The Imagineer Who Came In From The Cold

Thanks to the many geeks and nerds who answered my SOS the other day about how to use Orlando as a way to write about technology and the future. One of the many standout e-mails was from a genuine Disney Imagineer, with whom I had a clandestine and revealing meeting last night on a deserted EPCOT bench. This was only one of several mystical and powerful encounters with pilgrims flocking to the world's new techno-mecca. Next: Disney's Carousel of Progress and the lost model of his dream city of tomorrow.

"Why is it that the philosophy of technology has never really gotten underway? Why has a culture so firmly based on countless philosophical instruments, techniques, and systems remained so steadfast in its reluctance to examine its own foundations?" -- Langdon Winner.

ORLANDO -- Good question, one I'm trying to answer in a magazine article, and if that pans out, maybe a book. I came to Orlando because I couldn't imagine a better place to look. I asked for help on Slashdot the other day and got a great outpouring of help, links, ideas, questions (including a lunch invitation from a local Linux group) and a striking e-mail from a man who identified himself as a genuine gee-whiz Disney Imagineer.

Even by the reckonings of my own spectacular relationship with technology, this encounter was odd: a genuine, in-the-flesh Imagineer working (for the moment) in Orlando, who is a fanatic Linux geek and regular Slashdot reader. The Net is a world of surprises.

The Imagineer had e-mailed me after I posting my column asking for help in what I consider an open source writing experiment. The Imagineer reeled off the details of an impressive career. He is responsible for some pretty impressive stuff, none of which I can describe.

"Why Linux?" I couldn't help asking. "I'm bored with everything else," he e-mailed. This, I well understand by now, is an enduring geek strain: the eternal fight to fend off boredom.

The Imagineer loved talking about technology, he said, but he was sure I understood that The Mouse was "touchy" about unauthorized encounters with journalists. And yes, they did seem to know almost everything that went on in their world. He needed a promise of strict confidentiality.

So we met in the best clandestine manner - on a concrete bench halfway between Exxon's "Universe Of Energy" and the closed "Horizons" pavilion. The only people going by were the kids on their way to the "GM Test Track," and they couldn't have cared less about a couple of middle-aged men sitting on a bench trading official secrets. Strange, Enya-like New Age music poured from a cactus.

The Imagineer recognized me, as we had arranged, from my fading Yankees baseball cap. I spotted him by his ... well, I can't say how I spotted him.

The meeting reminded me of one of those scenes in the LeCarre Cold War thrillers where spies gathered across from "Checkpoint Charlie" and at other secret rendezvous' in pre-90's Berlin. The scene was strange to begin with: uplifting Millenial music, as many wheelchairs as strollers, and hundreds of each; Monorails whispering overhead, cars roaring froma nearby test track; a babble of diverse races, nationalities and origins. The space had the feel of a 50's vision of an Intergalactic space station. Nowhere is nostalgia for the future more evident than here.

So there we were, sitting across a manicured, empty stretch of EPCOT center, munching strawberry fruit bars, gassing happily back and forth about books we'd read and ideas we'd heard, disturbed only by a lengthy column of electric wheelchairs with flashing lights and red flags carrying the inhabitants of a Kissimmee, Fla. nursing home. They'd made a wrong term, the group leader advised us: they were seeking the World Of Imagination.

The Imagineer politely pointed across the vast concrete plaza, around the flood-lit spouting and dancing fountain. Then, for the third time, he went over the ground rules again: he would talk with me, but I couldn't describe him or his work in any way, and he wouldn't talk about Disney or its work in any detailed way.

This was okay with me, as I don't want to write about Disney World, the Disney Corporation or its inner workings. Writing about Disney is like writing about Microsoft - everybody has intense feelings, and they've been expressed so long and so often there's almost nothing new to add. But as for Walt himself, that's another story.

I assured The Imagineer that I wanted to write about technology, and to some degree, Disney's original visions of technology, especially trying to come up with the missing philosophy about the subject that people could use, maybe even desperately want.

"Walt Disney would have had a philosophy. He was a complete geek," said the Imagineer. "He just had this oh-mi-gosh quality about anything to do with technology. He especially got the hold technology has on people's imaginations, even though he hasn't fared all that well in history," the Imagineer added. If I wanted to see what he meant, he said, get on over to Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom and check out the "Carousel Of Progress." He said it was Walt's favorite exhibit. Disney had unveiled it at the 1964 World's Fair, and brought it to Disney World. It was the perfect expression of his view of technology. I said I'd check it out.

Disney has, in fact, suffered in the decades after his death, branded a middle-brow shlock-meister, mass-manufacturer of kitsch and junk, and a mean-spirited bigot and lousy employer.

"He died before he could complete some of his most beloved projects, and the company is so big it's disturbing to people, although there are many echoes of the original spirit. Lots of us work here because it's the best place for people like us to work. Where else would you go if you loved technology? But when it came to technology, no one could touch Disney, and no one ever really has. From animation to architecture, movies and design, he understood the beauty and power of technology at its purest; that's why all of these people come here from all over the world.

"Some of them literally have to crawl here, and lots of them spend every penny they have to get here. But nobody makes them. This is the place they want to be, no matter what the intellectuals say. Disney saw technology as something that could render imagined worlds. These worlds varied wildly, but at the core, he believed technology could fix the world, save it, solve it's problems.

"These parks are all rendered worlds. They use technology to invoke visions, past and future. Maybe it was naïve, but it was profoundly moral on Disney's part, maybe his most profoundly moral part. He thought EPCOT could light the way for the world. Now, there's a lot of blabber here about pan-global humanism and all, which everybody understands is about money, not brotherhood."

"Disney was a businessman, but not when it came to EPCOT. That was from the heart, at least his original idea for it, and that vision is still everywhere here, and in a lot of other places, if you know how to look for it."

And you do have to look for it. When Walt Disney announced his plans for Disney World in the mid-60's, he promise it would be more than an "entertainment complex." Most important, he told his friends, was a planned city of the future, a place where Disney employees could live, a real town that included commercial and residential areas, a thousand-acre industrial park, and a highly sophisticated transportation system. He died before this city - he called it EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) could be built, and it was transformed by his successors into the corporate techno- World's Fair it is now.

Disney said his experiment - he sounds like Steve Jobs talking about Apple - was "the most exciting and by far the most important part of our Florida project, in fact the heart of everything we are doing in Disney World."

But not for long.

The Imagineer talked about how unbelievably important the Web was becoming, how it had exploded ("we didn't imagine it, none of us, not for a second") Silicon Valley, Microsoft, and about the difference between Gates and Disney, mostly in terms of their visions of technology (Gates didn't fare too well. "Walt Disney was a visionary. Bill Gates makes software.")

He talked about Linux and open source, and about hand-held computers and wireless modems, and about the explosion in "dot.coms" and "junk appliances." He was smart and funny, nothing like the Imagineer of my imagination, in a white smock with butterflies coming out of his ears.

I pointed out my surprise that EPCOT didn't yet reflect the Digital Age. Other than a mention or two at the AT&T pavillion, and some jazzy interactive exhibits for kids, the network barely came up at all. Was EPCOT being overtaken by technology in the same way Tomorrowland was left without any "Tomorrow" when the Space Age fizzled?

He nodded, and agreed and said that that was understood, and in the process of being corrected.

He repeated that nobody foresaw the explosion of the Web and the stuff around us took a long time to design and build. He talked for awhile about Disney and how Walt would have viewed the Web.

"He would have been obsessed with computing," said the Imagineer. "He would have loved the Net; Good Lord. Every kid who came here would be crawling along a Motherboard. He would have grasped its implications right away."

We talked on that concrete bench for a couple of hours. I was reminded again of what a strange place the Net is. I was talking to a person whose existence I normally wouldn't ever even have known of, let alone gotten the chance to meet through a website.

I was on the right track with my earlier column, the Imagineer said. Technology was inherently tragic. "It's the only way to see it," he said. "At the core, some of us want to improve the world, and people look to us to improve it. No matter how hard we try, we only get so far. We spin our wheels. Unforeseeable things happen. It doesn't ever quite work out the way we expect. That's the first rule. That makes technology heroic and doomed at the same time, which is why it's tragic. Because it serves human beings, and they are tragic. They do horrible things, horrible things happen to them, and they're all going to die."

The Imagineer and I said our goodbyes, and exchanged e-mail addresses, and I walked the length of EPCOT's World Showcase Lagoon, winding between restaurants, stores, food carts, juggler and bands. The circuit reminded me of my talk with the Imagineer. He knew what he was talking about.

Why We Won The Cold War.

The man standing in line next to me waiting to board AT&T's "Spaceship Earth" at the entrance to EPCOT asked me where the line began, and shuffled his nervous wife behind the ropes. It was, he said the first time he'd ever left the Ukraine, and Orlando was the first place he'd always wanted to come.

He looked up at the giant dome, whose roof was sparkling with a giant "2000" sign and various assorted Millenial electric twinkling, and climbed into the moving blue seats that take visitors up on a tour of the history of communications.

In EPCOT, all of humankind's experiences are sponsored by corporations. Communications is brought to you by AT&T (my favorite is "The American Experience," which is brought to us by American Express).

The old Russian and his wife exclaimed repeatedly as the train climbed quickly past Hebrews and Greeks, the invention of fire, papyrus, the printing press, paper and roads, and the destruction of Rome.

"This!," he exclaimed, poking his wife and speaking towards me as we headed down the other. "This is why you won."

I asked him what he meant.

"I don't know how or why, but there's more amazing stuff in this dome than in my whole country," he said. "The Communists just could never do it like Mr. Walt Disney."

The New Thing.

A few minutes later, I found myself standing next to an elderly woman in a wheelchair, as a Parade of trans-global drum- beating puppeteers wound its way around the World Showcase Lagoon. It seemed the worst kind of Millenial Blather - "let's walk hand in hand towards a better world," intoned some remote Orwellian voice that seemed to be - and was, in fact - coming from the trees.

One of the puppeteers maneuvered his 10-feet tall, wooden and cloth, vaguely Asian-like butterfly figure down the parade route. He spotted the woman, who took the puppet's hands and welled with tears.

Surprised and moved by the look on her face, I sat down next to her. She was from Texas. She was frail, and even breathing seemed a struggle for her. I could only guess the toll the trip halfway across country had taken.

I thought of the book I'd bought which had referred to Orlando as the "new mecca, " the world's number one destination.

Maybe they were on to something.

Why had she come to Orlando, I wondered?

"The science, the technology. I'm going blind so I can't get on the computer, but I wanted to see the technology. I think it's here if it's anywhere. I want to see the new things. My mother dropped dead hauling water from a lake in Texas to our house - she had to do it every day, because it was before electric power and the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority). I think often how long she might have lived if they'd had dams. So I told my son I wanted to see what they've done before I die. It's amazing, just amazing?"

In his book "The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology," Langdon Winner puzzled over why, in a culture riddled with ideologies and philosophies, there wasn't one for technology. In the United States, he wrote, we are a culture of technological somnambulists.

Samuel Florman, the civil engineer, wrote that there was, in fact, a philosophy of technology, and it was inherently tragic - technology represents the best of the human desire to understand and improve the world, and the relentless tendency of humankind to screw the world up. If we really grasp this and apply it, then we can perhaps relax a bit about whether technology is a good or bad witch. It's both, always.

That was the only way, Florman believed, that one could possibly come to terms with technics in a society literally engulfed by technology, but riddled with passionate moral and other disagreements about it.

From the 1939 World's Fair well beyond World War II, technology and engineering were golden - the country loved all of its new conveniences and wonders, from electric power to TV and cars, to toasters and the Space Age.

But the 60s ended America's unambivalent love of technology. Intellectuals in particular began blaming technology for ruining the environment, threatening catastrophic conflict and destroying classical culture and civilization.

Many have hated technology ever since, along with a broad and growing array of allies: nervous Boomer parents, exploitive politicians, unknowing journalists, professional religious fanatics and political moralists.

But the tragic view of technology eliminates this silly argument. It holds that while there is plenty of evil in the world, the essentially tragic fact is not so much the war of good with evil as the war of good with good. If anything, Disney's dreams and Utopian fantasies seem to support that idea.

Among other things, Orlando - at least the theme park part of it -- is a testament to the fact that these elites are, as they've always been, disconnected from the masses of people they profess to serve. The stream of people who come to Orlando dearly love, even worship, technology and - just like the Imagineer said - flock at all costs across great distances to get just a glimpse of the imagined worlds on display.

Next: Walt's Carousel of Progress and his lost model of the city of tomorrow.

Comments

The question - in part - answers itself

[ZamZ]

Science and technology are an accumulation of our current understanding of the world and their existance/creation changes that understanding. As such they cannot exist within a philosophy. We can only attempt to comprehend the impact of change on our current society and at that only in wide terms with a philosophy that accounts for our current society and extrapolates. This is the limit of the philosohpical scope of any realist.

What would be the constituent parts of a technological philsophy? Morals, laws, human relations, captial relations? All of these are changed by technology.

What I am saying at heart is that our philosophy, our institutions, our society can all only follow what technology does. We can attempt to apply current social values to new technology but that is vanity and folly. If there is any enduring 'philsophy' we can apply it boils down to one phrase - The dynamic of change.

Z@mzm1.demon.nl

Now how fair is that?

[konstant]

"Walt Disney was a visionary. Bill Gates makes software."

A perspective I can already see echoed in that nebulous 'article and maybe a book' Katz is talking about. But how fair is it really? Was Disney really a starry-eyed big kid who would've used Linux to run his MP3's if only both had been invented at the time? Was Gates really a snide poser whose vision of shoddy upgrade-driven software and world domination crystallized at the age of 3?

If we judge both men by their actions, we see they are remarkably similar. Disney did not invent the cartoon, nor the amusement park, nor the notion of breathless technofairs that cozen corn-hucking families of four in a glittering tin foil vision of the future. But Disney did formulate the concept that these familiar sideshows could be brought together for the common man, in one place by one company. To judge him purely by his actions, Disney believed in the common spark of delight, and he wasn't above turning that ageless need for pleasure into a buck or two for himself.

How does Gates really differ? The Imagineer wasn't entirely wrong: Gates makes software. That, and that alone, is the significant difference between Disney and Gates. Disney recognized the golden possibilities in bringing cartoons and technology into the average home. Gates realized the seas of green to be made bringing computers to Everyman's den, and fabricating software that Everyman would want to use.

We readily accept the statement above from the "Imagineer" because we work in the computer industry, and so we inherit a memory of the time when Gates clawed his way to the top. We remember that there were others who shared Gates vision, and others who could have just as easily assumed that monopolistic throne. So we give Gates no credit at all. He was one face in the crowd, distinguishable only by a pair of goofy glasses, a bad haircut, and a signed IBM contract stuffed in next to his pocket protector.

Disney worked in entertainment, and most of us are unfamiliar with that world. We accept readily, at face value, the claim that he was original and that he was first. The notion that he was a titan with unheard-of ideas seems reasonable to us within our limited sphere of experience. But ideas, great ideas, are always "in the air". From evolution to calculus, from airplanes to money itself, the ideas that transform society have only rarely been the original fruit of one brain. Did Disney pen the first cartoon? No. Did he tighten the screws personally on the first carnival ride? No. Did he hold the first bonanza of Future Tech. No. What he did, and what Gates did, was realize that there was money to be made in the combination of many elements that already existed around him. They were opportunists, both of them. They were also original thinkers. To suggest otherwise, whatever your personal hatred for Gates or Disney, is spiteful.

-konstant