In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wizard isn’t a wizard at all. He’s a carnival trickster. When the main characters discover that his sorcery is nothing but smoke and mirrors, they denounce him as a “humbug” - an evocative term we don’t hear much anymore. Today, as we are bombarded by a whirlwind of technology that promises miracles greater than those of Oz, perhaps we should take a page from their book.
The sad truth is that we aren’t the heroes of the story: resolute Dorothy, wise Scarecrow, compassionate Tin Man, brave Lion ... No, that’s not us.
We are the Munchkins.
Like the gullible denizens of Oz, we have surrendered our autonomy to charlatans who, even if they mean well (a big “if”), are only capable of providing diversion and false hope.
Whether in Oz or our own world, the work of humbugs is insubstantial at best and highly dangerous at worst. After the Wizard orders a band of misfits led by a child to kill the Wicked Witch - a tyrant whose powers, unlike his own, are genuine - he is surprised to see them return alive. To appease their justifiable indignation, he provides them with cheap gifts that are crude approximations of what they actually wanted. Likewise, when our own humbugs aren’t pitting us against each other with algorithmically-optimized divisive rhetoric, they serve up content that capitalizes on our desires without actually satisfying them.
In many ways, the tricks haven’t changed; they’ve just been given a fresh coat of paint. In the 1939 film, the Emerald City is green, but in L. Frank Baum’s original novel, the veridian hue was another of the Wizard’s tricks: residents and visitors to the city had green-tinted spectacles fastened to their heads at all times. Today’s humbugs would call this Augmented Reality. Unwittingly, Baum anticipated the conceit of wearable-enabled AR two centuries before people started walking into traffic to catch virtual Pokémon.
Even without chasing imaginary creatures, most of us spend a lot of time roaming the digital carnival staged by humbugs - gaping at the freaks, leering at the dancers, and being relentlessly pitched by peddlers and barkers. We come for the sideshow, but at every turn we are accosted by hucksters and snake-oil salesmen hawking contrivances and miracle cures. They offer us health and happiness in exchange for the time and resources we would otherwise direct towards things and people that are genuinely important to us.
But wait ... That’s not a good deal. It’s not even an honest deal. In the “attention economy,” the carnies and quacks get what they want from us, and we’re left with nothing but wasted days and empty pill bottles.
Worst of all, the humbugs are now in charge. In Baum’s day, they would show up, scam whomever they could, and then roll on down the road before they were tarred and feathered. But our modern mountebanks have exploited our curiosity, insecurity, and vices so effectively that, just like the false wizard, they’ve been able to move in and take over. Thanks to the endless stream of “engagement” they provide, we’re too preoccupied to notice their predation.
The humbugs have built a world of illusion so enthralling that we’ve forgotten what reality is, or how to function within it. We, not Dorothy, are the ones lost in a land of make-believe.
Munchkins though we are, most of us recognize that there are invisible puppeteers pushing buttons and pulling levers to bring us captivating illusions. We know, and yet we’ve been so thoroughly bamboozled that we don’t object to the sham. We don’t want to take off our green glasses to see that the Emerald City is a drab shade of gray, and that there are no Pokémon to catch.
So, instead, we continue to lose ourselves while focusing on the unattainable mirage of social media. We fall for the scam of “virtual” experiences that divert us from real ones. We squander our irreplaceable energy on addictive media platforms designed and built for the benefit of swindlers who harvest our attention as a cash crop.
Haven’t we had enough?
Isn’t it time to stop being exploited by humbugs?
Once exposed, the Wizard readily admitted he was a fraud. Yet he was still able to con Dorothy and her friends into accepting his gifts. We need to be smarter than that. We need to look up from our phones, turn our backs on the hucksters, and reclaim our reality. That means real experiences, real connections, and figuring out who we really are.
It is there, not in the empty promises of self-serving humbugs, but in the unmediated, screen-free moments in which we experience life as human beings, that we will find the true magic this world contains.