It's an indication of economic retraction.

Traditional Saudi Arabian architecture is based around keeping things cool. Like the high walls in this building complex keep everything in the shade, and retain the coolness from the night as much as possible (because hot air rises, the cool air stays in the building). At the same time, it still allows natural light which overall makes a very comfortable effect.

Having a line allows you to enforce hierarchy. The people at one side will never want to go to the other side, that's where the lower class people are.

Unless you're planning to print it out (requiring about 300 cubic meters of paper - per month, to keep up with edits), you still need things like electricity, and replacement hardware as it wears about and the infrastructure to keep it all going, which is about as likely to be available after a civilization destroying collapse (which is, by definition, what we're talking about) as the internet.

So good luck with that.

All that aside from the fact that it's largely useless with the internet.

And NPR brags about how unbiased and factual they are, and little girls all want a pony.

But it isn't hard to find first hand accounts of their overtly political bias, so perhaps, their own claims about themselves are not exactly reliable or credible.

Even when you try to keep the implementation fairly practical just deciding that there should be a city somewhere without any historical logic for the presence of a city is a strategy with a pretty dubious success rate. Doesn't fail every time; but unless you get lucky and manage to find an attractive chunk of real estate that was missing nothing but critical mass; or you have a very specific purpose in mind like 'new administrative center without restive urban population' that allows you to just tell the civil service to live there unless they like 8 hour commutes and declare victory your odds aren't good.

In this case the Saudis started with that downer; picked a particularly grim environment, likely to get at least a couple of degrees grimmer in the comparatively near future, and treated aggressive deviations from practicality as a virtue. There's probably something they could have done to doom the plan harder; but I'm not sure offhand what it would have been.

In my experience, not really, no. Cloudflare, yes, a pretty large percentage of all internet traffic goes through them. But AI scrapers? Not that I've seen.

Or buy them from gog.com, which will come with a custom version of DOSBox all set up specifically for it.

There are obviously many reasons why Spotify and other industries definitely don't want you to think clearly! If you want to call it a conspiracy, that is accurate. A conspiracy to distract, prevent clear thought, prevent the forming of deep social bonds, and of course spend money unwisely. Like was said in the summary, Spotify's goal is to get you to waste your time.

Have you asked yourself why this is so?

Become? Were they ever not?

If only one could get a reliable list of all IP addresses they use, it would be trivial.

Yeah, I'm sure the internet will be working just fine after what catastrophe causes you to need to rebuild society.

There are, however, actual options for such information.

What if you listen to podcasts? What if you're not afraid to be alone with your thoughts, or meditate in quiet? Why does life have to have a soundtrack? What did people do who in the 19th century when they had to walk for days without a steady supply of algorithmic music? What would happen if you contributed meaningful statements instead of rhetorical, mindless questions?

There are or were plenty of artists in the background music genre. There are countless hours of instrumental music created by human beings playing actual instruments. The business of background music (Muzak, now Rockbot I think, Trusonic etc) is still a competitive business.
Corporate music, like the stuff you hear at health clubs, malls, parking lot elevators, waiting rooms, you get the idea, is a paid service that generally pays artists.
They license real music and curate playlists for all kinds of settings, and pay royalties to artists via performance royalties collectors like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GEMA in Germany.
I'm represented by ASCAP and I used to get regular checks, mostly from the EU. Spotify is destroying that business with their royalty free robot generated slop. All the money that used to be distributed through a variety of systems is drying up. Spotify "disrupted" it in the worst way.

Almost every eating place I go to is playing AI generated crap as background music. It's very obvious to me that it's not real music, but everyone else seems to be oblivious. If I had to put them in a genre I'd say "business deep techno and house" and "business trip-hop"
It's as if all the boring techno/deep house records from the 2000's were used to poorly train an LLM to poop out repetitive garbage. The "songs" have no structure, just loopy almost-melodies with the same pseudo-instruments - is it supposed to be a Rhodes electric piano? Saxahorn? The drums are a mash of synthetic and organic-sounding without actually being anything recognizable. There were a lot of records made in the 90's that could be called "filler" - most of that had the prefix "deep-" attached to it. I never heard anything from that era that was as soulless and tasteless as this garbage.