Living Dangerously - Issue 30

It's almost here, the millennium. Don't worry about computers botching the hurdle to 2000. What you really need to worry about is your mind. How are you going to drag your lizard brain over the speed bump and into the new world? How do you expand your thinking to a size that's appropriate to the new millennium so that you're not a total embarrassment to Stanley Kubrick and the other visionaries who got there way before you? I don't know the answers myself, so I went to see somebody who's already living in the new world, and has been there since the Elvis '60s.

I went to see Dan Mapes, 53, technology director of the largest startup in America -- a NASA-size operation dedicated to producing far-flung visions and mass-marketed adventures: "A $771 million startup," Mapes says, explaining his millennial vision. "We've started from nothing. In Silicon Valley, having a $10 million startup is a big deal. We're building a theme park based on "The Wizard of Oz." It's dedicated to this proposition: We intend to produce extraordinary new media for the global digital theater. "Oz" is one of the most archetypal stories of this century. Do you know what the number-one attraction at the Smithsonian is? It's the ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in the movie."

Dan Mapes is as skinny as a snake and has an abundance of energy. Watching him, you worry that he might explode and hurt somebody. This is a guy who calls NASA a "baby" project. Set on 2,000 acres just outside of Kansas City, Kansas and scheduled to open in 2003, Mapes's Oz will include a theme park, a hotel, and a golf course, and will eventually house water parks and residences. All of the houses will be wired for high-speed connectivity. "It's like Disneyland, except that there are screens all around," he says. "Even if you're in France or China, you can come to Oz. If you're physically in Tokyo, you can take a virtual ride seated next to someone who is physically in Washington, DC." A Middle Eastern sheikh put up the initial funding, but then, feeling cash poor, he sold his stake to the good people of Kansas and to Salomon Smith Barney.

I'm hearing about Oz as I'm being driven down Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, the city of skyscraper blondes. All at once, all of the lights up ahead turn green, and speed is possible. Mapes takes his eyes off the road and his hands off the wheel to make a point about the art of building for the next century: "Oz uses more fiber optics than any other theme park in the world. We're coming to life right on the cusp of the millennium. We believe that the millennium is a story in itself. It brings with it a sense of a new period. What happened at the end of the post-World War II period probably comes closest to matching this feeling. By the end of 2002, the World Wide Web will be significantly linked through cable-television and satellite networks. New technologies and media that are now heating up will take off in wild new directions. It's in the nature of society to use that numbering system to represent a kind of crossover point, or a rite of passage -- the same way that we use college graduation as a crossover point. And our graduation gift to ourselves is to lay down the great highway."

In this movie, on this day, I am Dorothy. Since Mapes is driving, he's the Wizard. Mulholland Drive looks like a yellow-brick road (must be the glint coming off all those blondes). And we are both very far from home -- which is still 1999. I am checking in with Mapes because he is unlike any other futurist. He believes that if you're serious about it, you don't just talk about the future; you build it. Mostly, I'm in his car because I want to know what qualities will make it possible for a person to survive a few decades from now. What kind of equipment do futurists need? Why are they so good at spotting things before the rest of us?

"How do you focus on the future?" I ask Mapes. Mapes says that he does it by having a tremendous appetite for the new. "I don't think it's an accident that man flew in 1903, rather than in 1899," he tells me. "There is no software for this new highway, just as there was no software for the personal computer when it was created. At that time, the number-one word-processing program was WordStar, and the number-one spreadsheet program was VisiCalc. Right now, we still have a Kitty Hawk Web; it's basically pages of information sent over 28-Kbps modems. The Web we're going to have in two years is a million-bit Web, which will demand new applications. That's what I'm working on."

And what does it take to get you into the Mapesian future? The foremost piece of equipment for a time tourist is trust. "Trust the innate wisdom of the evolutionary process," says Mapes. "If you don't, you'll try to control everything. If you do, you'll be like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz": You'll just believe that the process that made Shakespeare will also make things beyond us."