Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

Friday, 13 December 2002

I've just been checking out the introduction to Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies (link via Tim Dunlop). It starts with an extended meditation on the revamp of the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland in 1998. I've been to Disneyland; it was fun. For most of the day anyway. When it's evening and you're jaded from six hours of sensory overload, pissed off at having to pay for a two-pack of Tylenol to ease the pain of your companion's dysmenorrhea and looking at a three hour bus ride back to central Los Angeles the romance dies. Your attention drifts from the gorgeous scenery of the rides to the cleverly concealed industrial technology that drives them and the mind turns to thoughts of Taylorism. I had nowhere near as much fun as John Safran did in his Race Around the World segment, asking the guide at the Walt Disney Museum awkward questions about Walt's alleged fascist sympathies and sneaking a Saddam Hussein doll into the "Small World" ride.

Postrel doesn't share my crap-coloured glasses view of Disneyland:

Disneyland was dedicated to what Walt Disney called "plussing": continuous improvement through both new ideas and changes to existing attractions.

The notion of continuous improvement through both new ideas and changes to existing "attractions" (in the world outside the theme park we're probably better off speaking of institutions and technologies) is the basis of Postrel's dynamist vision of the future and, like many polemicists, she offers us a simple choice:

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis — a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism — a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition?

Postrel places herself firmly on the dynamist side of this divide: the domain name of her site is "www.dynamist.com". My first impression is that Postrel's core argument is that there are basically two kinds of people in the world: smart people and stupid people. Dynamism is progressive and smart: stasism, a position embraced at both ends of the political spectrum, is reactionary and stupid.

There's a wealth of potential for argument and satire here, especially as Postrel's thesis has a lot of features which pretty much guarantee its success as the next big intellectual fad. Too much for one post really so I'm looking forward to returning to this topic in the future. It looks like being more fun than the Indiana Jones ride.