The Next Magic Kingdom, Future Perfect.

Not long ago, I met a curious man in his early forties named Bran Ferren. By curious, I mean that his fleet of automobiles has atone time included a Pinzgauer armored personnel carrier. By curious, I mean that he has spent no small part of his fortune on such home-decorating touches as a dining-room table mounted on a hydraulic lift (the better to adjust to the height of his guests) and a shower made from the same variety of metal used for the decks of nuclear submarines. Before we met, I had no clear idea of what Ferren did for a living except that he had been described to me "as the big elf guy who thinks about the future for Walt Disney."

Ferren heads up the research-and-development wing of an enormous "think tank" of almost two thousand robot mechanics, theme-park designers, aerospace engineers, Goofy sculptors, and other craftsmen who work in a string of unmarked offices and warehouses in the town of Glendale, north of Los Angeles. On the Disney flow chart, the workers are called Imagineers, and they have been known to call their place of work both the Idea Lab and the Dream Factory. Ferren has also hired four "fellows," top-rated specialists in computer science and artificial intelligence, and their job is to make sure that the Walt Disney Company, the reigning Gorgon of mass entertainment, skirts the threat of obsolescence and thrives in the new age to come.

The Disney company is obsessively secretive about what the Imagineers are up to, because it fears that their ideas for new theme parks, movies, cartoons, and other amusement products will leak to the ruthless competitors who surely abound; as a result, the Imagineering buildings are about as open to the public as the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. And yet when I finally called Ferren's secretary to arrange for a preliminary dinner meeting in New York, the response was friendly and efficient. "How will I be able to recognize Mr. Ferren?" I asked.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. I could practically hear the secretary smiling three thousand miles away. "Don't worry," she said, at last. "You'll figure it out. Bran's got a real unique look."

She got that right. Ferren's chin sprays a flame-red beard, and there is in his eye (and I really mean this) a glint, a shining, the sort of mischievous look normally associated with a little boy who has just discovered a new way to hot-wire the family cat. He is six feet two, but seems much bigger. I don't know why. His uniform is an immense and rumpled safari jacket (the sleeves of which come down to his fingernails) and a slouchy pair of wrinkled khakis. In his pocket, he carries a low-tech wallet stuffed as thick as the pastrami sandwich at the Carnegie Deli. He always wears running shoes. I don't think he runs much. Ferren looks rather like one of those burly Scots whose sport is the tossing of stumps. This is all a way of saying that I had no problem finding him in the dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel.

In fact, Ferren is a man of soft hands and an antic personal warmth, a grownup whiz kid with a gift for gadgetry. What he does is make clever things-not important things but clever things, delightful things. Ferren grew up in New York City and on eastern Long Island, where his parents were artists. He was the sort of child who took things apart, put them back together, and then blew them up. "I had a very keen interest in explosives," he explained. School bored him. His grades were wildly uneven, but he had no problem acing a test when it counted. He was accepted for matriculation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He quit after a year. Making things-complicated things, which required knowledge of a dozen scientific fields, from optics to electronics-was what he wanted to do, and he wanted to do it right away. When Ferren was still a teen-ager, he was building sets and designing the lights for various theatre companies. By the time he was twenty, he had been hired to design special effects for Emerson, Lake & Palmer. He was the tech geek, the ultimate A.V. guy you'd call on to ask how to pull off things like blasting flames out of the Moog synthesizer without toasting Emerson or Lake or Palmer.

Eventually, Ferren set up his own company, Associates & Ferren, in East Hamp- ton. The idea was to make a fortune at what he calls the "crossroads of design and science and entertainment." He created visual effects for "Little Shop of Horrors" (which, come to think of it, might have been a better name for his own eccentric little company). He built a wall of eight-thousand-pound video monitors for a New York night club, the Palladium. For the short-lived Broadway show "Frankenstein," he developed a technique to prevent artificial fog from floating out beyond the proscenium and choking the audience. He constructed a perfect artificial thunderstorm. The United States Navy hired him to design a long-range-vision system so that robots could see in three dimensions rather than two. Revo hired him to build the ultimate pair of two-hundred-dollar sunglasses. In short, Associates & Ferren became the place to go for cool stuff. Eventually, in 1993, Disney took notice. Michael Eisner paid a reported twenty million dollars for Associates & Ferren and invited Ferren himself to come out to Glendale to help run the Imagineers.

"I wanted a bigger sandbox," Ferren told me, "and I got one."

Ferren is a self-described "future guy" as long as the future is going to be plenty rich and nothing but smiles. And while he is neither a top-flight scientist nor a front-line name in pop culture (his job is backstage), his influence on the future, in this age of entertainment, is bound to be enormous. "If we keep living longer and machines are doing more of our work, we're going to have plenty of time for amusement," he said.

As Ferren made his way through a basket of rolls, he uncorked a soliloquy on the future of everything: the Net, the Web, the Well, the telegraph, the telephone, computerized medicine, the press, weather, food-the future of food. Ferren is not arrogant, but he is serenely confident about the march of progress. It cannot happen fast enough for him, and it is all thrilling and fun and easy. Even doomsday is sort of easy. "It's sad to say," he said, "but if you gave me a little time and a decent laptop I could probably knock out all the lights in the neighborhood and send the whole place into chaos." Very John Wayne, very "no brag, ma'am, just fact." That turned out to be the only time I ever saw him so serious, to say nothing of solemn. "Techno terrorism is the big problem of the future," he added. "But let's talk about something else. I don't want to be the one to give anyone any ideas."

For Disney, the future has nothing to do with techno terrorism, the colonization of Uranus, or the cloning of a newt. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, neonatology- these are the futurist concerns of other quarters, other scientists, and other corporations. Disney is desperate to understand and profit from an era that promises unprecedented time and resources for the amusement of sedentary human beings. "I've always been fearful that I'd end up in an industry like the railroads when they sneered at airplane travel," Ferren's boss, Michael Eisner, told me. "We have to deal with the new distribution systems of entertainment, with interactivity, with the fact that you'll have the morning paper on your fingernail or on the inside of your eyeglasses. All that stuff. Walt Disney used to follow technology by becoming friends with the head of, say, Westinghouse, and visiting the plant floor. I've got Bran Ferren."

At Disney and at conferences all over the world, Ferren plays the role of the great popularizer, the khaki-clad link between the lab coats and the suits, the bridge between M.I.T.'s Technology Review and Forbes. He is fluent in the jargon of animatronics and genetic algorithms; he can talk with authority about planting "itty-bitty cameras" in the eyes of the blind and the rise of "thinking machines." But everyone in the future business talks about that stuff. Ferren's real ambition, and Disney's, is to find a way to exploit the newest technologies to insure that the company remains the world's mass-market teller of tales.

"Storytelling is the world's oldest profession, and Disney tells stories in 2-D, 3-D, in real-world spaces," Ferren told me. "Disneyland is the first virtual world, a fantasy made of bricks and mortar." Perhaps his main goal is to figure out how to marry the capabilities of the Internet to the capabilities of Disney's storytellers. It's still unclear.

"Trying to assess the true importance and function of the Net now is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines Advantage Miles," Ferren said. 'We're always very bad at predicting how a given technology will be used and for what reasons. Originally, cable television was just meant to improve your picture reception. Theatre people used to think that the idea of motion pictures was ridiculous. But the Net, I guarantee you, really is fire. I think it's more important than the invention of movable type. But you have to wait and see. Society evolves like the species. It's not smooth and linear. You'll have something like the industrial revolution-it comes like a jolt, and then you kind of dick around for the next fifty years getting used to it."

The fusing of the Internet to television is no secret. Half of the communications industry seems to be pursuing it in one form or another. With Microsoft and so many other competitors in the hunt, Disney will never dominate Net television the way it once did animation and theme parks, but the company's singular hope is that its brand name as a storyteller will help it gain a hugely profitable position.

"The real challenge is having something to say," Ferren went on. "Do you ever find yourself saying, 'The problem with television is that it needs four hundred and twenty-two more horizontal scanning lines'? No. The problem with TV has to do with story. Most stories really suck. People talk about interactive storytelling. Fine. But the reason you pay Steven Spielberg ten million dollars is that he's better at telling stories than you are. You want him to tell you stories for the same reason you don't go out and buy a vise grip and do do-it-yourself bypass surgery."

Ferren invited me to come to California to see the lmagineering operation in Glendale. And while he warned me that he would have to go out of his way to protect certain future projects, I'd still get some sense of the twenty-first century through the eyes of the world's mass entertainment machine. "The year 2000 is a very big kahuna for all of us," he told me later. "It's amusing to converge on a moment that people thought of as the destruction of the world, as salvation, as a planet behind the sun. But I'm optimistic, because it's my nature to be optimistic. I'm a good match with the Walt Disney Company. I approach the year 2000 as another way to have fun."

WALT DISNEY himself had a conservative Republican's relationship with time. He had within him an intense nostalgia for Main Street, the pre-urban white-bread never-was world that greets every visitor at the entrance plazas of Disneyland in Anaheim and Walt Disney World in Orlando. At the same time, he worshipped at the altar of scientific progress. He created Tomorrowland and Future World, "people movers" and space-age garbage-disposal systems for his parks. It was the present that irritated him.

Disney not only sought to popularize a soaring technological future for his ticket-buyers; he also played a distinct role in bringing it on. He was, in a sense, the chief propagandist of the techno future. From 1955 to 1957, in an attempt to promote the new Tomorrowland exhibits at Disneyland, he produced three hour-long television programs: "Man in Space," "Man and the Moon," and "Mars and Beyond." With the help and advice of the German-émigré rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, Disney drew on science fiction and emerging rocket technology to introduce to a wide audience the idea of travel to the moon, life on Mars, and other fantastic visions. The shows speculated on the dark side of the moon (is there life back there?) and on the daily diet of a typical Martian (Mars bars?). The ratings were extraordinary, even by Disney standards. After the first program aired, President Eisenhower called Disney and thanked him for doing so much to promote the space program, and then asked to borrow a print for a screening at the Pentagon.

Disney's futurism was science-fiction fantasy imbued with a sense of commercial possibility. When he opened the Monsanto House of the Future at Disneyland, in 1957, the building had four curved fibreglass wings. In it were wall-size televisions, ultrasonic dish- washers, self-dialing phones, floating lamps, and a climate-control system that spritzed a choice of sea air or flower scents into the room. Everything was made with materials like Polyflex, Lytron, Nitron, Scriptite. When, ten years later, it was obvious to all that the House of the Future was looking dated, the Disney people ordered it destroyed. "The curious thing was that when they finally went to remove it all from Disneyland they couldn't wreck it with a wrecking ball," a Disney veteran said. "The plastic wouldn't break. They had to bring out the saws."

The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze our- selves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent. The trouble comes when the storyteller tries to predict the future, as Disney sometimes did, in a voice of certainty. H. G. Wells, for one, was counted as a visionary, able to foresee skyscrapers and superfast trains, yet he was also convinced of the coming of a socialist World State. When Wells laid out his vision in "A Modern Utopia," G. K. Chesterton remarked that unfor- tunately the creators of visionary futures "first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon."

Speculative storytelling, from Thomas More's "Utopia" to William Gibson's "Virtual Light," is always about the present: what confuses us, what we desire, what we fear. In "Paris in the Twentieth Century," a novel abandoned in a safe and published only a couple of years ago, Jules Verne imagined easily enough a world of electric elevators and modern facsimile machines, but he also predicted a culture whose bookstores would have room only for scientific tracts and not the classics of French literature. Verne, of course, was worried about the plight of Verne.

Disney's attempts to tell the story of an American future is part of a larger tradition in both high and mass culture. Of all the American stories set in the future, probably the most influential was Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward," published in 1888. Bellamy was born in 1850, in the mill town of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. The town was a typical product of the Gilded Age-crowded tenements, illnesses, strikes-and Bellamy, who in growing up absorbed an ethic of self-denial and charity, quickly became a crusading journalist. In the late eighteen-seventies, he also turned to fiction and, as a kind of antidote to his times, wrote "Looking Backward." Bellamy's surrogate in the novel is young Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in "the present" and magically wakes up in the year 2000. As he wanders the city, he discovers that the corruptions of his time have disappeared. Technology has come along to meet everyone's needs: there are shopping malls, credit cards, and electric lighting, though no Internet. Most important of all-at least to Bellamy-is that a religion of solidarity has driven out the ills of the Gilded Age. People are no longer selfish. Bellamy, like the Puritans before him, re-stated the dream of an American golden age, a new Jerusalem, and his book not only sold tens of thousands of copies a week but also spawned more than a hundred Bellamy clubs across the country.

The problem was, as Alfred Kazin suggests in "On Native Grounds," that Bellamy, with his industrial conscript army and collectivism, had also managed to propose a kind of "beneficent Socialist totalitarianism." A lord of high capitalism answered in 1894, when John Jacob Astor IV, the dilettante scion of the Astor fortune, published "A journey in Other Worlds," another utopia set in the year 2000. Like Bellamy and other futurists of the time, Astor took for granted an acceleration of technological progress to burnish his utopia. The Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company, for example, tries to pump water from one pole to the other so that the earth's axis will stay perpendicular to its rotation, thus creating eternal spring everywhere. But, while Bellamy was surrounded by misery and corruption and sought to correct it, Astor was swaddled in privilege and sought to protect it. In his novel, English is fast becoming the language of the entire world, the poorer, duskier peoples retreat, and Anglo-Saxons take over from one end of the earth to the other. "If much of Astor's literary and scientific work had a certain Buck Rogers flavor, reflecting dreams and unearthly speculations, it was because he himself lived in a world as unreal as any he ever imagined," Harvey O'Connor, a biographer of the Astor dynasty, wrote.

The utopian novel faded out decades ago, with products like B. F. Skinner's "Walden Two" and Ayn Rand's dreams of a modern Atlantis, but in an atmosphere quickened by the millennium (and all its marketing possibilities) a certain kind of nonfiction fantasy has proliferated. If you fly fairly often and sneak a look at what the passengers have brought along to pass the time, it's striking that anyone who is not reading Grisham or Crichton is immersed in a kind of self-help book that promises the reader to keep him from drowning come the new age: "The 500 Year Delta." "The Third Wave." "Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century." "Being Digital." "What Will Be." "The Road Ahead."

These are books read more out of anxiety than out of pleasure. Part of that anxiety, no doubt, is the approach of the millennium-a thrill both dramatic and meaningless, rather like that instant so long ago when the family watched the dashboard as the Chevys odometer finally turned from 9999 to 10000. (Those zeros!) But the anxiety also stems from something more meaningful-an undeniable sense that, as all those books insist, we are entering a technological era in which change itself has accelerated beyond all precedent in human history. Alvin Toffler's books may be loud with the bark of the future-hustler, but he was correct about that: change has changed-it has speeded up, and leads to a sickening anxiety (think of the hapless passenger stuck in the back of a taxi driven by an unblinking maniac). To fall behind is to risk humiliation, loss of status, poverty.

The hemline of the moment is technological bonhomie. A recent article by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden in Wired entitled "The Long Boom," which claims that we are just reaching the midpoint of forty years of millennial peace, prosperity, and interconnectedness, has had enormous resonance in futurist circles. Occasionally, there appears an alarmingly dark vision- science-fiction writers warning of a techno dystopia, various environmentalists forecasting scenarios of apocalypse, writers like Sven Birkerts and Alvin Kernan mourning the burial of print culture under the great blizzard of digital bytes and streams-but in the main the chorus of giddiness overwhelms them.

Optimism is a sound economic decision. Optimism brings in the corporate consultancies, the two-million-dollar book advances, the forty-thousand- dollar lecture fees. Optimism sells. (This is a principle that Disney understands better than anyone.) A corporate audience wants to know that it can master the future, and it wants to know how. Watts Wacker, for one, had been on the road giving speeches to the Pacific Coast Gas Association and a convention of confectioners when I reached him. From talking to Wacker and reading his book "The 500 Year Delta," I got the impression that he had no idea what he was talking about, but, all the same, he was having a wonderful time pitching happy days. "I think things are pretty cool," he said cheerfully. "I think it was Emerson who said, 'This time like all times is a great time as long as we know what the fuck to do with it.' Emerson's my hero, by the way, though he wasn't much of a poet." Wacker laughed. And then he said, "I'm a futurist, and I make all these things up, of course. The only thing I know is that an optimist is going to have a good future and a pessimist is going to have a bad one."

Wacker is no scientist, you will be surprised to learn, but he told me with utter confidence that babies born in the year 2000 will probably live to be a hundred and fifty, and babies born five hundred years from now will have a chance to live to be eight hundred. This notion of eternal life, or close to it, is not entirely alien to futurist circles. An electrical-engineering professor at M.I.T., Gerald Sussman, has said, "I don't think the time is quite right, but it's close. I'm afraid, unfortunately, that I'm in the last generation to die." All this brings to mind Woody Aflen's remark "I don't want to achieve immortality through my works.... I want to achieve it through not dying."

If manufactured optimism is the credo of the day, then the Walt Disney Company approaches the millennium with the Zeitgeist at its back. Whether in dead earnest or in wry, postmodern tones, cultural critics have long pointed out the lack of shadows in the Disney view of the world. They are pushing on an open door. Optimism is practically a prerequisite for employment. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I met with Marty Sklar, an old Disney hand who worked closely with the founder in the fifties and sixties and knew the ideology first hand. 'What we do in the parks is eliminate the contradictions and complications," he told me at his office one afternoon. "We have horse-drawn vehicles, but you don't get the horseshit. People who want to communicate that life can be better and that people can have fun at work and play are happiest here. If you're not somebody who enjoys communicating about the good side of things, you probably won't make it. A theme park is not a slice of life as it actually is. People come to us to escape and be reassured that somewhere in this world there are people who will smile at you and say hello."

On the night before I was supposed to begin my two-day tour of the Imagineering plant and meet with the Disney fellows, I drove up to Bran Ferren's house. Ferren owns houses in East Hampton and in Beverly Hills (where he lives on a canyon road, near Bruce Springsteen), and both places are among the most curious in the country. His friend the screenwriter Marshall Brickman calls the Long Island house Neo-Post-Modernist-Palladian-Psychedelic-Oriental-Bauhaus, and it's hard to think of a better tag for its California counterpart. The bathrooms feature infrared heaters. The kitchen has aerospace cabinets and refrigerated drawers capable of holding (should there be a nuclear war or a run on the asparagus market) more than two hundred pounds of vegetables. There is an eight-door Traulsen refrigerator that is capable of storing leftovers and the Green Bay Packers, and there is an air-curtain system that controls the exhaust from the stove, which is useful, Ferren has said, especially if you are roasting a yak."

There would be no yak tonight, however. Robyn Low, who is Ferren's companion and the cook of the house, was on the East Coast. So, after a couple of hours of listening to Ferren's high-end stereo system (it, like so much else in the house, looked capable of launching a space shuttle), we drove down the mountain to Jerry's, an all-night deli near Rodeo Drive frequented by movie stars and their adjutants. Ferren commandeered a booth and ordered a shrimp cocktail, an artichoke, stuffed cabbage, and a slice of seven-layer cake with vanilla ice cream.

I am not sure I'd ever met a man so happy. He liked his houses and his cars and his toys well enough, and the stuffed cabbage wasn't bad, either, but it was not his obvious material wealth that delighted him so much as it was his timing. It's as if by joining forces with Disney Ferren had hooked into the most American recipe of all-the marriage of cultural shlock to technological wit. "Living in the industrial revolution and the Renaissance must have had a similar feel to living in this age," Ferren said as he slowly denuded his artichoke.

Walt Disney's brand of futurism has receded fast at the company, partly because Disney died in 1966, partly because it is expensive to revise multimillion- dollar Tomorrowlands when they rapidly begin looking like Last Week Lands, and partly because the new team of executives does not see the future in the same metallic shimmer and curved lines as the founder. While thinking machines and cloning and space travel will force even the most skeptical to rethink the notion of human uniqueness, Ferren said, technology will know its place. After all, modern man no longer has to dream about a technological age; in large measure, it's already here. The future we're heading toward, he insisted, is less like a scene in "Sleeper" than like one in "It's a Wonderful Life."

"Tomorrowland's ethic is synthetic is better than real, plastic is better than non- plastic, press a button and your food is delivered by robots," Ferren told me. "In the last decade, that has been replaced by the middle-class-American sensibility-the house with a lawn, real plants, a white picket fence, a recycling plant down the road, a house with cool moldings. Events like the explosion of the Challenger and the disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island diffused the sense of an ideal vision of the future as clockwork. We used to think that Tang was wonderful, but then there came the sense that Tang was all we got out of a multitrillion-dollar space program."

Disney's sense of the future shifted when it came time to build new Tomorrowlands and refurbish the old ones. One afternoon, I drove down to Anaheim, to Disneyland, where I was supposed to meet with Tony Baxter, who oversaw the design of Disney's theme park outside Paris and the new Tomorrowland in California. I can't say I was looking forward to this trip. Not long before, I had been to Disney World in Orlando with my wife and two young sons, and while the kids, of course, enjoyed it (my older son turned to me on the plane ride home, shot up his thumb, and said, "Dad, life is good, isn't it?"), while they endured the humidity and the heat and the endless lines without complaint, I did not. I whined. I made some perfunctory ironic comments. I expanded on those comments. I stretched severely the patience of my kin. The experience to me felt like wearing an alpaca greatcoat in a steam bath while ripping up hundred-dollar bills.

So, naturally, two months later, I was on Interstate 5 heading south from Los Angeles to Tomorrowland. I was supposed to meet with Baxter in an empty building that is, in Disney-speak, "Inside the berm" (i.e., on park grounds) but closed to the public. Baxter was a little late, so for a while I watched the Bosch-like panorama of determined amusement all around: the parents, flushed of energy and cash, crying out the names of the lost; the sugar-stunned children wailing their complaints; the parade of ancient Greeks in glittery hot pants advertising the summer' s animated feature, "Hercules." Finally, Baxter, a slender man of mythical reputation in the company, came trotting up the stairs, all apologies and smiles. Among hard-core Disney fans on the Internet and in clubs, Baxter holds the same position that the late Gene Roddenberry held for "Star Trek fanatics. He is Disneyland's master planner. As we sat on some packing crates, Baxter said that when he first started thinking about Tomorrowland he was faced with the terrifying view of the future coming out of Hollywood in the eighties.

"'Blade Runner was pivotal," he said. 'Blade Runner' took the problems of the present-the unrest, the collapsing mass-transit system, the urban decay, the sprawl- and then it combined Los Angeles and Tokyo and projected it into the future. 'Blade Runner' ushered in 'The Terminator,' 'Robocop,' and all those other pessimistic views. But Disney can't participate in that. Disney is about reassurance. For the thirty-six dollars you pay to get into Disneyland, you want things to make you feel good, things that make you hopeful that all will be right with the world. So between the realities of apocalyptic Hollywood and the disappointments of urban reality, we had to think, How do you design something new about the future for a jaded, savvy crowd looking for reassurance?"

Baxter thought a long time about his mission. How to make the future seem fast and fun and harmless? Finally, he started making sketches and models for a Tomorrowland set in the year 2055 an "intergalactic future" full of flying saucers with a little wit thrown in. The refreshment stands were going to have Coke cups printed with a pseudo-international language. "The bathroom had a urinal on the ceiling," Baxter said. "This big building we're sitting in now was going to be a flying saucer, but tilted, as if it had made a bad landing--off-kilter Intergalactic Flying Circus. He went on to say, "It was fairly innocent futuristic entertainment. We were all in synch for a long while. But then Michael Eisner realized his dream by building a rural paradise for himself in Aspen, out there with Harrison Ford. One day, we were standing around the model of the new Tomorrowland in Glendale, and Michael suddenly looked up and said, 'How do you show people the future when the future is Montana?'"

The conversation lasted just a few minutes, but in that short time Eisner redefined the pop-culture notion of the future of mankind. Sort of. "I thought then and I think now that most of us will be living and working in very densely populated places like New York or Los Angeles, but that there will also be massive green spaces that will be the utopian areas of the new society," Eisner said to me. Then he smiled, and added, "Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about. It's all baloney. But who knows? But I just know that the future we want is not going to be stacks of concrete, the "Jetsons," or Kafka, take your pick."

Baxter and his team suddenly started drawing up plans for a Tomorrowland that looked less like Mission Control and more like Central Park, or even the Garden of Eden. Green, green everywhere, and not a hint of Polyflex or Lytton. But, of course, after a while it also began to occur to them, and to Eisner, and to Eisner's accountants, that a purely Arcadian vision of the future would mean levelling tens of millions of dollars' worth of buildings. In Paris a few years before, Baxter's team had hit on an idea to satisfy the French critics who insisted that the park reflect French culture. He came up with "Discoveryland," a kind of nostalgia trip of the future with Jules Verne at its center.

Perfect! For the Anaheim park, Baxter and his team devised a similarly conservative view. There would still be some green spots, and an "interactive fountain," but the dominant look would be future. For a look forward, the cavernous building we were sitting in would soon be outfitted with exhibits set up by various corporations who want to show visitors their products of the future. "But it will be the future you can see coming around the comer," Baxter said. "You might have got Windows 95 in 1994. Not sooner, but not later."

In the end, only the oldest of the Old Guard at the company thought that the more timid, cost-effective approach to the future was all wrong. John Hench, an artist who began his career fifty-seven years ago and worked with Disney on "Fantasia," told me, "The conception of the future we have in Paris is a copout. Jules Verne! Jeesh! I thought they could have worked harder at it, been more imaginative, but they figured, well, the past doesn't change and you have to keep the future up to date." Hench said he was relieved that some Disney verities, like the Mickey Mouse icon, would always stay the same. He took my notebook and started drawing the mouse, and as he started sketching the familiar eyes and ears he said, "You see, Mickey is an archetypal figure of some sort. Wherever he is they give him a local name in the local language. He's a life symbol. He's David in David and Goliath. He's made all of circles, all curves, a muscular structure. We read him as a life symbol. Walt had acute intuition. He understood human beings and their need for symbols. Look at Felix the Cat. Felix has too many angles and sharp points. It's a different DNA."

As Hench drew Mickey, I said that my own sons liked the venerable rodent well enough, but they also liked other characters, specifically "Rugrats," an animated show that is everything Disney is not. The characters look like rhomboids, edgy and strange, and they do not utter a single unironic word. Hench looked up in horror. "'Rugrats'?" he said. "Oh, dear! 'Rugrats' is angular and threatening, and people don't like to be threatened too much. Some- times I fear for the future."

It doesn't require a cynical heart to recognize that the millennium, which is fueling so much of the current interest in the future, is an almost preposterously arbitrary idea. January 1, 2000, as a date of reckoning and celebration is no more than a pleasant fiction, another story. James Ussher, the Anglican Primate of All Ireland, published in 1650 one of the most famous Christian chronologies and determined that creation took place at noon on October 23, 4004 B.C. Why 4004? The belief at the time was that the earth had existed for four thousand years before Christ, and had another two thousand to go after him. The problem came from a mistake in church arithmetic. The sixth-century monk Dionysus Exiguus, who was charged with devising the B.C. -A.D. system, botched the job so badly that he had Herod dead at the time of the birth of Jesus, whereas the Bible has him alive at least into Christ's infancy. To adjust for Dionysus' oversight, Ussher came up with a new set of numbers, setting creation at 4004 B.C. As a result, Stephen Jay Gould and others conclude that the millennium could just as easily be said to be sooner than we think: October 23, 1997, to be exact. Right about now.

For the moment, the realm of life that seems to anticipate the apocalyptic moment to the greatest degree is commerce: Madison Avenue. There are some signs of spiritual anxiety: Christian groups who sense the coming of the Rapture; Muslims who are worried that Jews and Christians are preparing to build a Third Temple in Jerusalem, near the Temple Mount; Hindu sects who believe that Vishnu will become the ruler of the world, somewhere between 1999 and 2003. But in the main the millennium is about money, about marketing, and about amusement. Hillel Schwartz, a cultural historian, who is acting as an informal adviser to the Clinton Administration on the millennium and is the author of "Century's End," said he was dumbstruck by the proliferation of advertisements. "My favorite is the Mazda Millenia ads," he said. "Usually, in car ads, when you have a vehicle parked on a cliff over a canyon, the car is facing out, over- looking the abyss. This time, the car is facing away from the cliff, as if it had jumped the chasm. The implication is that Mazda has already made it into the twenty-first century. That's the idea of all of these ads, really: to show that the product in question has already entered the twenty-first century."

In the past few years, according to Harper's, the United States Patent and Trademark Office either has registered or has accepted applications for the following product trademarks: Millennium vacuum cleaners (White Consolidated Industries,Inc.); Millennium floor wax (G. H. Wood & Wyant); Millennium gas masks (Mine Safety Appliances Company); Millennium Undergarments (Maidenform); Millennium deodorant (Takred, Inc.); Millennium Money scratch-off game cards (Taco Bell Corp.); Millennium Legacy videos of the deceased for friends and relatives (James M. Oliver); Official Sponsor of the Millennium (Miller Brewing Company); the Official Chocolate of the New Millennium (Mars, Inc.).

Naturally, Disney has big plans. "Very big plans," Eisner said. "Of course, I can't tell you all of them." Eisner allowed himself to reveal that the Disney company is commissioning a millennial symphony. "That's probably the first commission of a symphony since the days of Maller," he guessed. Orchestras will play the symphony every day at Disney World. For eighteen months, the Epcot center, in Orlando, will be turned over completely to Millennial exhibits. Disney animators are already at work on forty minutes of new material to "revise" "Fantasia." Will Babyface Edmonds replace Leopold Stokowski? Will the sorcerer's apprentice switch to an Electrolux? Eisner was mum.

At Disneyland, staffers are forbidden to wear beards, mustaches, or earrings. Discipline is maintained. "You step inside the berm and you're not yourself anymore, you're playing a role," one guide told me. Grandparents have been known to sue the company for distress when children suffered the trauma of seeing Mickey Mouse take his head off in the heat.

At the Imagineering buildings, on Flower Street, in Glendale, the atmosphere is looser, more privileged. The artists who work on things like virtual-reality attractions or 3-D models of Buzz Lightyear are likely to be wearing T-shirts and jeans. They decorate their offices and cubicles the way sci-fi nerds in college do. In the cafeteria, people eat their sandwiches and knock around futuristic ideas like personal flying machines and "smart" benches. Ken Wong, the president of Imagineering, told me that he once overheard a conversation on the feasibility of "talking breakfast cereals."

Even if the Imagineers don't all have the jolly surface details of Bran Ferren- the red beard, the blinding twinkle--they are in the business of creating clever, marketable pop-culture products. My guide, a nice fellow named Dave, took me from building to building, from shop to shop. Dave is in his late thirties, and has worked for Disney all his adult life. Everyone at Imagineering wears a tag that has on it a little picture of Mickey Mouse and the person's name: "Dave," "Bran " "Julie." The Disney code, however, requires that the Imagineers take off their tags before coming inside the berm. It wouldn't do to have a scruffy Imagineer identified as a "cast member."

As we toured the main Imagineering building, Dave pointed out one workroom and said, with whispered awe, "This is where they conceived 'Pirates of the Caribbean."' Elsewhere, craftsmen were carving dwarfs out of clay, playing with lasers, reviewing models for a new aquatic theme park, Tokyo Disneysea. Dave took me to a room where two young guys with lots of pens in their pockets introduced me to a very tall robot known officially as a model A-100 and more familiarly as Joe Cocker. They turned on the music-Cocker singing "Feelin'Alright?"-and, by God, the robot danced just as jerkily as the original. He danced like Eddie Murphy's imitation of a white man dancing, almost no movement below the waist. "It's not the robot's fault," one of the technicians said. "The A-100 is less jerky than earlier robots, but the legs still can't really bend at the knee. We have to keep the knee rigid because it's got to support so much weight. But we'll get it better pretty soon."

Along the way, I met Eddie Sotto, a young designer who had been shuttling between Los Angeles and Tokyo to work on the theme park there. His office was decorated with nineteenth-century lawyer's cabinets, an Italian poster for "Citizen Kane," and a series of little candles. I asked Sotto what his dream project for Disney might be. His answer was one I'd been hearing, in variations, from other people around the company. He said he was interested in creating "entertaining environments." "What would be great," he said, "is not knowing that I'm looking at a screen, that the Internet is the entire room itself, the walls and the ceiling and everything would transform itself into, say, the Pyramids, and you are inside, exploring. You can read about the Pyramids, and text provides a lot of information, sure, but here you could even see it in your peripheral vision, the dust is in your hair and your neck is burning, and you smell the horses outside. I don't want just to see things, I want to feel them."

At lunchtime, Ferren came by with one of his new fellows, Marvin Minsky, who is a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and is the author of "The Society of Mind." We drove off to the executive dining facilities a few minutes away in Burbank and commandeered Michael Eisner's table. Bran basically sat back, ate his lunch, and let Minsky go. Where Ferren is essentially reverent about Disney, Minsky is essentially reverent about nothing. Minsky is in his sixties. For decades at M.I.T., at both the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Media Lab, Minsky has been trying to describe the workings of the human mind and then replicate it, even outstrip it, through the use of increasingly sophisticated computers. He accepted the Disney offer mainly because it reminded him of the early days at the Artificial Intelligence Lab. Minsky, like Ferren and the other fellows, is eclectically eccentric in a pleasant sort of way. When Minsky tried to ski, it was on Mont Blanc. He wears a ropy-looking belt made of Kevlar which turns instantly into a forty-foot survival cord. He once pulled his daughter out of quicksand in Norway using the belt. "Besides," he said, "you never know when you might have to tow your car."

Unlike Ferren, whose corporate position forces him to be quite as careful as a deacon in what he says, Minsky seemed not to care, or even realize, that he is now attached to an almost churchly American brand name. Religion, Minsky said at one point, "is only the most refined version of human ignorance. There is something in your brain that makes you want to feel that your father is always alive and controlling the universe. My religion and society is international science. To tell you the truth, I don't really believe that the Pope believes that there's a God. He's too smart. The second-raters, the level of priests below him, may believe it. But not him."

Minsky is the most un-Disney of all the fellows. He is the opposite of pious. He does not even display the ritual joy in the natural world. "Look, the world is a rather dumb place," he said. "There's nothing special about it. It's accidental. The world was terrible before people came along and changed it. So we don't have much to lose by technology. The future of technology is about shifting to what people like to do, and that's entertainment. Eventually, robots will make everything. The trend is over time. When Henry Ford was around, a large percentage of the population was involved in manufacturing. Now it's much smaller. I'm telling you: all the money and the energy in this country will eventually be devoted to doing things with your mind and your time."

In his own irascible way, Minsky is as eager as the more puckish Ferren to welcome the era of amusement. Minsky's interest in progress is fuelled by an impatience with the world as it is. "I always have the feeling of "Where is the future and why won't it hurry?'" Minsky said. "I'm interested in the heavens. So why doesn't my wristwatch tell me that there's going to be a meteor shower tonight? In the future, your watch--your computerized assistant, your personal agent--will monitor the airwaves and the Web for you, and then it will alert you to things that it should: Meteor showers, if that's your thing, the financial pages, a television show. Or you'll put on a suit and a special pair of glasses, and you'll become involved in an experiential form of entertainment. You'll immerse yourself in an environment, an electronic environment, a mountain climb, whatever you feel like. We've got the visual thing down. What we have to get down is the sense of touch. But that will come."

Later, I asked Minsky why, besides the intellectual companionship, he came to Disney. He said that he was tired of all the "fatalistic" myths society churned out. "I'll tell you the truth," he said. "I'm here because of "Fantasia." I like myths with a little promise in them."

In the near future of Disney Amusements, the biggest gamble is California Adventure, a theme park as exquisitely kitschy and ambitious as any the company has ever confected. The project, which will be built in the present parking lot of Disneyland, is going to cost the company and the city of Anaheim two billion dollars. Barry Braverman, the leader of Imagineering's creative team for the project, said that Eisner and the others thought through dozens of ideas before settling on California. "Eisner decided that people come to California, but they find the real thing too spread out, too hard to get a handle on-the beach, Hollywood, the mountains," Braverman said as we walked around a scale model. "It's very hard to find--California. So we decided that our park could be like a sampler."

There will be a Hollywood studio, a beachfront boardwalk, a hangar rep- resenting the aircraft industry, nine acres of "mini-wilderness" with redwood trees and a giant rock formation shaped like a grizzly bear, a tiny Napa Valley, a miniature San Francisco, and a working California farm. The hangar will have an aerial flight aided by a large dome projection screen. You will feel as if you were flying over the entire state in five minutes. This is what Braverman calls a "peak experience." At the studio, there will be a Super Star Limo and you will be made to feel, Braverman said, "like a big actor on the way to sign a contract with Michael Eisner at Grauman's Chinese Theatre." This is a peak experience, too.

"Through virtual reality at our version of the Palace of Fine Arts, you'll get into the 'mind-set' of California," Braverman said. "A sixties rock band at the Fillmore West, the 1906 earthquake, an eight-to-ten-minute experience. You'll be zapped with images, so when it's over you'll say, 'O.K., I get it. I know what it's like to think like a Californian."'

There will also be a roller coaster. "The best ever," Braverman said. Later, Dave, my guide, led me to a group of other guides from Imagineering's research-and-development wing. They opened a door and led me into a dark room filled with screens and blinking lights and odd machines. There was a computer that takes your picture and then distorts it, a kind of digital version of the house of mirrors. Disney may use these in suburban malls and in its new urban entertainment centers, called DisneyQuest. They showed me the ImaginEasel, which animators can use to work directly on a computer. Then they threw me on a "multicell motion system," a slab as big as a queen-size bed. They flicked a switch, and suddenly I was rocking up and down, back and forth. I was told that this was to simulate a "jungle cruise." They showed me a new fireworks system that cuts down on smoke and a digital projector that may one day replace film projectors at movie theatres. They showed me something called a Magic Mirror and then a virtual-reality ride on a magic carpet. Someone said, "To make it better, we'll be selling you a robot to sit on the TV." I didn't know what to make of that. Finally, someone aimed a gigantic pipe at me. The pipe was called a "puffer," and when it went off it blew a fast-moving puff of "smoke" at me. It felt, for the second it lasted, like turning a corner into the wind on a winter day. Someone said that it was going to be used at the new animal park in Orlando "to simulate the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs."

Finally, Bran showed up. He wanted to make sure I was getting a comprehensive view of the future of entertainment. "Puff him," he said. "We already did." "Then puff him again." Soon they lined me up for another blast. It felt harder, and rocked me pleasantly on my heels. "That's the mega-puff," Bran said.

At Disney, people talk a lot about their responsibility to children. Talk about educating "future generations" is as much a part of the official corporate rhetoric as "storytelling" and "inside the berm," and the company does donate millions of dollars to educational institutions and programs. But there is criticism within. A loyalist like Marty Sklar, who has been working at Disney since Walt walked the earth, told me, "Disney has done a terrific job in telling the public that teachers should be valued and in holding teachers up as the key to education. But beyond that there's not enough that the company has done. I come from a family of teachers-my brother and my son both teach, I was on the Anaheim school board-and it disappoints me."

One evening, I had dinner with Bran and his inside circle of fellows-Minsky, Alan Kay, and Danny Hillis. (The fourth Disney fellow, Seymour Papert, was out of town.) I remarked that Sklar hadn't hesitated to chide the company on the education issue. They seemed unwounded. They all agreed with Sklar, but Hillis and Kay especially said they were determined to find a way to make their work add up to something more than another cartoon, another stunt at a theme park.

Hillis and Kay are both computer scientists who made their names and fortunes through some of the early inventions of the P.C. industry. Hillis is in his forties and Kay in his fifties, but they are almost childlike in their bearing. They both smile as they tell you their ideas, and, when they do, they look years younger than they are. Hillis likes fire trucks. Kay had a pipe organ built in his home. They are both interested in converting schools from boring barns into houses of wonder. They are convinced that computers will help.

Kay, who spent his career at the celebrated Xerox PARC research center, and then at Apple, has been working on computer interfaces for children for nearly thirty years. "Before I came here, I couldn't help noticing that parents were buying Disney-brand stuff without serious appraisal, like the Lion King Activity Center," Kay said. "Six of the ten top-selling educational CD-ROMs are Disney. And the truth is that they're good but not so much better than anyone else's. Disney is a brand that parents will buy blindly." Kay and Hillis both said that the main reason they came to the company was to exploit that brand name for the good. They'd both spent their careers, as Hillis put it, "making computers that go faster and faster and faster, and after a while what's the point?"

Kay's dream is to make a computer language whose rhetoric is so accessible to children that they will be able to use it to explore the world in ways they never could. "Classical math is organized around algebra, so it's difficult to give kids a hint of what math is about," he said. "There's a long tunnel you take. But with a computer and [the right] language, you can actually understand something like the acceleration of a spaceship. Kids can type in two lines of code and they'll have a functioning spaceship, just as they have in reality, and they can feel what it's like to land on the Moon. Kids can take a nonlinear concept like feedback, and in ten minutes they can build a butterfly that will home in on a light that it can't see well, or learn how ants find food. Forget about the adults, they're over the hill. What we want is a medium that embodies powerful ideas that only a few people can deal with, and gets as many kids as embedded in it as possible. Kids will spend huge amounts of time at play, and play is their work. As it is, ordinary schools just take adult content and try to stuff it into kids' minds. I'll tell you about the project I've been working on. You are on the Internet. Imagine one page with various options, and one of the options is to make a car you can drive yourself. You click on that. What is downloaded is an authoring system. You can draw a car and then the car comes to life. Now you can tell the car what to do. You start moving it around, and by doing all this you start learning."

Hillis is also working on a pile of projects that might turn out to be more than just increasingly high-tech versions of "Aladdin." Perhaps the most fascinating, and least remunerative, is a kind of mechanical metaphor that he hopes will help cool the current mania for millennial prediction, for cocksure future-gazing, for shortsightedness.

Of all the fellows, Hillis has the most organic (and the strangest) connection to the company. When he was a graduate student at M.I.T., he worked on the problem of parallel computers-the means of generating enough capacity to teach a computer to begin thinking for itself. Few students had ever attracted as much attention, but if Hillis was to get his doctorate he had to carve out time enough to sit down and write a thesis. One morning, he stuffed a bag full of clothes, books, and legal pads and went out to Logan Airport intending to take the first flight out of Boston. The first flight was to Orlando. He took it. At Disney World, Hillis checked into the Contemporary Resort and bought a week's pass to the park. Every morning, he took the monorail from his hotel to the Magic Kingdom and, sitting on a bench, wrote a chapter per day.

Hillis soon built an international reputation, and a sizable fortune, through his expertise in parallel computing. Now, at Disney, he is spending many of his hours developing what he calls a Millennium Clock. The project itself, like so much else at Disney, may turn out to be too unwieldy to be called art, but the idea-the conception-is, amid all the Magic Mirrors and mega-puffers, a moment of ambition.

"For a long time, I've been struck by how our sense of a future is shrinking all the time," Hillis told me. 'When I was a little kid, the future meant the year 2000-all our expectations and dreams were built around that date. Now, thirty years later, somehow the future is still the year 2000. Part of it is the artificial barrier of the millennium, but it's also because technology is changing things so quickly. Now I think the year 2020 is almost impossible to imagine. Technology is self-creating. When I design a faster computer, it lets me create an even faster one. In science, this is called autocatalytic: every change increases the rate of change. So people are right to think they can't plan for the future the way they used to. In the Middle Ages, you could be in a cathedral and then figure that your grandchildren would finish it. Long-term projects made a kind of sense. These days, you can't imagine a three-generation project. No one believes that such a thing would remain relevant. I like the example of the oak beams in one of the dining halls at Oxford, which were put up in the sixteenth century. Several years ago, they had to replace the beams-twenty-foot oak beams, which are very hard to come by. They called the Oxford forester and asked if there were any such trees, and sure enough there were. In other words, someone thought far ahead enough to have planted the trees in the expectation of replacing the beams. You can't imagine that kind of thinking anymore. It just wouldn't occur to many people to make a centuries-long development. When you start thinking only in terms of a five-year leap-a five-year future a lot of problems become impossible. You can't worry about hunger or literacy. People give up on them. Companies plan in a way that they aren't even sure that their particular industry-their reason for being-will be around in five years. Ten years later, many Fortune 500 companies don't exist."

"The millennium stuff will pass. At first, there will be a big party, but when we're on the other side of the millennium we'll feel like there's a big blank sheet of paper in front of us, an open road, and we'll shift to more long-term thinking. The burst of technological progress will not go on forever. It feels very bad right now, because we haven't adjusted to it yet. We now have the technology that will allow for a different kind of society, but we don't have that different society yet.

"I felt what we need is a project that takes more than a century to complete. I want to build a clock: Imagine something very large-- cathedral-size, Stonehenge-size. A huge clock, whose very construction emphasizes that it will last only as long as people take care of it. It will be a clock that ticks once a year and bongs every millennium. If people keep winding it, it will last ten thousand years. One idea is to put it in the desert, and you'll have to go on a pilgrimage. I think of it as a way to keep mankind modest. No matter how hard we try, we literally cannot imagine the future."