pavilion or point-of-sale

Though planners pared down the aspirations for Epcot from an actual, functioning city of the future (the utopian Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) down to a theme park with futuristic attractions.
Before the Epcot was demoted to a sort of permanent World’s Fair with any kind of opening delayed until 1982, RCA pitched ideas to Disney on how it would support the city’s infrastructure to make what went on behind the scenes as authentic and state-of-the-art as what it seemed on the surface. Revolutionary for the late 1960s, proposals included the use of debit cards almost exclusively and eschewing cash. Even more interesting was how the notion of electronic money back then already connoted eroding privacy, since the money trail was anything but anonymous and carried a permanence. Around this time, at the height of the Cold War, a Georgetown think-tank, tasked to devise the most insidious yet invisible and voluntary state surveillance were they working for enemy, dreamed up a convenient system for the KGB that essentially mirrors our current network of automated teller machines and cashless registers.

5x5

markov-chain: a sub-reddit that harnesses the property of memorylessness by and for robots

memory & function (& memory): Nag on the Lake keeps us updated on what is afoot in Scarfolk, a township forever trapped in the 1970s

le grand huit: hundreds of brightly coloured café chairs form a static roller coast in Nantes

tempest in a tea cup: an interesting look at the anti-saccharine movement and the fickle sweet-tooth of Percy Bysshe Shelley who boycotted sugar and other staples that drove the slave trade in the Empire

spaceship earth: celebrating Star Trek’s pushing the envelop with George Takei

crocodile creek, neverspeak mountain

The ever intrepid team of Atlas Obscura presents an illuminating, nostalgic glimpse at the stellar rise and equally rapid decline of a gargantuan amusement park built in the southern marshes of New York state that opened in June of 1960 and closed after just four seasons, called Freedomland U.S.A. Civil engineer and architect of such ambitious family playgrounds named Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, recently dismissed from his last project of putting another but more enduring pleasure estate in an orange grove—the successor would again be built in a swamp—and his role ultimately denied and disavowed, designed a huge area in the shape of the continental United States and placed several historical and cultural attractions and rides within those borders.

The park celebrated the cheerier side of manifest destiny, mercantilism and American exceptionalism, including the Great Fire of Chicago, the San Francisco Earthquake, the launch pad and mission-control at Cape Canaveral—plus a New Orleans where it was always Mardi Gras and live music acts for adults to enjoy. In order to attract and retain more, the educational character was quickly supplanted by more conventional rides but its decline was swift—despite the number of guests and a lot of fond memories. Some of the more conspiratorial-minded believe that Freedomland U.S.A. was never meant to be a commercial success but rather an experiment in urban development by real-estate magnates and large landowners in New York and was undertaken to demonstrate that the marshland could safely support large-scale construction projects—and in fact, just after the park was razed, a public housing and a shopping centre went up. I think it is more likely the case that people became much disillusioned with the notion of what their country was becoming with the string of political assassinations of those waning years, not to mention the competition from the nearby venue of the 1964 World’s Fair that was meant to cheer everyone up again. The in depth look at Atlas Obscura furthermore bounces the demise of Freedomland off of the other ruins of theme parks and presents an interesting retrospective on the culture and the times.

five-by-five

inside voice: dogs in Japan taught to soft-bark

staring-contest: crystal lattice whose patterns appear when one blinks

relocation: an interesting podcast on chaotic Moving Day in New York City, the annual event when all tenants’ leases expired simultaneously

PET-project: plastic bottles beautifully repurposed as artificial plants

playland: restaurant in Italy has an amusement park that’s powered by the momentum of thrill-seekers