1 The World of Tomorrow

The credit crisis has seen a spree of name-calling as investors seek to lay blame. What was it about the psyche of North Americans that started this world-wide cascade of value? According to the popular view, pure top-down greed among the barons of Wall Street infected the markets with false hope. Sure, Wall Street crafted the financial instruments of the sub-prime collapse. But somebody had to buy all those houses and by doing so inflate the value of shelter beyond the ability of America’s financial giants to backstop a crash.

Some people reached unsuspectingly for the brass ring. But many others must have heard that little voice whisper “ … if it seems too good to be true, it probably is .” How did America’s celebrated common sense get so skewed that this could happen? The answers lie in the expectations that were imbued in mass culture – in the mindset that media-abetted middle class comforts instilled. This is the first in a series of postings that look at how North Americans were carpet-bombed with messages leading to the conclusion that prosperity was limitless and excesses would be endlessly forgiven.


With the benefit of hindsight, the panorama that lit up the Seattle skyline in 1962 seemed to have been preordained. By the end of the 1950s there were 20-million families in the United States elevated to middle class status by what Fortune magazine called an "economy of abundance". America's success at evening the score with the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race had catapulted imaginations into the stratosphere and the great beyond of the 21st Century. Each of those families was a unit of consumer activity primed to shower in the cascade of goods and services spun off from the space race. Fittingly John Glenn, the first man in orbit, was on hand to greet his fellow Americans as they swarmed over the site of the Century 21 Exhibition, more widely known as the Seattle World's Fair.

Thirty-eight years before the end of the century, exhibitors embraced the exhibition's bold theme: The World of Tomorrow. By then, anything seemed possible when viewed alongside Glenn's astonishing accomplishment. The theme had a subtext: the triumph of science and technology, which was reflected in the style of exhibitry that gave a whole new collateral look to the toil of physicists and aeronautical engineers. Visitors were invited to ride the "Bubblelator", a spherical Plexiglass elevator that rose from the floor of the Washington State Coliseum into "floating" clusters of backlit, silvery boxes, depicting life in the 21st Century. The Utopia of the next century was represented by push-button appliances, apartments suspended above marine basins, monorails, climate-controlled micro-enviroments and, paradoxically, a family of crash test dummies living in a well provisioned bomb shelter. Towering over it all was Seattle's 606-foot Space Needle, replicated in the Eye of the Needle restaurant by a foot-tall, white plastic cocktail container as tacky as vinyl shoes.

The United States Science Pavilion housed what National Geographic meaningfully called "the largest exhibit devoted to a single theme ever assembled by the U.S. government." The Science Pavilion's exhibit, described as a vision of white with Gothic arches and crystal pools, presumed to display "the past, present and future of science" all in one very finite space. Explaining his creation Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, Commissioner of the exhibit, said science isn't magic, but a tool to meet human needs. "In our pavilion, we try to tell how the tool has been used in the past, so that America can decide how it should be used in the future."

The Seattle World's Fair was a celebration not of achievement, but of the future. It was conceived and organized as a showcase for the benefits of North American applied technology that would be revealed and enjoyed in the next millennium. World's fairs have served a similar purpose since the concept was moved out of the barnyard before the turn of the 19th century. But if Seattle wasn't the birthplace of marketing by special events, and it wasn't, the technique of mass marketing by commercial prophecy hit its stride there.

The leaders of U.S. industry were represented in 72 exhibits. Visitors to the Boeing Spacearium took a tour of intergalactic space that spanned two billion light years. Standard Oil visualized rocket-powered, glass-topped airliners that would take off vertically and cross the Atlantic in an hour. General Motors imagined electronically-controlled turnpikes on which cars would be steered, accelerated and braked without any interference from their less competent drivers. AT&T featured many innovations in home communications that have come to pass already, including satellite TV, fibre-optic transmission of signals, and cordless telephones. RCA's home entertainment predictions are all in common use. These include colour TV and sets that range from book-size to wafer-thin big screens with remote control. RCA's exhibit didn't foresee the advent of the couch potato, but it did prove the wisdom of forecasting from ones' strengths.

Within the long but finite shadow of the Space Needle, Standard Oil set a new continental standard for hyperbole with its catalogue of fanciful images. In addition to the airborne family car with the vertical takeoff option, the company foresaw climate-controlled farms enclosed in enormous plastic bubbles, inflatable submarine freighters, and large-scale underwater agriculture. Naturally, most of Standard Oil's visions required the consumption of oceans of fuel.

On the surface, Seattle's futuristic theme suited a buoyantly optimistic era. But there was a subliminal price to pay, hidden in the cost of every gadget and appliance that the era produced. The underlying message was one of profound change based on a growth mentality with little thought to costs in social and environmental dislocation. As it turned out, it took three or four more decades before that change began to take its toll on the lifestyles of post-modern America, which Robert Heilbroner once described as "the striking loss of global economic leadership of the United States". But for the time being, Seattle helped to stir the imagination of consumers in a way that had seldom occurred in the history of humanity.

World's fairs were just one of many powerful influences on the consumer culture that developed after the Second World War. Other spheres included the news media, popular entertainment and advertising, to name just three. In the end, commercial prophecy of many kinds left post-war consumers with the feeling that anything was possible in the marketplace and, most importantly, that everybody would benefit. As a consequence, the willingness to be misled was profound. Many of Seattle's more extreme visions have not been realized, although some may yet be. But what the Space Needle accomplished was to symbolize the moment when the surrender to the consumerization of life in America became complete.

The post-war embrace of commercialism took many more years to run its course. In the summer of 1996, commentators treated the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta as though the corporate ideology of America was discovered there. The media frenzy that greeted the Atlanta Games was more of a comment on the forced naiveté and short memories of the media than an exposé of trade show commercialism, given the longstanding tradition that it honoured. Many records for Olympic grandeur fell under the weight of two million spectators, 10,700 athletes and 197 participating countries. Eleven million tickets to Olympic events were sold, enough to overwhelm the city's housing and transportation plans. So many vendors and "ambush marketers" descended on Atlanta to capitalize on the games that International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound, who was responsible for the IOC's marketing arm, called their tactics "unethical and unacceptable”. A brass medal for crassness should have gone to sports shoe giant Nike for achieving a low point in sportsmanship with the company's repulsive TV tag line: "You don't win silver, you lose gold". It was a slogan that created 10,000 instant losers among the contestants, by Nike's subterranean standard.

Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta was described by one news magazine as "a theme park for consumerism" -- that was, until a pipe bomb went off killing one person and injuring 111 others. Dick Pound worried that over-commercialism at the Atlanta games could diminish the value of Olympic sponsorship in the future. If the market value of sponsorship is sustained, it will not be due to any last-minute streak of self-discipline in Atlanta, nor because the IOC got control of the situation, because it didn't. Sponsors had the bomber to thank for taking the media focus off commercialism, shifting it to security for the remainder of the games and in post-mortem media coverage. The Atlanta Games may have been over-booked and overwhelmed, but in truth the `discovery' of corporate America's role in inspiring and underwriting world-class spectacles wasn't just another media phenomenon triggered by petulant journalists irritated by poor accommodation. By the 1990s, the fallacies of breakneck consumerism had begun to dawn even on mainstream journalism.

The New York Times reported in February of 1997 on the transformation of a North American icon brought about by the realization that visions of a commercialized future have lost their marketing lustre. When Walt Disney World was conceived in the central Florida swampland of the 1960s, its focus was to be Walt's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Disney himself explained his concept in a promotional film in which he said EPCOT " ... will never be complete -- it will never cease to be a blueprint of the future and there will always be new materials, new systems and new ideas introduced." Disney's Epcot concept was distorted after his death in 1966 into a permanent facsimile of a world's fair, more static in its execution than its creator had imagined. Many of its futuristic exhibits have been realized, or overtaken by other ideas. Inside the dome, tourists rode through a technological spectacle, from the papyrus scroll to the telegraph, winding up with a view of schoolchildren using video conferencing equipment. But the overall effect was decidedly deja vu.

Increasing public indifference to Walt Disney's overheated vision of the future was cited as the reason for a reversal of the "Magic Kingdom's" futuristic theme. Disney's vision was transformed from Orwellian to Rockwellian in a 1995 makeover of Tomorrowland. The `new' retro look was described by the New York Times as "an antique remake of The Jetsons", focused around a "green, gray and purple canyon of neon, oversized bolts and swooping arches of anodized steel." Designers of Celebration, the town that Disney built nearby, took their cue from the market researchers and did a U-turn. The community of 20,000 was modelled after a late 19th Century town. Disney’s exhibitry wasn’t singularly responsible for the late-century emphasis on futurism. But it was symbolic of what was happening throughout mass culture at the time.

How did the post-modernists become so influenced by commercial prophecy, a practise modelled on the inspirations of biblical prophets? The staying power of old time religion provides one answer. The reach of the ancient prophecies provides another. St. John's apocalyptic visions still held sway over those Christians who were awaiting His return at the turn of the millennium. A third answer lies in the subtle process that has transformed old line biblical prophecy into a practise that, except for the actions of sects and cults on the fringes of religion, has become almost exclusively secular. This transformation of prophecy, from biblical, to scientifically secular, and then commercial, parallels the evolution of western culture. In this century, it is distinctly traceable through several phases in the development of science fiction, futurism, and postwar industrialization.

The whipsaw effect of the Great Depression and the war effort, followed by explosive productivity of affordable goods and services, created a North American psychology of mass expectations that went way over the top. The Thirties' contribution to this mentality was undeniable. Buckminster Fuller's biographer, Hugh Kenner, called the Thirties "the decade when `the future' was popularized." Ancient prophecy was born out of adversity, offering either a New Jerusalem or a Second Coming to inspire hope. Hope begat the notion of progress, which in turn begat the growth assumptions of modern capitalism. This inexorable progression continued, despite the setback of Depression-era deprivation. J.B. Bury wrote that "the idea of Progress was becoming a general article of faith" by the late 19th Century. "There was nothing in the nature of things to disappoint the prospect of steady and indefinite advance," Bury observed. Not even the Crash of '29 and its aftermath.

Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that there was no real focus on the future between the 1920s and 1950s. This would have come as a surprise to two writers of considerable repute from the period, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. By the Time Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, the hegemony of science and technology over literary imaginations had not yet reached its peak, but doubts had already begun to occur to some people. Huxley's novel, portraying technological anarchy, was set in the year A.F. (After Ford) 632. This willingness to challenge the prophecy of science carried over into William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the story of a party of British schoolboys shipwrecked on a boys' island paradise after the outbreak of nuclear war. Huxley was more skilled than Orwell at anticipating biochemical, pharmaceutical and genetic trends, which he experimented with in his fictional Central London Hatchery of humans with mechanistic traits. Huxley used this skill to warn others about the consequences of short-sighted use of technology.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, written between 1945 and 1948, is not a book about the abuse of technology. It is a dystopian vision of political collectivism, taken to oppressive extremes. As such it was seized upon as a propaganda tool in its own right by post-war capitalists striving to discredit the Soviets' Marxist experiment. In developing his scenario, Orwell says emphatically that all scientific research has been banned except for that which is useful in war, propaganda or surveillance. Realizing that his vision of the future would inevitably be scored for accuracy and smarting from early controversy over its bleakness, Orwell ordered his publisher to issue a statement in which he denied that the book was intended to be predictive. Instead, it was a warning against totalitarianism of any stripe, more preventative than prescient.

Despite his denials, Orwell was a passable prophet, whose most celebrated work envisioned helicopters hovering over the cityscape and intrusive state surveillance by two-way telescreen. He forecast state-run lotteries, stupefying pop music lyrics, continuous warfare of the migrating kind the world has experienced from Vietnam to the former Yugoslavia and now to Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is just as well that Orwell made his disclaimer when he had the chance. In the west, at least, state propaganda has not reached anywhere near the level of thought control that Orwell believed possible. Only in the marketplace, where advertising has been laid down like carpet bombing, has social engineering succeeded to the extent that Skinner depicted in Walden Two and Orwell simultaneously predicted. The promise of computers and information technology was not well developed. But the novel's most striking oversight is Orwell's indifference to the development of consumer capitalism after the Second World War. Instead of vivacity, over-abundance and sexual freedom, Orwell described a society of drab, puritanical, unimaginative, mechanistic creatures subsisting in a sensory vacuum. Rather than conspicuous consumption, Orwell's 1984 was a wasteland in which there was no place for free choice and where prophecy would have been unthinkable. Easy credit terms would have been totally out of the question.

To be continued ....
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