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.