I dislike the Walt Disney Company because of how self aggrandizing it is. The executives act as if there’s something special about it because it’s Disney, as if it’s so important and so whimsical by the mere fact of its existence that they just have to pat themselves on the back for granting us the privilege of patronizing it. I don’t fall for the whole “Most Magical Place on Earth™“ mentality; it’s all a facade, it’s fake, it’s hollow, it’s completely disingenuous. If you know how the sausage is made, if you know how the executives’ minds work and how they try to groom the company’s image to be as marketable and inoffensive as possible, you can’t help but feeling like it’s Stepford Incorporated; all smiles, with nothing behind the eyes.
They worship an imaginary version of their dead founder, treating him as though he were some perfect Renaissance man, God’s gift to the entertainment industry, when he was a cutthroat, conniving, bigoted capitalist from the start. I can’t get behind the company culture, I can’t pretend like it’s some benign entity that just wants to make people happy; it’s a soulless money vacuum that seeks to limit creativity by monopolizing the industry and funneling everything through itself. Gotta make sure everything is in line with The Brand™, don’t want to do anything that’s Off Brand™, wouldn’t want The Brand™ to appear sub-optimal to the investors.
The Walt Disney Company is single-handedly responsible for destroying the concept of the public domain; Congress will just keep extending copyright law to keep the Mouse happy, and nothing will ever become public domain again. “The Mouse” doesn’t even exist, it’s just a drawing; the corporate entity itself is made up of a bunch of conservative billionaires in suits with names and faces, but we act like it’s some omnipotent, omniscient, omnivorous being that’s beyond control or comprehension. Like it’s just some force of nature, an unchanging part of the universe, a vital cog in the machinery of reality that has always been there and always must be there. It’s gotten to the point where if you critique the company structure, people will jump to its defense and call you out as a hipster who only hates it because it’s popular. “Hating Disney is not a personality trait, Scrooge. Lighten up. I’m gonna go give them free advertising on my YouTube channel!”
I’m sick to death of it. Someone stop the Disneyworld, I want to get off.
