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Report from Orlando: The Lost City of Epcot
from the No-Tomorrow-In-Tomorrowland dept.
"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."
picture (Score:5)
http://www.spacey.net/ts haw/Images/Epcot/OriginalEpcot.gif [spacey.net]
EPCOT. (Score:3)
Frankly, I don't blame the sponsors one bit. It's almost impossible to keep up with technological trends and dream about the future. AT&T pretty much knows where communication technology is going, so they've done a good job keeping Spaceship Earth up to date, but that's about it. GM tore down their "World of Motion" to put in place the "GM Test Track," which has little, if anything, to do with their dreams for automotive technology.
Even worse, United Technologies pulled their sponsorship from the "Living Seas" exhibit, and the whole thing's falling apart because nobody's even paying to maintain it anymore. I guess the whole "Seaquest" sci-fi dream is a thing of the past.
I guess that could be part of the problem. People go to EPCOT for the fantasy of a possible future, and our desires for what that future ought to be change so dramatically over the years. I mean, in the early '90s, it was the dream of a 100% environmentally friendly society. Now it's the dream of what the Net can do next. Nobody knows for sure what it'll be in five years, so why waste money on an attraction in a theme park that nobody will want?
Sighhh....EPCOT's what made me dream of innovation when I was a teeny little geek, and it's so sad to see it both falling apart and succumbing to pure commercialism.
Disney was a Dreamer (Score:3)
A dreamer is a person who comes up with new ideas. That person would love to see those come true, but ultimately knows that they may not. What Disney created in his EPCOT was a perfect future world. No man can expect such a thing to actually come true.
Take a look at Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry made up a wonderful world where money and power have little or no value. Do we get all misty-eyed when we watch an old episode? I hope not.
Dreams are just that. I applaud Disney and his team of imagineers. But, I do not feel a loss that his EPCOT never became a reality. I instead feel love to see what he came up with and cherish his ideas as one of the greatest men of the twentieth century.
Oh, and one point of clarification. Disney was not alive to see the completion of Walt Disney World, but he was there to oversee the early stages of the project.
What EPCOT was really supposed to be. (Score:4)
Reach exceeding grasp (Score:4)
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?
"The Gernsback Continuum" (Score:4)
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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Internet the Ride! (Score:4)
Brilliant as he was, Disney never foresaw or imagined the Net, the Web or the Digital Age.
Internet the Ride!
It revolutionized the way we communicate. Now it's the world's ultimate thrill ride!
Marvel as you fly through the T3 pipe at blazing speeds! Feel your stomach churn as you hit the 56KB bottleneck. Sit back and enjoy the show as Microsoft battles all comers in a battle for the very soul of the Internet! Lose yourself in the maze of Usenet and IRC. Wander through the Hall of pr0n (seperate admission, adults only). Experience the thrill of watching as server after server is brought down by the dreaded Slashdot Effect!
Bigger than than Steve Jobs' ego, faster than the Linux development cycle, scarier than debugging Windows 2000, wilder than a steel cage death match between Richard M. Stallman and Eric S. Raymond it's Internet the Ride!
Go Directory to Writing 101. Do Not Pass Go... (Score:3)
The Tragedy of Technology
by Jon Katz, summerized by Anonymous Kev
There's a cool model, but Walt died and they didn't do it that way.
The End
Is that about it? Come on Jon, I don't totally buy into the opinion that technology's a tragic thing. But surely there's a thousandother valid subjects that would better illustrate your thesis. I'll list a few off the top of my head.
Technology is tragic because:
- It produces data that makes us less intelligent. The flood of information brought by technology has led us to avoid processing it. We scan over something and reach a knee-jerk opinion instead of reading and reasoning carefully.
- It produces new excitements that make us more boring. The new entertainment media have reduced us all to cocooned geeks will little people skills and with little to converse about (except for, "Hey, is the new Quake out yet?"
- It enables us to talk to different cultures, which destroys what's unique about other cultures. As more and more people communicate and learn from each other, the more all cultures become homogenous. Once we're all part of the AfroAngloEuroAsian Culture, life will be fairly boring.
- It provides greater (easier) mobility, allowing us to break family ties and move farther away from our "support groups".
- It provides medicines to extend our lives, so we can live our additional years in lonely isolation (related to the reason above).
Anyway, there's a few off the top of my head. Like I said before, I believe technology is a Good Thing(tm). But, Jon Katz, if you're going to take a view, please take a view. Don't just pander on about Walt's model. Yeah, that's sad. But doesn't make Technology tragic.Oops! Here's my boss... Now there's a tragedy of Technology ... productivity monitors on your computer!
Anonymous Kev
Walt's dream never really died - It got a new name (Score:3)
Epcot never went away, it just got a new name.
The Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow is better known today as the city of Celebration, Florida, located in the southern part of Walt Disney World's property. While it doesn't have the art deco and sterile feel of Walt's original vision, it does attempt to embrace his original concepts of a forward-thinking town with a strong sense of community. The homes are all wired together, and public Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs)can be seen zipping about the town. It might not be the perfect embodiment of Walt's vision for EPCOT, but it's as close as can be expected for now.
When Walt died, his brother Roy wanted to bring the EPCOT vision to pass. However, the technology required to construct such a city simply did not exist, and Roy just wanted to get the Florida property opened with the new Magic Kingdom. Once WDW opened to the public, attention turned to building the EPCOT community, but the technology still was not around, so the Disney Co. settled for the "World's Fair" concept that Epcot is today. Epcot (the theme park) has been moving away from the "prototype community" association for a few years now. A couple years ago Disney made a change so that "EPCOT" is now "Epcot", and has no acronymn associated with it (since the park is not a "community of tomorrow").
No internet attractions at Epcot? Well, perhaps you missed the one that was there. It's not very big, but as you exit Spaceship Earth, AT&T has set up a "Ride the Net" area where you stand in a rocking tube synched to a video in front of you. It's not much, but it is an internet-based attraction. If the Disney Imagineers could actually come up with an exciting attraction about the Internet, then they have my modest appreciation. I just can't see how anyone could make routers, packets, and high-bandwith pipes into a thrill ride.
What about Tomorrowland? When Walt Disney created the original Tomorrowland that was to showcase all that Epcot currently represents. However, the attractions were never updated to reflect changes in thought, and when Epcot opened, it basically took the place of Tomorrowland's original function. When Disney decided to go through a complete rehab and change Tomorrowland into a Jules Verne-esque themed area, I thought it was brilliant. By taking this new approach, Tomorrowland would not have to worry about being outdated. They also eliminated the haphazard grouping of attractions by tying them together to form a "town." Next time you're there, notice how all the buildings are supposed to be structures in an actual city. The only attraction that really seems out of place anymore is Space Mountain. Somehow a future look at high-speed FedEx delivery just doesn't cut it.
So remember, Tomorrowland isn't supposed to showcase the actual future, Epcot is no longer regarded by Disney as the "Community of Tomorrow", and Celebration, FL is the best embodiment of Walt's vision to date. Disney isn't really behind the times, they just haven't put the old city model in the dumpster, yet.