creating a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. Then yet a third person created a thing to reflect what was being photographed in order that it too would be photographed. It really is a confusing, abysmal, bottomless pit. We've reached a point as a culture and civilization where we're beyond even what we could call an extreme image-based culture. We've crossed into the realm of absurdity.

So, that's a really long way of saying that my recommendation to any of you reading this is; if you ever decide to go to Morocco, go to Fes, Tetouan or Tangiers and leave your phone in your backpack.