Disney's Cautionary Ride
Media Rant
by Jon Katz
Orlando, Florida, 28 April
There are lots of reasons utopian visions like Disney's fail. According to historians, the most frequent is that powerful and imaginative technocratic elites end up talking only to one another, since nobody else can really understand them or grasp what they're doing. They lose power and influence by cutting themselves off from everyone else. They end up shutting humanity out of the process and, worse, gradually forget even to take their fellow humans into account.
Disney's was the penultimate utopian dream, the staple vision of most science fiction and futuristic fantasy - a technology-driven world deliberately built on an idealized plan.
But it never worked. As the digital world grows and emerges, and as megacorporations and engineers struggle to take control and plot its growth and future, Disney's ghost hovers.
When the cyberworld opens its first theme park, Digital Kingdom, it should include, right by the entrance, a ride called Walt Disney's Cautionary Ride of Technology.
This will be a giant, spectacular, multimedia digital experience spanning hundreds of acres. It will feature magnificent computers with giant, high-resolution monitors and powerful potent drives, nuclear search engines for the Web, enough bandwidth to march a band through, high-speed wireless modems, stunning virtual games and rides, radical new definitions of community and politics, as well as cyborganic entities that transform life, health, and culture.
All the oh-my-gosh, razzle-dazzle stuff will draw thousands. But they must travel great distances at enormous expense. The ride will, however, be interspersed with endless waits in artificially constructed computer discount store "environments," and phone booths where visitors get lost in touch-tone voice recordings for hours. Visitors will maneuver around blocking software, race in doomed desperation to show their kids all the best exhibits, struggle to load or download incompatible software, shell out thousands and thousands of dollars for equipment that's instantly outdated or too complex to use or unnecessary to begin with.
Along the way, computer companies will go broke, sales clerks will provide the wrong information. Flamers will blast you as you move from exhibit to exhibit, ridiculing your technical skills and calling you names.
Like the slaves who rode in Roman chariots to whisper in the ears of victorious generals, Walt Disney's ride will trumpet the glories of technology and remind us, as it did him, just how fleeting glory really is.
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See also:
Media Rant, Part One
Beware the magic mirror
