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The Timekeeper
-- H.G. Wells, "The Time Machine."
At this time and this point in the evolution of technology, it's probably never been more important to consider the future clearly and ethically. The evolution and advance of powerful new technologies - genetic, digital, AI, nano - are inevitable. They represent the best tendency of human beings to attempt to master life's secrets and curb human suffering. If you believe in history at all, however, they will not work quite as we expect or hope.
War and poverty were supposed to have long ago been eliminated. So were slums, poverty and disease. A century ago, one historian wrote that the age of conquest was about to yield to "an age of glory and enlightenment. Aluminum will be the shining symbol of that age. The houses and cities of men, built of aluminum, shall flash in the rising sun with surpassing brilliance."
Today we use aluminum for soda cans.
All these years later, we're still hearing Future Hype. Artificially intelligent machines will soon pass us in intelligence; nanites will zip through the human body to repair damaged blood cells; supercomputers and computer networks will transform politics and commerce; genome projects will isolate the origins of diseases so that we can eliminate them.
We'll see. I have the nagging feeling that when the next Millenium rolls around they'll probably be jeering at us too.
There's no more fitting place to grasp America's tortured relationship with technology and the future than an exhibit called "The Timekeeper," in the heart of Tomorrowland in Disney World.
Orlando is as close to a universal experience as Americans have. More of us go there in our lifetimes than any other single place. Some visitors want to have fun, to take their kids. Others are drawn by the astonishing technology and innovation that goes into its imagined worlds.
Orlando transcends entertainment. There's plenty of politics and propaganda there, too, especially when it comes to technology. The Disney Imagineers have cheerfully pillaged the past to invoke a bright and shining tomorrow. Small wonder Americans have no coherent philosophy of technology.
"The Timekeeper" is a monument - a shrine maybe - to the way we struggle with the future, and to the death of a kind of corporate idealism, generosity and imagination no longer possible in the contemporary world - where corporatism seeks not only to control technology but to rewrite the past in order to shape the way we view the future.
The Millenium may technically be a year away, but socially, culturally and politically, it's here. We've already entered an era in which marketers and venture capitalists have much more to do with shaping technology and the future than inventors, visionaries, politicians or educators.
The battles of the 21st Century - individual humans versus greed and bigness - are underway, from protests in Seattle to the Microsoft wars to the evolution of Linux to legal battles over DVD's and MP3's.
Increasingly, technology is the battleground. In small, symbolic but powerful ways, this battle's roots and stakes are visible all over Orlando.
"The Timekeeper" is literally the first thing you encounter when entering Tomorrowland and perhaps the most subtly ideological exhibit in Disney World.
Inside, visitors meet an audio-animatronic robot, also called the Timekeeper (narrated by Robin Williams) who takes them back to the Paris Exposition at the turn of the century, where H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are meeting - warily - for the first time.
The auditorium is actually a diorama surrounded by giant cinema screens; pictures envelop the audience. The Timekeeper character manipulates an iron time machine, whose obvious inspiration is Wells' first novel, "The Time Machine," in which a Victorian Time Traveler creates a machine that takes him 800,000 years into the future, to a bitterly-divided and horrifying world.
"The Time Machine" is one of the most famous works of science fiction ever published, even though Verne is often considered a more prescient author than Wells.
The truth is that neither saw the future very clearly, and the work of both underscores the hubris of people who think they know how technology will evolve. The only thing predictable about technology over the centuries is that it isn't predictable.
Verne's most successful forecasts were Captain Nemo's submarine in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea" and the Baltimore Gun Club's mission to the moon in "From The Earth To The Moon." Wells described a color television displaying remote events instantaneously, and airplanes flying from London to America in two hours.
But neither writer really conceived what twentieth-century life would be like: the dominance of the car, the spread of telecommunications, the advent of the Internet and personal computers, the disappearance of European empires, the scope and savagery of modern warfare, the Holocaust, the Nuclear Age.
Disney's version of The Timekeeper, however, is an entirely sunny one. For obvious reasons, corporatists dread losing control of visions of the future, since somebody might actually start considering who owns technology, who ought (or ought not) to control it, how freely it will be distributed and who should profit. This isn't a problem in Orlando. There, Imagination is brought to you by Kodak; Innovation is presented by IBM, and the American Experience itself comes courtesy of American Express.
By accident, the Disney Timekeeper brings Verne into his future, our present, where he joyously discovers cars, planes, cities and space travel. Verne nearly gets run over in Paris and almost falls out of a helicopter, but that hardly diminishes his rapture at finally encountering the future.
The last thing the audience sees is Verne and Wells happily sailing off together in a Wells-designed spaceship, towards a dazzlingly futuristic city of the kind Disney once hoped to construct on the grounds of Walt Disney World.
How very Disney. Verne even exclaims at one point of his trip, "So it's true. If it can be conceived, it can be built!" - an unmistakeable echo of Disney's and his Imagineers' theme, "If you can dream it, you can build it!" Nothing this Verne sees in the future - the world's problems seemed to have vanished - disturbs or troubles him, or even makes him think much.
But there are lots of ways to regard the future. The Time Traveler's journey back through time in Wells' disturbing novel was a very different trip than the one in Tomorrowland. It was a nightmare, not a celebration.
Wells was one of the first writers to place his characters in the context of science and technological evolution. "The Time Machine" was a blistering attack on the British class system, on the fact that the haves were using science and technology to create a superior class at the expense of the have-nots.
This idea is eerily relevant in the age of widening gaps between the technologically - equipped and those left behind. Wells fictionally portrayed the human species as a deeply flawed biological experiment, sure to ultimately fail because of internal weaknesses even if it didn't succumb to external disasters. Some of the history of the Twentieth century has reinforced his ideas. His novel, unlike Tomorrowland's happy roller-coaster ride, ends on a note of melancholy and reflection.
At the end of Wells' "The Time Machine," the sorrowful narrator wonders if the Time Traveler will ever come back. "He, I know - for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made - thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so."
And we have. If the families and tour groups clapping and laughing at Robin William's upbeat narration had heard a rendering of Wells' real vision, most would have run screaming from the room.
One thing Wells got right: at almost the same time that Walt Disney died in the late 60's, the old-fashioned American corporation had begun to fade and something new - something imagined by gloomy futurist writers like him, Orwell and Huxley - came into being. They'd thought the enemy would be oppressive governments and political regimes, but the most despotic political systems of the 20th Century - Nazism, Communism, apartheid - collapsed or were defeated. Corporatism, though, has become a political system unto itself, one of the most powerful forces in the world.
Almost as if his death sounded the signal, Disney's own company, like so many others, was transformed from one man's powerful vision into a global media and entertainment conglomerate with properties and interests too numerous to remember.
As in the grim future envisioned by Huxley and Orwell, the individual feels powerless and helpless against elements that dwarf free choice and spirit and threaten his humanity.
Increasingly, such bigness has become linked with technology, which provides the tools and means for corporatism to expand and dominate, and the economic motive for doing so.
Individuals seem to have little chance against such enormity. Everywhere, they are pressed, losing ground, elbowed aside. The individual dwells in a parallel universe, struggling to sort confusing realities: Times are great; jobs suck. Vast amounts of wealth are generated, but a comparatively small number of people benefit. Life is easier; life is more stressful. We are more connected, we are farther apart. There has never been more freedom, or more people wanting to take it away, sell or control it.
On the eve of the Millenium, it seems only right to honor Wells, the father of science fiction, by noting that his amazing work, his vision of the future that spawned so many others, has been butchered and redone into a big Disneyfield lie fobbed on thousands, even millions, of unsuspecting pilgrims, young and old.
Wells would probably have been the last person to argue that we could or should turn back, though. We have no choice but to keep trying for that brighter tomorrow, even if our fate is to grope, stumble and sometimes fall.
Anyway, Happy New Year. And Happy Millenium.
Come to think of it, the decision about
who to vote for is pretty much like
a visit to KFC.
Do I get the Southern Fried Bush?
Or the Extra Crispy Gore?
...eat the fries...
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
Katz says "...work of both underscores the hubris of people who think they know how technology will evolve. The only thing predictable about technology over the centuries is that it isn't predictable. "
But the observation about corporate power and the diminishing relative power of the individual is well received. Given recent experience, it is probably safe to make one prediction: The future will be increasingly shaped by corporate powers for some time to come.
The average corporate entity has no defined, consistent, or evident ethics, and any attempt to change the nature of the corporate beast internally lands one either in endless mission statement and vision definition meetings (universally derided within corporate culture as roughly on par with being a United Way chairperson -- a sign of being useless), or labels the company as a hippie granola farm or religious cult. Attempts to change corporate culture externally by individuals are generally portrayed as signs of nuttiness or foolish idealism (something Michael Moore tried to change with productions like TV Nation). To be serious about changing unethical corporate behavior, one has to use the clout of connected supplier or vendor corporation using money as leverage, or perhaps the US Department of Justice. A gloomy state of affairs indeed.
The obvious question, here at the end of the millenium, is what to do about it. I don't have much faith that a corporate-power driven future holds much good for me, even though I'm a white male in the top 99.5+% of income worldwide. Not much good at all. For my part I'm trying very hard to make a lot of money, concentrate and contribute it in a manner that maximizes my financial and political power, while trying very hard not to lose my sense of ethics. I may work for big, powerful, sometimes passively benevolent, sometimes actively evil corporations, but I am first and foremost and individual. But it sure as hell is hard not to lose oneself in a corporate culture.
What's your plan for making it ok to look at yourself in the mirror each morning?
I think not...(*poof*)
You're mostly right -- corporate entities have control over people's lives because they abdicate responsibility to those corporations. They do so not because they must, but because it's easier.
It's easier on so many levels it almost defies decription. Do you work with a large corporation to define its job title and description before you take the job, or do you accept the role and work within it? Do you write up your own mortgage agreement, or sign the documents put in front of you? Do you define your needs and buy a vehicle to meet them, or do you select a car that best matches your self-image according to a set of options put forth by a car manufacturer? Do you buy a cheeseburger and drink, or do you buy meal #3 and get the fries anyway?
Of course it would be silly to imply that people have no choice in these matters. One always has a choice. You can be an independent consultant. You can privately finance your house. You can take the bus or ride a bike to work. And you can cook your meals at home, be a vegan, or even grow your own food in the hills and never talk to another person. But the simple reality is that most people choose what's easist in their daily transactions, and that means choosing from a limited set of options defined by a commercial entity.
Does this mean I'm running for the hills? No. And I'll just eat the fries like everyone else. But I do worry that many people become so complacent in their decision-making that they select a president with no more cognitive effort than they select between Southern-Fried or Extra-Crispy. They lose sight of the big picture, and allow themselves to be financially and politically herded. It's important that people maintain a sense of self, a sense of perspective, and an independent sense of ethics against which they can judge the actions of corporate entities (because they're rarely self-regulating and will continue to concentrate financial & political power for the forseeable future), just as a lot of greater minds suggest that one must keep a watchful eye on one's government lest it become oppressive. I'm not even necessarily advocating activism -- just awareness.
I think not...(*poof*)
In Charles Babbage's time, an automated calculating machine that could automatically draw pictures that were perspective correct would have been unthinkably complex. It would have been an immense job.
And, in a sense, it was. It took us 100 years to get there.
Enjoy Quake.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The culture you postulate is partially explored in the film Rollerball. Go rent it.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Well, another man's meat and all that, but... I haven't read Kim Stanley Robinsion, so I can't comment on the implicit comparison between him and JK. I know one thing: I'm a writer, and if anyone ever compares me to Katz, I'll sthcream and sthcream and sthcream!! Seriously, the piece is badly-written, ill-organised, says very little, and what it does say Katz has said before in slightly different words in umpteen previous articles. My guess is he's putting together another book, and is using slashdot to thrash out his "ideas". Since there is no real editorial control here, he gets paid for posting pretty much anything -- and doesn't it show? Of course, this is just my opinion. But, how seriously can you take an AMERICAN who doesn't know that Edgar Allen Poe invented sci fi?
Read "Thoughts From the Furnace" to see exactly how little Rob cares about adverse reaction to Katz. Katz's attitude is the same: anyone who criticizes is a "flamer". There is little the mere users of slashdot can do, other than vote with our browsers so to speak -- but where can we go?
The USSR tried "scientific socialism", distributing wealth and technology to everyone. What notable advances did they produce? That is what you are talking about, of course -- centralized planning. Whether you call it "justice" or "Communism" it's still the same thing.
Corporations and "the market" will do nothing but increase the disparity of wealth unless they have the incentive to do otherwise.
So, corporations won't sell to me, because they want to "increase the disparity of wealth"? And here I thought that all they wanted was to make a buck. I haven't heard of AOL refusing new subscribers, or of Motorola rationing cell phones.
Only the government can give this incentive.
Yes, only the government can take from the producers and give to the parasites. Don't have the money for a computer? Don't bother to work harder, just get the Government to take some money from other people and buy one for you.
You might not like big government, but without it nothing can stop big business.
Let's stop big business. Henry Ford? He's anti-semitic, and he's making huge profits at the expense of the proletariat. Stop him. Westinghouse? Why, they're selling radios, and making addicitive radio programs, too. That's a monopoly. Close 'em down. Texas Insturments? They have the majority of the semiconductor market -- that's not fair to the Peepul.
Look at Communisim, and see what it has produced (~60 million dead under Stalin). Now look at Big Business, and see it has produced:
The cheap & plentiful food that you eat, never farther away than the all-night store nearest you. Your job(unless you work for the government or are on Welfare, two sides of the same coin). Your computer and 'Net connection, the electricity that powers them, the people that developed the hardware that led up to them, clear back to Bell Labs.
But why wait until someone else changes things for you? Why not do it yourself? I'm sure some underprivledged child somewhere needs your computer more than you do -- why don't you give it to him/her? Why not sell your furniture, and donate the proceeds to someone with NO furniture? Why don't you go get a second job, and give the money away to street people? After all, you'd be redistributing corporate wealth.
Or, is all this talk of "a just dirtribution of wealth and technology" something that you want the government to do to other people?
--------------------
Earth first? Oooh, and I was thinking of paying the rent.
I'm heartened to read Jon Katz saying that a careful study of history shows that futurism never quite gets things right. (I hope I'm not misinterpreting him.)
Where's my flying car? Or my city on the moon? What about all the things that were promised by the year 2000 or 1990 or 1980 or whenever? The one lesson I take from all of this is, no one really knows what's going to happen in the future, and we'll probably all have just about the same concerns. Will I be able to pay my bills? Can I raise my kids right? Can I take care of my aging parents?
Maybe the real tragedy of technology is that it's not our savior, no matter how much we like to believe otherwise.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
We'll see. I have the nagging feeling that when the next Millenium rolls around they'll probably be jeering at us too.
Jingoism. That's what Jon's reduced to. These last few articles have all been full of sound and fury, but are ultimately hollow. Take the above line, for example. It's typical, in that at a first, superficial glance it looks like it might say something. But if you ponder for more than a nanosecond, you'll pause, and say to yourself 'hang on'.
How many years after the Wright brothers took off did Voyager photograph the gas giants? How many years after Galileo first saw Jupiter's moons did Hubble give us the Deep Field, possibly the most awe-inspiring photograph of the mil^H^N^H our time?
How many people are alive today, having been cured of -- or at least saved from death by -- illnesses that killed millions a scant fifty years ago?
The population of the earth is over six billion, not because we've suddenly started breeding like rabbits, but because technology has improved our overall standard of living. As Jon said, we still have poverty. But he implies that we lack the technology to deal with it. Not true. Political will and technological wherewithal are radically different things.
I've read my last Katz article until he decides he's got enough for his book, and gets back to writing stuff that's worth reading.
Actually, I might argue that the closest thing to an acid trip without really doing it is a day spend in silence in the Nevada desert just outside of Vegas, followed by an evening return to the lights and greed and excess and sanitized sin of the strip.
Which brings me to the real point. If Katz wants to find the future...and if he wants to find what is the common uniting experience of Americans...and if he wants to stick to the sort of pessimistic prophesizing that we've seen so far...he shouldn't be writing about Orlando.
No, I've seen the future, and the future is Vegas.
Two words: Mary Shelley
The truth is that neither saw the future very clearly, and the work of both underscores the hubris of people who think they know how technology will evolve. The only thing predictable about technology over the centuries is that it isn't predictable.
I was never aware the ability to predict the furture is what makes or breaks the notoriety of an SF writer ....
Moreover, I guess Katz thinks Orwell's 1984 is/was about, well, 1984 ....
Last I checked, an SF writer is there to predict/explore/comment on the potential interaction with humanity and his/her surroundings, with a [key word coming up] SCIENTIFIC pretext ....
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
Orwell never pretended to be writing predictions about the future of technology and civilisation: he was writing allegory about the betrayal of the Revolution by Stalin and his cronies. 1984 is an anagram for 1948 the year in which the events that most disturbed Orwell took place.
By the same token, Wells' time machine was, as Katz notes, "a blistering attack on class structure." It wasn't about predicting the future at all, it was about using the future as a setting for a burleque that lampooned the social order of the day.
Disney, on the other hand, has always taken the tack that they are predicting the future (in fact, this is an occupational hazard of dark-rides and themeparks going back to the Futurama at the 1939 World's Fair).
The disconnect that Katz sees between Wells' novels and Disney's interpretations can be explained by this key difference: prediction is an inevitably goofy exercise that lays bare the predictor's agenda, while allegory is a subtler undertaking.
Like a man once said, "Reading science fiction to learn about science is like reading romance novels to learn about love."
The problem is the arrogance of people in assuming that they have the solution to all the world's problems -- whether the solutions are technological in nature or not.
I mean, sure I'm grateful for the set of circumstances that surround my life (I may complain sometimes, but they could have been so much worse). But things aren't universally "better" for people now than they were X number of years ago. It all depends on who you are and where you happen to be at the time.
And unfortunately, sometimes in "fixing" a problem, we actually manage to make our problems worse. The widespread use of pesticides and antibiotics have caused resistant strains of the stuff we were trying to get rid of to develop, for instance.
There were certainly problems with the 1950s love affair with "progress." I've seen the old videos with DDT being sprayed directly on kids to show how wonderfully safe it supposedly was. (Something that was not very well thought out IMHO.) Now, I see the same people who perpetuate the War On Some Drugs on the one hand throwing Prozac at women and Ritalin at active boys on the other. Is this, honestly, progress? I don't think so, sorry.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Today we use aluminum for soda cans.
And for aluminum siding.
Katz continues to provide views into the Liberal Arts / Mainstream Fiction mindset - where progress is pollution, net improvements are to be judged only by their downside components, and no matter how bad things are you should not try to fix them because you'll only make them worse. It is no surprise that he identifies with the Wells "Time Machine" vision of the future/our present, preferring it to those of Verne or Disney.
But have things really gotten worse, or better? I don't know about you, bunkie, but as I look back over my half-century of life I see an enormous net improvement in quality of life - not just for me, but for humans in general.
And the biggest fly I see in this ointment is government interference in the lives of the people. And one of the most useful tools of the control freaks in power is the distorted mindset that Katz so aptly demonstrates.
There's a distinction between Science Fiction and Mainstream Fiction that corresponds: Science Fiction is the art of the techie, and it has a central theme: If it's useful you can do it. If it's broken you can fix it. Even the cautionary tales are a variant: Be careful, because if you break it THIS way you could break it so bad you CAN'T fix it. But even that is upbeat, because it assumes the power and decision-making is in the reader's responsiblehands. Mainstream fiction, on the other hand, is art for the serfs: It's all going to hell. But don't try to change it, or you'll make it worse. Just be thankful you're not going to hell as fast as those other people. (But while you're going to hell, you might as well try to spike the wheels of anybody who's trying to fix things. After all, if they do manage to change anything they'll just get you to hell faster.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
His emphasis is a little off, in seeing the world as divided between the technology haves and technology have-nots. Actually the distinction is much older --- the difference between the haves and the have-nots themselves. Technology merely reinforces the old divides, it doesn't create anything new.
But can technology be used to break that divide? Sure it can. Like most other things, technology itself is morally neutral. It can be used as it currently is and perpetuate injustice or it can be used to break those lines. But who will implement this change? Will Big Business do this for us? Will this spreading of prosperity be a natural consequence of the market economy?
Katz hits this one right on the head --- NO. Corporations are interested in profit and share price, and will do nothing but work towards those goals. Perhaps back in the days of Disney, one man could wield his company as a tool of his own ideology. Today this is no longer, if it ever were the case. The Board of Directors wants to see profits. This is the bottom line for corporations.
The ONLY answer to the problem of a just dirtribution of wealth and technology can come from the government. Sorry to offend the libertarians in the audience, but face facts. Corporations and "the market" will do nothing but increase the disparity of wealth unless they have the incentive to do otherwise. Only the government can give this incentive. You might not like big government, but without it nothing can stop big business.