Orlando and the Tragedy of Technology

I'm heading South today to try an experiment in non-technical open source writing. The subject is Orlando and the tragedy of technology, woven through Disney's imagined worlds and some of the other bizarre places there. The idea is going to be a magazine article, but I'm wondering if it might be a book as well. I could use some help.

For some time now, I've wanted to write a book called "Orlando and the Tragedy of Technology," indirectly inspired by a classic essay by the engineer Samuel Florman. Florman's "Technology and the Tragic View," ran in, of all places, House & Garden magazine's Bicentennial issue in 1976.

This, I thought, was the way to look at technology, probably the most powerful, pervasive, and perplexing social force in the modern world. This, it seemed to me, was the sane position, the rational middle ground between Luddite gloom and techno-hype.

Technology is the universal topic, revolutionizing business, culture, publishing, and soon, politics. Technology is a tidal wave; on everybody's mind; debated, denounced, celebrated and fussed about by journalists, politicians, business people, educators, geeks, engineers, academics, intellectuals, Harry and Martha sitting at home figuring out what to buy.

But I've never been sure how to tackle the subject. Books need narrative spines, story lines that take a reader from one point to the next, and it isn't clear that there is one here.

Then last month, to my pleasant surprise, my editors at Rolling Stone bit. They liked my notion of trying to come up with a contemporary view of technology, and of setting this project in an appropriately bizarre place like Orlando, Florida, founded on techno-visions and now one of the most-visited destinations on earth.

So I'm heading south today to write about Orlando and technology. And I'd like to take a whack at open source non-technical writing - presenting the idea to some of the smartest, most opinionated people involved in technology (that would be you guys) and getting some help.

Orlando is a place where technology, capitalism, imagination, individualism and corporatism collide. A polyglot nation of the imagination, the city, for better or worse, is awash with tourists, theme parks and restaurants, all sorts of amazing technologies and much metaphor - from Tomorrowland to EPCOT Center.

Walt Disney chose Orlando as the place for his new theme park for several reasons. The biggest was he wanted to control the land and environment around his parks, something he'd failed to do around Disneyland. Another was his obsession with building EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) Center.

Disney was a closet utopian, fixated on the belief that technology could be put in the service of creating perfect little worlds. He believed he could build a model community, free of blight, poverty and crime, and he would do this be harnessing the kinds of technologies that embodied good old American ingenuity, the kind he embraced to such successful effect in his theme parks and imagined worlds.

He meant for EPCOT to serve as a model community of the future; a clean, safe, flawlessly-planned enclave where Disney employees could live, and a community whose trailblazing new educational and environmental technologies would save the world beyond.

It didn't turn out that way. Walt Disney died of lung cancer. Rumors had it that he was studying cryogenics so that he could freeze his body and one day thaw himself out and come back and get even with his bottom-line fixated successors, who he was convinced would commercialize EPCOT.

Disney was right, of course. His successors scrapped his expensive and ephemeral notions of a model town, and swiftly turned EPCOT into a giant promotion, one that not only celebrated corporations, but the new technologies they were deploying for the future. Perhaps Disney's successors' vision -- technology in the service of corporatism -- was more prescient than his own.

Almost nothing of his original dream for EPCOT (some of the echoes of EPCOT survive in Disney's planned town, Celebration) remains, except an architectural model hidden from most visitors in a Tomorrowland train tunnel.

Disney's lost dream was a heartbreaker, though. Modern Orlando is now an astonishing, uniquely American world or collection of disparate and disjointed worlds, a place that Disney spawned but would neither recognize nor approve of. Technology -- visions, representations, manifestations -- are at its heart.

There, technology is on display in all sorts of remarkable forms. There's no Tomorrow in Tomorrowland, for example. Disney's notion of the Space Age as the next big thing in technology fizzled. He never imagined anything like the Internet.

The Space Age died and now Tomorrowland is being revamped at great expense along the lines suggested by Jules Verne, a futurist from the past. The walkways, trams and intergalactic spaceways Disney believed would be part of 21st century life never got out of the park.

It seems to me that one of the things that drove Disney, and drew so many millions of people to the things he built was his idea of technology as a way of imagining the past and the future. His life and work, in fact, embody Florman's notion of the tragic view of technology.

Samuel Florman had this idea: technology was neither good nor evil, but inherently tragic. "I suggest that an appropriate response to our new wisdom is neither optimism nor pessimism, but rather the espousal of an attitude that has traditionally been associated with men and women of noble character -- the tragic view of life."

Tragedy, Florman wrote, is uplifting. It depicts heroes wrestling with fate, struggling to improve the world. It also reflects another inherent human trait -- messing the world up.

"We simply cannot make use of coal without killing miners and polluting the air. Neither can we manufacture solar panels without worker fatalities and environmental degradation."

Florman was onto something, and I think his theories are best reflected and captured in Orlando, in the place fathered by Disney's failed dreams and mangled visions. So I'm on my way: your thoughts, insights, responses, criticisms and ideas are welcome.

Specifically, I'm interested not in Orlando itself, but in this tragic view of technology -- the idea that it represents the best and worst in humanity almost simultaneously -- as it plays out in Orlando, not only in Disney World but in the network of parks and rendered worlds from Sea World to Universal Studios: in visions of technology and the future, in the ways in which technology captures the imagination. I'll be filing reports from Orlando to Slashdot in the next week or so. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I don't know if this idea is a book or not -- I hope it is -- but at the very least, it promises to be a great conversation.

Comments

"Open Source" huh?

[konstant]

As I interpret the phrase "open source" when applied to writing, all of us would be able to reproduce, modify, and re-release the product of Katz's labor. We could submit or remove chapters, sell individual paragraphs, or scoop Barnes and Noble by copying the text off an FTP site (where it will be freely available) and reselling print copies with no royalties going to Jonathan Katz.

I strongly suspect this is not what Katz means. Rather, his hope seems to be that we supply him with our ideas, as moderated by his target audience to "Interesting" and "Insightful" levels, he farms those ideas and tosses in a few adverbs as relish, and then he becomes wealthy. If his book is not copyrighted, I will eat my shoe.

Open source writing might very well work for a topic that is highly technical and an author who is highly altruistic. I question whether this book (which may nonetheless be very interesting) fits those criteria.

-konstant

What makes a tragedy?

[Mr. Slippery]

What does it take for a story to be tragedy?

If I recall my English lit classes, the tragic hero has some sort of tragic flaw. Often it's hubris (Macbeth's belief in his right to rule and his invulnerability), or ignorance (a simple DNA test could have saved Oedipus so much trouble).

Capek's R.U.R. might be the best literary example of techno-tragedy; humanity's downfall is a combination of hubris (believing it can create life better than God or Nature) and ignorance of the consequences of it's invention.

Maybe that's what makes for techno-tragedy - pride made dangerous by ignorance. "Look!" says Man "I have invented refrigeration! Food and medicinces can be preserved! Hot buildings can be made comfortable! Isn't this wonderful!" And it is wonderful - but meanwhile, unknown to him, his refrigerant is eating away the ozone layer that shields him from ultraviolet rays.

Maybe it's technophile hubris to think that the human condition can be fundamentally improved by technology - "we cannot get grace from gadgets," as someone once put it. But on the other hand, we are now developing the technologies that can change what it is to be human - genetic engineering, bio- and nano-tech, cybernetics, things that will not lead to incremental change in the human condition but quite possibly to the end of humanity as we know it.

Maybe we'll just destroy ourselves; but maybe we'll just break out of the chyrsalis and become something more than what we are. Remember that birth to the butterfly looks like death to the catepillar.

The end of our story with technology isn't written yet - it remains to be seen whether it is tragedy, comedy, or romance.

Re:forget technology - look at the root problems

[jalefkowit]

Technology isn't good or evil, it just exists. People create things and solve problems, and technology is both the solution to problems, and the source of new ones. To ascribe words like good or evil or tragic to technology is to ignore the problem that we are trying to address in making technology.

You're missing the point. Though he may not realize it, Katz isn't talking about small-t technology, he's talking about big-T Technology, which I would argue is a way of looking at the world rather than any specific invention.

Think of it this way. A longer-lasting light bulb is small-t technology. It is morally neutral. Now, say that society looks at this light bulb and decides that, since it lasts longer, the whole problem of 'night' has been solved -- now you can keep your factories running 24 hours a day. This is Technology, and it is most certainly not morally neutral -- it has its good elements (higher productivity, more jobs) and its bad (stress on families from working odd hours, fatigue from people disconnecting from the natural rhythms of the day/night cycle), but it's not neutral. The light bulb is, the presumption that technical innovation equals social progress is not.

Another example -- if the modern USA is a Technological society, the former USSR was an Ideological society. That is, the common assumption was that society and progress were driven by strict adherence to ideology. Now the small-i term "ideology" encompasses everything from Libertarianism to Fascism, but big-I Ideology is about people filtering all their experiences through the prism of whatever their ideology is -- just like we, more and more, filter our experiences through the technology that we surround ourselves with.

Now look at the Tomorrowland that Katz is talking about. The old-style Tomorrowland is a shrine to the Technological outlook: a world in which everyone is thrifty, brave, and clean simply because they ride zippy monorails to work and have fusion-powered dishwashers in their kitchen. This is Technology at its ridiculous extreme -- assuming that the more small-t tech we accumulate, the more virtuous we will be. Of course, real life is much messier than that; people are people, and no amount of George Jetson streamlining can round the jagged edges off of human nature.

That's the tragedy of Technology -- that we persist in assuming that it will somehow save us from the unpleasantness of ourselves. Of course it won't. But like the Russians, who gave up their Ideological outlook only when it had completely worn out their society, we'll probably have to discover this for ourselves, the hard way.

-- Jason A. Lefkowitz