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Report from Orlando: The Lost City of Epcot
"There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them." ----J.D. Bernal, "The World, the Flesh and the Devil."
Others might have their own, perfectly good nominations, but my candidate for the saddest site in contemporary technology would be a wood-and- papier mache model that sits in a darkened a tunnel in a distant corner of Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World.If the tragic view of technology has a locus, this could be it.
To see this forgotten vision of the "Model City of Tomorrow," you have to go to the Magic Kingdom, to the Tomorrowland Transit Authority.
There is, of course, no Tomorrow in Tomorrowland, and there hasn't been any for years. Disney and his fabled Imagineers hitched this particular wagon to the Space Age, which died unaccountably some years after Disney himself in 1964.
Brilliant as he was, Disney never foresaw or imagined the Net, the Web or the Digital Age. The farthest he got in imagining networked computing were voice-activated stoves and other household appliances in his beloved "Carousel of Progress, " an attraction-in-the-round that was his personal passion, and which made its debut at the l964 New York World's Fair. It resides today, uncomfortably, in the farthest corner of Tomorrowland.
In California and in Florida, Disney's Tomorrowlands were always the most barren and joyless sections in his theme parks. Disney, in fact, personified the notion of nostalgia for the future. He was a genius at using technology to invoke the past, but like so many technologists before him, never quite accepted that the future was inherently unpredictable, beyond even his imaginative reach. He was so successful at rendering the imagined worlds of yesterday, it didn't occur to him how steadfastly technology refuses to do what it's supposed to.
As a consequence, Tomorrowland always lacked the imagination of Fantasyland, the corn-fed patriotism of Frontierland or the shameless corporate puffery of Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow), in which the future and its technologies are leased and monopolized by giant companies.
It's impossible to know exactly what Disney would have made of Epcot as it took shape after his death, but the model in the tunnel gives us some clues, and the people who have studied his life bet he would have gotten some dynamite and taken Epcot down, one corporate showcase after another.
Tomorrowland is centered around 1950's ideas of space travel and their accompanying intergalactic blabber: Astro-Orbiters, ("paging Mr. Morrow. Mr. Tom Morrow. Your party from Mars is waiting"), the Carousel (more about that later) and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority .
The people running Walt Disney World seemed to have grasped the hollowness of this corner of Disney World, and are spending tens of millions of dollars to re-vamp it. They still don't see the Net as fun to ride, or even to invoke. It is conspicuously missing from the re-engineering of the future.
Maybe Disney's successors learned from his mistake, and decided to play it safe. The vision of the future taking shape in Tomorrowland is based not on the future, but on the past - a Jules Verne décor with a hodge-podge of unfocused rides, exhibits and hi-tech talking robots.
For now, at least, you can ride a couple of minutes on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority train, as it curls around and over Cosmic Ray's Café and past Disney's model community of the future.
But you better go soon: some Slashdot friends and e-mailers who work for Disney say the old model is going to be removed as the renovation advances.
And maybe it should be. It doesn't really belong there.
The Tomorrowland train is not actually a train, but another of Disney's fabled "wonders" - an electric, silent, environmentally clean "People Mover." Disney hoped the idea would spread, like his Monorail, and would end up ferrying people around crowded urban cores. But just like his Monorail, it never got out of Tomorrowland.
After a few twists and turns, the people mover rushes into a tunnel, then turns abruptly, and this startling model of a city suddenly pops into view on the side of the car, depending on where you're sitting.
If you're not looking for it, or facing the direction, or sitting on the right side, you can miss it completely, mistaking it for another one of the aging, cheesy inter-galactic displays (the woman of the future sitting in a hi-tech hair curler) that the train glides past.
On almost every level - visually and conceptually -- the model comes as a shock, popping up out of nowhere, whizzing by, completely out of character and context. It's behind a glass partition and it's huge - about 15 feet deep and perhaps 20 feet long.
I'd first seen the model a couple of years ago, writing about technology and Orlando for the website Hotwired. While there, I met a group of hackers obsessed with hacking the Magic Kingdom, and who collect and trade Disney techno-lore all year.
They tipped me to this model, whose existence is referred to in a few of the countless Disney biographies, and is known to many geeks and techno-addicts.
The model was evocative from the first, but especially so in the context of the tragic view of technology, a philosophy first advanced by the civil engineer, teacher and writer Samuel Florman, published in the Bicentennial issue of House & Garden in l976 and perhaps more relevant now than ever.
Florman wrote that technology was closely linked to life, and that people of noble character had an essentially tragic view of life. Tragedy, he wrote, is uplifting, depicting as it does heroes wrestling with fate.
The tragic view of technology, according to Florman, is the only one that makes any sense, the one that provides an umbrella philosophy, a helpful way to look at technology, perhaps the single most controversial subject in a muddled and divided world.
Florman didn't mean that technology was tragic in the pessimistic or disapproving sense. But when it comes to technology, the past century has seen plenty of hopes dashed. Technology represents both the human desire to improve the world, and the persistent human tendency to muck it up.
The tragic view of philosophy calls not for gloom, but for maturity, not pessimism but detachment and caution. The fate of most tragic heroes, Florman wrote, is hubris, or "overweening pride." Hubris isn't a weakness, but an essential ingredient of humanity's greatness. It's what inspires people to confront the universe, improve the world.
The tragic view, he wrote, doesn't shrink from paradox; it teaches us to live with ambiguity, technology's partner. Without effort and daring, we are nothing. But even with it, we are as likely to fail. Most of our disappointments with technology come when decent people are trying to act constructively - not the war of good with evil as the war of good with good.
If any public figure of the 20th century embodied this tragic view of technology, it was the compulsive, even fanatic techno-dreamer Walt Disney, whose hubris became an influential global economic, cultural and political force.
At the end of his life, according to biographers Steven Watts and Leonard Mosley, nothing mattered to him but building Epcot - the model city of the future built on the latest technology. To build a city of tomorrow, wrote Mosley in "Disney's World", that would be the last great challenge.
He didn't succeed.
Even if you are looking for the model, the train curves away so quickly you never get more than a glimpse. Even a fast look makes clear the thought and design that went into its construction.
It took me a dozen train rides just to pick up the announcer's taped words:
"The retro-metro historical society proudly presents Walt Disney's 20th Century model of the future! He dared to dream the perfect place to live, work and play."
It's a powerful kick just to see it. It has a hallowed, even reverential feel, like some sort of shrine or historic artifact. It was definitely a lost city.
Disney worked on this model for years, declared to friends and reporters that Epcot was the most important project of his life, the most important element in Disney World, the monument he meant to leave behind. He meant for Disney workers to live there, and for a Epcot to be a shrine to his nearly boundless faith in the power of technology to shape a better world.
But his successors had different visions. Disney's death coincided with the rise of corporatism, when idiosyncratic dreams of the future and fantasies about technology didn't sit well with stockholders and Wall Street analysts, and no single individual in any public corporate entity had the power to bull projects through the way Walt Disney did.
The company scrapped his plans and turned Epcot instead into a corporate World's Fair. Companies from Kodak to Exxon and American Express, which sponsors "The American Experience", host pavilions that presume to spell out the future and promote an indescribable global mix of capitalism, technology and a squishy brand of humanism.
The showcase of nations - a collection of distinctly-designed pavilions that sell the food and gew-gaws of various encircle around a man-made lagoon -- suggests a political idea so vague as to be safe and reassuring; If we can buy one other's toys, postcards, falafel and dim sum, we can find peace and celebrate the future hand in hand.
After Disney died - he never saw Disney World - the Epcot model was hidden away in the Tomorrowland tunnel, where it's languished for decades. Its positioning is clearly an afterthought, as if Disney executives didn't dare either to throw it away or display it. It's about as far from Epcot - its logical home - as it could be and still be on Disney World grounds.
But the model bears no resemblance to Epcot in any conceivable way. Disney, mythology has it, anticipated as much.
There are stories and rumors that he was so convinced his successors would mess up Epcot that he planned to use cryogenics to have his body frozen. Then, company myth has it, he would return and wreak havoc on the corporatists drooling over his demise. Disney execs better pray he isn't thawing.
This history makes the model all the more eerie.
Disney's original Epcot is a sprawling, roomy place with a distinct but small urban core.
There are four tall buildings in a small downtown, surrounded by lower structures that might be apartment houses, shops or office complexes.
An amusement park's tiny ferris wheel is visible off to the left, some sort of church-like religious structure in the forefront. In between are rail tracks, parks (Disney had all sorts of plans for submerged rail systems and highways), roads and housing.
One of Disney's many quirks was that even though he wrapped himself in Americanism and the flag, he was dubious about representative democracy and non-conformist individual expression.
His plan was that Epcot would be run by Imagineers and Disney executives, not elected representatives. He probably feared that the all-too-human inhabitants would ruin his technology.
Whatever one thinks about Disney and the things he did, it's hard not to be touched by what he wanted to do.
"For all our apprehensions," wrote Florman about technology in his House & Garden essay "we have no choice but to press ahead. We must do so, first, in the name of compassion. By turning our backs on technological change, we would be expressing our satisfaction with current world levels of hunger, disease and privation. Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. Without experimentation and change our existence would be a dull business. We simply cannot stop while there are masses to feed and diseases to conquer, seas to explore and heavens to survey."
Here's a (rough) picture of the model
http://www.spacey.net/ts haw/Images/Epcot/OriginalEpcot.gif
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
Anyone interested in this subject should check out http://www.waltopia.com/
I think Katz makes some interesting observations about EPCOT, and Disney in general.
;) Under these displays were old TVs, showing looped tapes of Walt Disney's Tomorrowland TV specials -- where Uncle Walt would show us how we'd get to orbit as easily as we got to Grandma's place in Florida.
:)
;) (For those of you watching the movie, that would be the "Floating Hairbrush" scene...)
I'm no Disney apologist (the Mouse in its current incarnation is a pseudo-fascist front, I'm convinced), but in Walt's time, his visions (and the visions of others he sprinkled throughout the Disney parks and legend) stirred the imagination of a lot of people.
I used to work in a space museum, and couldn't spend a day without walking past huge enlargements of old 1950s Collier's covers, all garish Technicolor visions of a spacefaring society. Round trip tickets to Mars and weekends in low Earth orbit seemed only a decade away.
This, for all intents and purposes, WAS Tomorrow(tm), according to popular culture. Wearable wireless internet appliances, nifty end-all-be-all PDAs, and a universally wired society are OUR Tomorrow(tm), if anyone reads certain modern garish rags *ahem*.
So Walt didn't see it coming. Good. If he saw that coming, and his corporate crony types had followed up, our computer mice would have big black ears right about now.
EPCOT will never be what Walt Disney intended it to be -- another experiment in Utopia. His successors are trying it out down in Celebration, FL (see also, Stepford). Every generation thinks they'll finally get it right. Every generation fails. That's how it works. So EPCOT would have been run by Imagineers and executives, big deal. You'd choose to live there, just as we choose to live in apartment complexes, condos, and other "planned" communities, or cooperative buildings, or Celebration -- following the myriad rules and regulations. Happens every day.
But EPCOT, in its eventual form, was a showcase for the little geek in me as a kid. So I can't complain too loudly.
Our reach exceeds our grasp. Count on it. Our visions and plans for the future never work out the way we plan them. Is that anyone's fault? Not really. In EPCOT's case, we'll blame the suits. I'm still pissed that we're not living in LEO yet.
We can't blame the suits forever. It's fun for a while, but sooner or later, we've got to do some changing for ourselves.
Almost off-topic, does anyone else remember how Arthur C. Clarke wrote in the 2001 novel about how Dave Bowman's mom lived in a nursing home in EPCOT, Florida?
A human being is the best computer available...the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. - Wernher v
Is anyone else here reminded of "The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson (shortstory in Mirrorshades)?
I think Katz' argument is interesting - that there's something noble and tragic in the story of Disney.
However, a very different argument has already been made by Gibson. Katz writes:
Gibson proposes fascism is inherent in that view of technology - in that romance of technology. He wasn't looking at Disney, but at Hugo Gernsback and contemporaries. Gibson wrote, through late 20th century eyes, of what the idealized future of "The Gernsback Continuum" looked like, and it was wholesome, squeeky-clean and fascist to the core.
This story is also an explanation of why Cyberpunk happened to science fiction. (That's why it's in the front of the anthology.) That utopian view of the future was so politically naive and inhumane, that younger writers were loathe to embrace it. Dystopia was an antitode to the sugared poison of a "utopia" of an efficient tyranny.
Katz is advised to take this under consideration.
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-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Brilliant as he was, Disney never foresaw or imagined the Net, the Web or the Digital Age.
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