Is There A Tomorrow For Tomorrowland?

If you haven't been to Disneyland, I suspect it may only be because you live in the Eastern half of the nation, and opted instead to go to Disney World instead, especially so that you could also explore all of the other theme parks in and around Orlando, which (amazingly) has more hotel rooms than New York City.  I did go to Disneyland, a very long time ago, during a year when my family lived in California while my father taught at Berkeley.  This was in the summer of 1971, not long before we returned to Baltimore.  I had a good time, but remember that, even then, the park had a somewhat dated, slightly shabby look to it.  At that point, it probably hadn't had a serious renovation, having just opened in the 1950s.

So it's with a sense of disappointment and dismay that I read this article on Slate.com about the current state of Tomorrowland, which was meant to be Walt Disney's vehicle for telling the story of America's unlimited, upbeat future, made better in every way by our ever-advancing technology. Most of the article deals with the inherit problems involved in forecasting the future; one who does so is perpetually chasing a moving target, one whose movements are themselves defined to some degree by the predictions themselves.  As a popular example, thing of the flip-top "communicators" from the original "Star Trek" TV series, compared to the early flip-top cell phones.

The article ends, however, on a much more cynical note.  It seems to suggest that we are already drowning in more tech than we can possibly handle, and that the fruits of all of this advancement are not exactly as beneficial as Walt, and the rest of us, once hoped they would be.  There may be some truth in that, but the antidote is not the end of technology, or human inventiveness for that matter.  It's to remind ourselves that technology is never an end unto itself.  It is a tool, first, last and always.  It is, and never should be anything but, a means to fully realize the best parts of our potential, and not the darkest of our internal demons.

So does Tomorrowland have a future?  For that matter, does forecasting the future have a future? Maybe it does.  Maybe the problem is that, in the past (for that matter, in the original Tomorrowland), the focus was on the technology itself, and less on its impact both on individuals as well as the larger would around them.  Maybe the solution is to try to come up with a vision of the future that addresses those issues head-on, and shows how many of them can be resolved in various ways.  The Slate article itself suggests something similar, such as how a "green" city living on renewable resources might work.

It's difficult to imagine how Disney's corporate heirs could come up with a way to mix social/cultural anxieties with a theme-park attraction, and then market it to middle Americans looking for a few days of fun.  On the other hand, it would certainly be a challenge worthy of Walt himself, and his vision of an attraction that, like the future, would be ever-changing.  So, how about it, Imagineers?