I have been following the exchange of ideas between Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the Sultan of Johor on Johor’s ‘Forest City’; on whether the project is about progress and growth of a region and promoting multiculturalism as claimed by the sultan, or about selling off Johor to a foreign country, a profit-driven venture going against the spirit of nationalism, and benefitting those who own the capital to dictate the process of national development.

It is a cultural and political-economic issue and will be the main focus of Malaysia’s general election #14, analysts believe, as reported.

But how are we to know if Johor’s ‘Forest City’ is good for the country or a major developmentalist-virus that will threaten sovereignty, and one carried out willingly by the kingdom’s decree, to destroy the country? Central questions these are, I believe we should ask.

Herein, I believe we need the tools of studying the nature of this form of ‘mega structural change’ to decide whether to believe the claims made by the present multi- mega-billionaire Sultan of Johor or the former longest-serving and still well-revered former prime minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir.

I hope at the end of this essay, the ideas can be used by policy-makers and opinion leaders to study the sustainability of an idea as it gets transplanted onto a nation-state/country subscribing to the neo-liberal ideas of how to ‘develop’ its people, places, and resources.

About a decade ago, I studied the genesis of Cyberjaya and Putrajaya; with cities created by the then-prime minister, Dr Mahathir. It culminated in a doctoral dissertation/thesis entitled ‘Thesis on Cyberjaya: Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian state’, submitted to Columbia University in the city of New York.

I wanted to find out how the implantation of the city of Cyberjaya, especially, is a form of neo-colonialism architecture by Dr Mahathir, a staunch anti-Western-Buy-British-Last-Look-East type of leader. Mahathir wanted to fully-cybernate the country and invited a panel international advisors essentially from Silicon Valley, California, USA to advise him how to catapult Malaysia into the Information Age.

How successful Cyberjaya and the Multimedia Super Corridor (The MSC) today is still being studied and debated of the impact of such a transplantation of a Western-based foreign idea.

The findings of the study allowed me to present a table of explanation on how hegemonic formulations and possible form of total colonisation and the setting up of a centre-periphery nation can be analysed.

The idea of cybernetics as it progresses from its philological roots in the idea of the explanation into the behaviour of living systems onward to its evolution as a systems theory to its appropriated and hybridised version in the case of Malaysia’ Cyberjaya and the MSC, is an example of an idea that can be analysed as a transcultural process. I analysed Cyberjaya and the MSC as a genealogy.