http://epcot82.blogspot.com/2006/09/wheres-spaceship-earth.html
Thanks for your astute observations regarding what's become of Epcot Center. I actually had no idea that it had gotten so bad until I read your description of all the changes that had been made. I am deeply saddened.
I actually had an inkling of this about a year ago, when I was looking for a cool picture of 'Spaceship Earth' in Google Images, but all I could find were ones with this hideous, giant, Vegas-casino-cum-Big-Boy-statue of Mickey's wand looming over it like some kind of hideous freeway-rest-stop-fast-food-signage out of some dystopian-carnival-nightmare. I knew from that single pic alone, that they had finally wrecked my dream-city. But until I read your article, I had no idea how truly horrible it had become.
My grandparents took my mom and I to see Epcot in 1983 - one year after it's opening. It was quite possibly one of the coolest things that I had ever experienced and it had a deep and profound effect on my budding psyche. It helped foster in me a life-long interest in Buckminster Fuller, geodesics, synergetics, tensegrity, sustainable architecture and environmentally sound design, earth-berms and earth-ships, sustainable urban farming, computers and communications technology, science, lasers, space-flight, innovative thinking, creativity, futurism, the long-view and saving the planet. Few experiences in my life have more dramatically shaped the person that I grew up to be than those magical three days that I spent with my grandparents me mummy at Epcot Center.
Of course, my grandfather simply had to take us to Epcot. That trip was as much for him as it was for me. See, grandpa use to work for Ma Bell back when she was still Ma Bell. He got his start in electronics when he earned his HAM license as a teen and then somehow ended up helping government researchers in developing the first EKG machine. By the time he got out of the service after WWII, he had helped spearhead the installation of Pentagon communications systems, Installed the communications links in Congress that broadcast President Roosevelt's famous "Day of Infamy" speech and maintained all of the radio and telephone systems in the presidential yacht, train and limousine fleet. He even built the first television in the town back in '46 for our family. Out of surplus military radar equipment no less.
So when the four of us first embarked on Bucky's 'Spaceship Earth' ride - and that little car entered the coaxial cable like an electron embarking on a journey through the vast circuitry of history - grandpa and I were both pretty effin' stoked to say the least. That single ride summed up the entire philosophy behind Epcot Center and the fantastic story of human technological innovation throughout history. Later...After we watched the 3D Michael Jackson movie, grandpa explained to me how the polarized 3D glasses worked by separating the light into distinct, dissimilar waveforms for each of your eyes. Sometimes, I think maybe grandpa had even more fun at Epcot Center than I did. In any case, we bonded over it. Grandpa could always see the future. He was a really creative guy and if he knew about anything, it was technological innovation.
And that's always what Epcot Center was really about. That fundamentally creative, evolutionary human drive to innovate. The drive Which has - throughout the ages - compelled us to develop ever more inventive methods of solving our problems. Ever more sophisticated means of communicating with one another. Ever more complex systems and solutions for understanding the complex world that surrounds us. It wasn't really about 'fun' at all. It was about sustainable technologies for facilitating human survival in the 21st Century and beyond.
But Epcot was about more than that. It was also about recognizing the caveats and pitfalls of innovation. Addressing the unintended consequences that technology can inflict. About rejecting old, unsustainable, methods of yesteryear in favor of newer, cleaner technologies as they become available. Epcot center was advertising the glamor of 'green' long before 'Planet Green' was ever cable channel. Epcot was about riding the Mono-Rail instead of driving in cars (Except in the future-car exhibit where they told us about the electric cars that were to come). Epcot was about eating a salad that was made from locally-grown plants that were right there in the greenhouse-dining-room. Epcot was about an aquarium where - not only could you see lots of amazing sea creatures - but the miniature aquatic ecosystem actually produced fresh fish that they served in the restaurants (at least that was the marketing - who knows, maybe they were really serving us trucked-in, frozen filets). Epcot was selling sustainability before they were calling it sustainability. It grew out of that late-seventies, Whole Earth Catalogue reading, geodesic-dome building, subset of upwardly mobile, tech-savvy, post-hippiedom that truly epitomized the baby-boomer generation - coupled with the flowering of those late-fifties, science-fiction, 'better-living-through-technology' memes that the Boomers were weened on in their childhood. I think that people like Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand,
Douglas Rushkoff and George Lucas probably all had a deep and abiding appreciation for Epcot when it first opened. Thus, I find it odd that they put Epcot in Florida. How many geodesic-dome-building, progressive-liberal/socialist, computer-geek types do you know that live in Cali... Where the original Disney is located? Kind of seems like a more logical place.
I think that these are some reasons are why Epcot was doomed from the beginning. It was just too cool for school. Too 'progressive' for your average middle-American-Disney-tourist to wrap their gas-guzzling little heads around. I bet it made money for the first couple of years and then all the knuckleheads got bored went back over to Disney World to ride Space Mountain or... Whatever. The masses are asses. They want beer, chili-dogs and Mickey Mouse - they don't want to be educated on how were screwing up the planet with our SUVs and they certainly don't care about sustainable, locally grown produce. They want that 'Chatchki's' guy from Office Space to throw balls at them and tell them not to have a 'case of the Mondays'. In short, they want 'fun'. They can keep it. I liked Epcot the way it was.
I don't remember the back-story, so I find myself wondering who exactly came up with the whole idea of Epcot. The whole park is so blatantly an attempt to emulate so hypothetically high-tech, sustainable-socialist-utopian, post-hippie pleasure-compound that I can hardly believe corporate America went for it. The underlying message of it seems wholly incongruent with my image of Disney as a corporate entity. Maybe they were just trying to cash-in on that ex-hippie boomer market. Or maybe it was just a sign of the times. Then again: '82-'83 was also the year that Disney released TRON - or as I like to call it: The Matrix v0.1. So evidently, there was a truly creative and forward-thinking staff on-hand at Disney back in the early eighties. Of course, TRON was also a commercial flop. Like Henry Mencken said: "No one ever went broke under-estimating the good taste of the American public".
Someone pointed out above: it almost seems like Disney is somehow 'ashamed' of Epcot Center. And I think that's exactly right. In many ways, Epcot Center represents everything that middle-American, Republican, right-wing, 'fiscal conservative', Religious Fundamentalist, corporate America types... The people that run companies like Disney in other words... Simply detest. Ideas like socialist Utopias make those people very, very uncomfortable. I believe the only reason Epcot ever got off the drawing board in the first place was the corporate sponsorship by companies like AT&T and Kodak who wanted to promote their products and to emblazon their insignias in laser-light across the surface of Spaceship Earth.
That and of course, the fact that they charged an arm and a leg just to get into the place and then you still had to buy the overpriced food and any mementos you might want to take with you. It seems like Epcot tried to sell the idea that: 'Someday we'll have a utopia - but only if it is run for profit by corporations'.
This is of course: complete and utter bunk. Corporate America would no sooner offer us a utopia than it would give away all of it's profits to charity. The entire concept of capitalism, of private enterprise and of profit-motive is completely incompatible with the world that Epcot Center envisioned. Epcot Center is a portrait - a pastiche - of that idealistic, utopian sentiment that socialism is and has always been founded upon. A truly FREE society. A concept that was still very much alive and well in the post-sixties cultural zeitgeist the spawned Epcot. In fact, I distinctly remember watching sour-faced tourists turn up their noses up at the entire Epcot experience because the whole thing seemed entirely too socialistic for them. My grandpa even mentioned something to that effect. Rest his soul - he was from the McCarthy era.
Of course, in truth Epcot was at it's core, always anything BUT socialist. You had to spend a lot of money to get the whole Epcot experience and I'm sure it costs even more now. And for all of it's cheer-leading, I seriously doubt that Epcot even approaches true 'sustainability'. The parking lot alone is a carbon-car-bomb waiting to go off. I'd love to see the amount of trash they haul away on a typical afternoon.
Which is probably the most interesting thing about Epcot Center: the many questions that it raises.
For example: All of the technologies that Epcot said we'd be using in the future are already here - have been here for some time... We're simply not using them. Earth-Berms, Electric Cars, Geodesics, Solar Energy, Wind-Power, Light-Rail, Urban Farming... All of these were old news back in '82. If anything, Epcot featured an 'all-star' team of old ideas that only seemed futuristic for the simple fact that they make a lot of sense, but have yet to be implemented. They still strike us as forward thinking because as a society, we still haven't done them. We're too busy invading other countries for oil. And therein lies the rub. Corporate America wants us to believe that the only way to solve the problems that face our planet is to put corporations in charge of our future. To put them in charge of developing newer, better, cleaner, more efficient technologies - presumably, because the ones that we have aren't good enough.
But the truth is, we as a species already have everything that we need. And without really intending to... Epcot illustrates this for us. Electric cars were actually quite popular in the early 1900s - there were even charging stations on the streets of New York where you could top-off your battery. Jay Leno owns one that was built in 1906. It still runs. Monorails could easily be deployed in every US city with a substantial impact on global warming if only the political will do do it were there. Obviously, there's no money in it, or corporate America would have made it happen long ago. So if anything, the fast-foodification of Epcot Center is a telling microcosmic indicator of the myopic social environment that our world is mired in, just as the 'theme' of Epcot Center pretends to challenge that very lack of vision.
But it's always 'someday'. 'We'll let our kids and grand-kids worry about that'. And why not? How are you going to make big-bucks with graft in a society that is well ordered and utterly without waste? How are you going to make the big bucks selling Mono-Rail tickets, when you could just as easily sell cars and gasoline and coal-fed electricity that you can meter and slap a price-tag on? That is of course, unless you contain the entire system inside of an amusement -park and run it as a for-profit, masturbatory exercise in make-believe.
But I digress. I loved Epcot Center just the way it was. Even if it was all big pipe dream... It was perfect. Like a sparkling jewel. I always wanted to go back and see it again but I never got the chance. I'm really glad that I didn't go back and see the wreck that it has become. I probably would have cried.
As for EPKAT's observations regarding the Orwellian social-implications of Epcot Center... I found these wholly insightful... If deeply flawed. On the one hand, EPKAT is absolutely right - according to the best science fiction, an 'orderly' future is a seriously plausible danger. But so too, is a completely chaotic one. Sure, the film GATTACA lies at one stark and frightening end of the spectrum when it comes to our potential trajectory. But by the same token, the film 'Idiocracy' lies at the other. As for Brave New World... Doesn't the spectral legacy of Walt Disney loom over Epcot just as ominously as the specter of 'Big Brother' did in the book 1984? In the end, doesn't the corporate sponsorship and tightly controlled central hierarchy that administers the park echo the very authoritarian fascistic tendencies that this country sought to escape? We've simply traded one 'boss' for another. Social monarchies for corporate hegemonies. Public dictators for private ones. 'Bread and Circuses' for food courts and video games.
And I guess in the end, that's okay. After all, as Wavy Gravy once observed: "Far out is fine, but who's minding the shop?". We will probably forever need leaders of one sort or another. But the dualistic choice between visionary dreamers and autocratic rulers is a logical fallacy. Epcot shows us that it takes all kinds to build the future. As Neil Stephenson observed in Cryptonomicon, every tech corporation consists of two different kinds of people: The Suits and The Beards. The Beards are of course, the geeks, gear-heads, artists, role-playing nerds and computer hackers sitting in their garages and basements building the next big thing. The Suits are of course, those hard-charging business types who know how to get that next big thing to the next big market. And while every once in awhile, someone comes along who embodies both sides of the coin - a Walt Disney, an Edison, a Buckminster Fuller. Someone who can find the balance between creativity and pragmatism. The fact still remains that the rest of us tend to fall into one of the two camps and that the only way for us to build a better world is for all of us to truly collaborate, cooperate, innovate and 'imagineer'. Epcot shows us that the future isn't some far off fantasy world waiting to be discovered - it's right here, right now. The innovations that will sustain our species in the years to come are right in front of us, waiting to be discovered.
And while I loved Epcot back in `82, EPKAT and others make a valid point. By today's technological standards, 'Legacy Epcot' is boring and dated. If Moore's Law is any indicator - my iPhone probably has more computing power than the entire park had combined. The internet as we know it did not even exist in '82 and all of the technological innovations that 'Future World' told us were coming have now been with us for 10+ years.
And that's part of the problem. Those creative, futurist 'Beard' types are apparently nowhere to be found among the current 'imagineering' staff at Epcot. Apparently, just like in the movie TRON, guys like Sark, Ed Dillinger and the MCP have - in the interest of profit - seized control of the system from guys like Kevin Flynn, Tron, Dumont and Dr. Gibbs.
I vote for a NEW Epcot Center – 'Epcot: 2012' (hey, just in time for the 30th anniversary). One that truly lives up to the 'information age', to the 'global village' and to the promise of tomorrow. The way the original Epcot did for us back in '82. One that looks a lot less like a McDonald's jungle-jim and more like a futuristic Renaissance Festival / World's Fair. One that more closely embodies the openness, freedom and communitarian collaboration of the Wikipedias and the Ubuntus than it does the centralized corporate control of the Amazons and the Googles. One where community feedback and suggestions from patrons inform and steer the direction that the park moves in. One in which, we as patrons are not simply there to be entertained, but rather to participate and contribute in the experience as a whole. One whose website looks a lot less like another corporate travel brochure and a lot more like a Web 2.0 social networking site. Thereby allowing Epcot fans and patrons from around the world to communicate and to share their Epcot experiences with each other and with staff. An 'Epcot 2.0' if you will.
Epcot should not simply be a 'spectator sport' and another revenue-stream for the Disney corporation and it's sponsors. After all, where would any of those companies be without US - the public - buying there products and visiting their theme-parks. Thus, Epcot – in the spirit of it's inception – should be a shared, collaborative, open-source repository of ideas and information that will teach our children and our children's children, how to cooperate and imagineer a better world for future generations... Now THAT's futuristic.
