We're Living in Oz: A Surprisingly Relevant Tale of Technology and Humanity

Long before The Wizard of Oz was the black & white defying cinema spectacle we’ve all come to know and love, it was a political allegory conceived by Frank L. Baum about the American populism that sprouted in response to the Industrial Revolution, an era when technology forever changed the human condition.?

The character we know as the Tin-Man was actually the Tin Woodsman, an industrial worker whose human attributes were replaced by machine, turning him heartless. The Scarecrow represented the American farmer, who, after being viewed for so long as “a simple, dumb hillbilly” by urbanites, began to believe it himself, unable to notice his penchant for logic and common sense. The Cowardly Lion stood in for visionary leaders who pushed reform but lost their mojo after their political efforts failed. ?

The list of metaphors in Baum’s tale goes on. And, as specific as they are to a certain time and place in American History, the underlying themes that swirl around the imaginary world he created feel piercingly relevant to our current twenty-first century relationship with technology and all the disorientation its creating, be it individual (i.e. social media addiction), political (polarization reinforced by algorithms), or economic (workers replaced by AI).

Pay No Attention to the Person Behind the Branding!

Perhaps the most meaningful metaphor for right now is the title character itself.? In an era dominated by curated selfies, #humblebrags, and hyper-edited online personas, where self-promotion isn't seen as narcissistic gaslighting but rather, simply "personal branding," the saying, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” packs a new punch.?

In the unregulated, color-enhanced, artificial landscape known as the Internet, we can all choose to live in Oz whenever we want, role playing, impulse scrolling, squashing ordinary people down to size while we experiment with imaginary monkeys.

We’re all our own version of the Wizard, pulling the levers of our grandiose projections, afraid one day others might find out that we are, in fact, mere ordinary human beings. Oz can be bright and shiny, ecstatic and colorful, but sooner or later we peer deep into the luminescent horizon and realize we’re not quite sure how to make our way back home.?

If We Only Had…

We of course know the downside of collectively choosing to live in Oz full-time. Welcome to the 2020s where our kids don’t talk to us, our politics keep playing to our internet-born outrage, and low unemployment rates are overshadowed by a sense of existential dread that the skills we spent a lifetime mastering may soon be irrelevant.?

Call me crazy, but the three longings of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Cowardly Lion seem to be eerily appropriate antidotes to our current crisis.?

A Farmer’s Brain

First and foremost, we need brains, logic, and intuition when it comes to the tiny glowing cities in our pockets. As the overwhelming evidence that they have been designed to harm and isolate continues to mount, we need to adopt a farmer’s sensibility, the confidence that while technology can make things go faster, going faster isn’t always the most prudent solution. Farmers husband their ecosystem, an art form which requires care, discretion, and common sense—the longings of the Scarecrow. Thinking wisely about technology goes beyond managing built-in features like “do not disturb,” or various parental controls. It’s an abiding knowledge that while this technology connects us, it can’t substitute the slow, close work of tending to each other on common ground. From that vantage point, a farmer can then work backwards, educating, assessing, and pruning. As the farmer-poet Wendell Berry says,?

“Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.”? ?

A Universal Basic Heart

In addition to brains, we need to resuscitate our hearts to keep humanity from rusting over. As our economy makes a massive leap toward automation over the next five years to include both blue collar and white collar jobs, we’ll need to find it within all of our competing and nuanced worldviews to collectively adopt a “universal basic morality,“ reassessing and reimagining what it means for ordinary humans to live in the real world with dignity.

“You people with hearts," have something to guide you, and need never do wrong;” the Tin Woodsman ironically explains. “But I have no heart, and so I must be very careful.”

Courage, Even When It’s Awkward

Maybe more than anything else we need courage, the nerve to make an unpopular choice when our brains and hearts tell us something isn’t working as optimally as the marketers are hyping, the nerve to call bull on the giant talking head, revealing the little man behind the curtain, realizing that its ourself. It may look like waiting longer than our kids want to hand them a smart phone, or deleting an account that isn’t making us productive, choosing to spend more time existing in private, intimate spaces despite the scary awkwardness of such a reintroduction, or traversing past the dense and shallow meme to recognize the complex soul behind it, the neighbor behind whatever flavor of flag they wave. In the words of Rilke,

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

Of course, the great farce is that the characters of Oz needed someone magical to bestow these attributes upon them in the first place, that they weren’t already preinstalled, incarnate…which brings us to a final character, the one we haven’t talked about yet.

There’s No Place Like Home.

“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” - Frank L. Baum

Dorothy eventually wakes up and recognizes she doesn’t need Oz. Everything from her midwestern sensibility to her plaid dress is a picture of the kind of grace and confidence ordinary people possess when they know they don’t need to live in any other skin than the one they showed up with. Her technicolor trip transforms her into a prophet, showing us what the right combination of brains, heart, and courage can accomplish in an age marked by synthetic escapism. “If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard,” she reconciles.?

That’s a model for change that won’t ever stop working. When we already have what we desire, even the brightest distractions can be seen clearly for what they really are. ?

Book Update!

We’re officially one week away from releasing The Forgotten Art of Being Ordinary. If you’re the early adopter type or have been a fan of my work for a while, NOW is the time to purchase a copy so it shows up on Tuesday. It’d be a big help if you could make a note to leave a review on Amazon next week as well. Grateful!?