Las Vegas is in many ways the funhouse mirror version of Disney World. I’d say it was the adult version, but it certainly isn’t all that adult. Instead, it’s sort of what happens when you take Walt Disney’s idea — create a fantasyland to get lost in — and parcel it out to a thousand different people, all trying to make as much money as possible in whatever way they can think of.

Vegas has been trying to remake itself ever since it was founded, never all that successfully, but with each attempt kind of surviving in bits and pieces even as the next washes over the city. It’s been a family-friendly resort, a budget destination, a place for the ultra-rich, a hedonistic pleasure pit, a sophisticated and swank tourist town, and (lately) what appears to be sold as a wild weekend destination if your wild weekend has to end just after midnight because you’ve all got a PTA meeting to make on Monday morning.

In other words, it’s trying to be all things to all people. And as much as that’s doomed to failure on the macro level, it’s surprisingly successful on the micro level, once you look for it. One of the pushes to reinvent itself about 15 years ago was a rush to improve the restaurants in and around the Strip, and a lot of famous restaurateurs opened outposts in Vegas to mixed success. But the legacy of that has been to inspire a more organic dining scene, and there’s now a number of decent places to eat scattered in and around the tourist traps.

In other words, if you can be microtargeted, someone in Vegas will be microtargeting you. About a decade ago The Cosmopolitan hotel opened on the Strip, with kitschy pictures from Vegas in the ’50s on the walls and art vending machines and a slick but intimate cocktail bar in the lobby and a buffet featuring things like poached pears over sweet polenta and vegan potstickers and sticky buns floating over a pool of caramel sauce and I realized to my shock they had finally dialed in to the precise segment of Brooklynite hipster I more-or-less inhabited.

There’s no question that the kind of capitalism represented by Las Vegas, built as it is on wasteland and advertising, supremely pandering, focused entirely on extracting as much money as you’re able to give, is destroying the world. But you’ll never understand it without seeing it, at least once.