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.Folk and rock music, interspersed with snatches of televisioncommercials, street noises and a lecture by or about Marshall McLuhan fill the ears.As themusic grows more excited, guests and guides begin to dance on the platforms and thecarpeted white walkways that connect them.Bubbles drift down from machines in theceiling.Hostesses float through, spraying a variety of fragrances into the air.Lights changecolor and random images wrap themselves around the walls, guests and guides.The moodshifts from cool at first to warm, friendly, and mildly erotic.Still primitive both artistically and technologically, Cerebrum is a pale forerunner ofthe "$25,000,000 'super' Environmental Entertainment Complex" its builders enthusiasticallytalk of creating some day.Whatever their artistic merit, experiments such as these point to farmore sophisticated enclave-building in the future.Today's young artists and environmentalentrepreneurs are performing research and development for the psych-corps of tomorrow.LIVE ENVIRONMENTSKnowledge gained for this research will permit the construction of fantastic simulations.Butit will also lead to complex live environments that subject the customer to significant risksand rewards.The African safari today is a colorless example.Future experience designerswill, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but forexperiential payoffs a date with a lovely and willing lady if he wins, perhaps a day insolitary confinement if he loses.As the stakes rise, more imaginative payoffs andpunishments will be designed.A loser may have to serve (by voluntary pre-agreement) as a "slave" to a winner forseveral days.A winner may be rewarded by ten free minutes of electronic pleasure-probingof his brain.A player may risk flogging or its psychological equivalent participation in aday-long session during which winners are permitted to work off their aggressions andhostilities by sneering, shouting at, reviling, or otherwise attacking the ego of the loser.High rollers may play to win a free heart or lung transplant at some later date, should itprove to be necessary.Losers may have to forego a kidney.Such payoffs and punishmentsmay be escalated in intensity and varied endlessly.Experiential designers will study thepages of Krafft-Ebing or the Marquis de Sade for ideas.Only imagination, technologicalcapability, and the constraints of a generally relaxed morality limit the possibilities.Experiential gambling cities will rise to overshadow Las Vegas or Deauville, combining in asingle place some of the features of Disneyland, the World's Fair, Cape Kennedy, the MayoClinic, and the honky-tonks of Macao.*Once again, present-day developments foreshadow the future.Thus certain Americantelevision programs, such as The Dating Game, already pay players off in experientialrewards, as does the contest recently discussed in the Swedish Parliament.In this contest, apornographic magazine awarded one of its readers a week in Majorca with one of its"topless" models.A Conservative M.P.challenged the propriety of such goings-on.Presumably, he felt better when he was assured by the Finance Minister, Gunnar Sträng, thatthe transaction was taxable.Simulated and non-simulated experiences will also be combined in ways that willsharply challenge man's grasp of reality.In Ray Bradbury's vivid novel, Fahrenheit 451,suburban couples desperately save their money to enable them to buy three-wall or four-wallvideo sets that permit them to enter into a kind of televised psycho-drama.They becomeactor-participants in soap operas that continue for weeks or months.Their participation inthese stories is highly involving.We are, in fact, beginning to move toward the actualdevelopment of such "interactive" films with the help of advanced communicationstechnology.The combination of simulations and "reals" will vastly multiply the number andvariety of experiential products.But the great psych-corps of tomorrow will not only sell individual, discreteexperiences.They will offer sequences of experiences so organized that their veryjuxtaposition with one another will contribute color, harmony or contrast to lives that lackthese qualities.Beauty, excitement, danger or delicious sensuality will be programmed toenhance one another.By offering such experiential chains or sequences, the psych-corps(working closely, no doubt, with community mental health centers) will provide partialframeworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured.In effect, theywill say: "Let us plan (part of) your life for you." In the transient, change-filled world oftomorrow, that proposition will find many eager takers.The packaged experiences offered in the future will reach far beyond the imagination ofthe average consumer, filling the environment with endless novelties.Companies will viewith one another to create the most outlandish, most gratifying experiences.Indeed, some ofthese experiences as in the case of topless Swedish models will even reach beyondtomorrow's broadened boundaries of social acceptability.They may be offered to the publiccovertly by unlicensed, underground psych-corps.This will simply add the thrill of"illicitude" to the experience itself.(One very old experiential industry has traditionally operated covertly: prostitution.Many other illegal activities also fit within the experience industry.For the most part,however, all these reveal a paucity of imagination and a lack of technical resources that willbe remedied in the future.They are trivial compared with the possibilities in a society thatwill, by the year 2000 or sooner, be armed with robots, advanced computers, personality-altering drugs, brain-stimulating pleasure probes, and similar technological goodies.)The diversity of novel experiences arrayed before the consumer will be the work ofexperience-designers, who will be drawn from the ranks of the most creative people in thesociety.The working motto of this profession will be: "If you can't serve it up real, find avicarious substitute.If you're good, the customer will never know the difference!" Thisimplied blurring of the line between the real and the unreal will confront the society withserious problems, but it will not prevent or even slow the emergence of the "psyche-serviceindustries" and "psych-corps." Great globe-girdling syndicates will create super-Disneylandsof a variety, scale, scope, and emotional power that is hard for us to imagine.We can thus sketch the dim outlines of the super-industrial economy, the post-serviceeconomy of the future.Agriculture and the manufacture of goods will have become economicbackwaters, employing fewer and fewer people.Highly automated, the making and growingof goods will be relatively simple.The design of new goods and the process of coating themwith stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, willchallenge the ingenuity of tomorrow's best and most resourceful entrepreneurs.The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the designof psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy andmoney [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]