The Timekeeper

Who gets to define the future as technology becomes one of the most important social concerns in the world? In Tomorrowland, H.G. Wells, the father of science fiction, squares off against the Imagineers. (more) This is the fourth in a series of articles on Technology and the Future called "Tomorrowville," which appears on Slashdot from time to time. The series began a month ago with several reports from Orlando, Florida, but it seemed fitting to hold this one until the New Year. "The Time Traveler vanished three years ago, and as everybody now knows, he has never returned."

-- 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.