Beware the Magic Mirror
Media Rant
by Jon Katz
Orlando, Florida, 28 April
Anyone who lives or works in the digital world, or cares what happens to it, should visit Walt Disney's EPCOT Center and Tomorrowland. In both worlds, technology and the potential for a utopian future collide with big money, family life, and corporate power.
The planners of Tomorrowland and EPCOT clearly imagined the millennium as one focused on space and interplanetary travel, with our earthbound lives organized around vast open plazas, lots of sliding doors, metallic voices echoing over unseen loudspeakers, sterile architecture, and Flash Gordon-like citizens wearing buttonless tunics.
Disney himself desperately wanted EPCOT to be much, much more - a utopian city of the future. In his mind, Disney World would pay for EPCOT, which would use technology to create a humanistic city that worked. He knew he was in a race against the dawning age of accountants and stockholders. He also knew he wouldn't live long enough to see how it turned out.
He lost the race. EPCOT is a corporate theme park, not a human community. But what is striking today about the technologically sophisticated world Disney inspired is how it mirrors the current challenges and dilemmas facing the emerging digital one.
The theme parks are filled with stunning, jaw-dropping technology, robots, holographic permeations, 3-D creations, new and interactive special effects, and digital hat tricks, as is the computer world. The engineers have brilliantly done their job of building gizmos, but they have too much power, and their visions of technology seem to end when their projects are done. They can't seem to resist piling one special effect onto another, even when the result outstrips the ability of humans to absorb, enjoy, and use it all.
People travel long distances to experience the park, but they often can't get on the rides. They have to stand in the boiling sun for hours with small children and wait in long lines for food. Hard-pressed parents watch the clock as it becomes clear their time is too short and their childen's expectations are too high.
At certain times of the day the crowd density approaches meltdown - it's almost impossible to move or escape, to find amusement or comfort. Enchantment and excitement morph into exhaustion, discomfort, and disappointment. At night, the music piped out of the ground is often drowned out by the cries of overstimulated children, and by the futile pleas of parents who can't appease them.
The digital world may soon have more in common with this one than we might like to think. It, too, is constantly cranking out more sophisticated stuff, even as people's comprehension and anxiety about using it rises. Disney's lines seem the equivalent of the 800-numbers at whose mercy hundreds of thousands of computer buyers are thrown all the time. We build and sell fancier stuff willy-nilly, without making sure we know how people will access it, pay for it, or use it.
And we flirt arrogantly, like Disney, with utopian visions. We often think we're smarter, hipper, different. That our world will be better, freer, more creative. That it will solve problems more efficiently, and heal the world in new and more efficient ways. Maybe so.
But the legacy on display at Disney World is a cautionary tale for us. Disney spent too much time talking to himself and his fellow imagineers, looking into his own Magic Mirror. Despite the fact that people all over the world are transfixed by Disney World, none of the technology here has moved beyond the parks, as Disney was certain it would.
We see again and again - from Jules Verne to H. G. Wells to Disney - that the future isn't predictable. Disney's vision of the future was dead wrong. Despite our new technology, many of the ancient social problems - poverty, crime, brutality - continue to plague us. Maybe one real lesson of the future is that they always will.
Disney never imagined the technological marvel of our time - the Internet - and the way it is now transforming our politics, culture, and communications far more than any space probe has.
Read Part Two of this Rant, and learn about the first cyber theme park.
