"Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But, there they are." Firesign, Bozos
"A power so great...
it can only be used for good! or evil!"
I could go on. However, as we were trading some of the more surreal and awe-inspiring bits (The Golden Hind, The Army Training Film, Boom Dot Bust) I remembered that their classic 1971 "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus" (with its Wall of Science and its Future Fair: "a fair for all/And no fair to anybody") was based on the World Fairs of the 30s.
Bozos begins with vegetable holograms enticing people to get on board the bus to the Future Fair, and ends with one of the first pop culture representations of a hacker doing combat with a computer (in this case a computer that is the animatronic voice of President Nixon). The Fair rhetoric of Progress mocks past fairs like the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair, with its heroic and unquestioning paens to industrial development and corporate power. It also has that fun-but-creepy atmosphere I always get at Disneyland, the happiest place on earth but with video cameras and security everywhere, even on good old Main Street.
So it was with interest that I found the following "life mirrors art" moment on Slashdot:
Dan Howland writes"Big Ruxpin is Watching You: Once again, The Firesign Theatre's I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus proves itself to be the science-fiction story where the most stuff came true. If you recall, a hacker named Clem traveled through the Future Fair, followed by computer generated Holy-Grams who popped up and said things like, 'Why not try [WALL OF SCIENCE], 'cause it's my favorite!' Leave it to Disney to perfect that spooky technology with My Pal Mickey, an interactive talking plush doll that knows where it is inside Walt Disney World, and tells you trivia as you move through the park. Ah ha, but even better (at least from Disney's standpoint) is that, just like the Holy-Grams, My Pal Mickey feeds the info back into the central computer system, so Doctor Memory can track people's movements through the park in realtime. (Of course, these data will be skewed because they only track people who buy the dolls...) Here is another link, with the interesting, Asimov-like sentence: 'He has a strong sense of self-preservation, and reminds you to put him some place safe when you get near water play areas, or on wet rides.'"
The future is fun. The future is fair. You may already have won. You may already be there.
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The reason the Firesign reference came to mind is that I had just begun a chapter in Carroll Pursell's excellent 1995 book The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology. I've been reading some histories of technology in order to get a running start and some context for what I want to argue about the postwar world that created cybernetics, and the cyborg. Pursell traces the "coming of science and system" in the late 19th Century and through the first two decades of the 20th, the increasing centralization and rationalization of all areas of life, Taylorism as it is applied not only to industrial workplaces but to all organizations and to the home itself (remember domestic engineers? the wife of the main apostles of Taylorism became herself a key apostle of Progress and Efficiency applied to the homemaker).
The motto of the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair was "Science Finds - Industry Applies - Man Conforms." This motto apparently didn't creep people out the way it is likely to do with current readers. In fact, the motto hides an important fact: that increasingly, the Federal Government was funding science research, establishing panels to look at the effect of the new technologies (and the flood of new consumer goods and machines) on social institutions, and creating governmental bureaus and committees. Of course these committees were often almost adjuncts of industry (the Bureau of Mines, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, myriad advisory committees). And the government monies often went hand in hand with a corresponding increase in commercial uses and corporate benefits. (Radio for example is a key precursor of television, so the way it mixed "fictional lives and consumer products" ends up as a giant advertisement for consumer-friendly "attitudes, aspirations, and styles of living.")
My favorite part of this Future Imperfect Fair is the heroic sculpture in the Hall of Science. Surrounded by a circular wal adorned by art deco panels in organic/Nature motifs (a stylized man holds his hand out to a sort-of deer), and observed by a gallery thirty feet or so above, the sculpture honestly looks like something Matt Groenig would draw in a Simpson's parody. A huge - seriously huge - robot with a huge square head and square shoulders and giant rectangular fingers looks above much smaller figures of a man and a woman. The robot's giant silver head and shoulders are bent almost 90 degrees, and its two giant arms are ushering the humans into a future that seems to terrify them. Honestly. Their arms are up as if to ward something off; they look a lot like Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden in all those old paintings.
What's eerie is that the whole thing rings true of the assumptions of this and other Fairs of Progress and Science. Technology and Science will not be stopped or really controlled; the future seems out of control and terrible (think of what is about to happen in 1933); governmental and corporate organizations, often revolving doors for one another, will recreate the world for you, like it or not.
As Firesign put it,
"in government inflicted simulation!
the future can't wait no place to hide
so climb aboard
we're going inside
we're going
back to the shadows again!"
The Future Fair bus doors open, and the protagonist says, "Pluck a duck. Who have I got to lose?"
Who indeed?
"Surrounded by a thin thin thin 16 mm shell. And on the inside, it is delicious."
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