Thread by @doctorow

Three weeks ago, I kicked off a new series of weekly essays in my @Medium column, the start of a long series on what we can learn about aggregate demand management and scarcity from the history of queues at Disney theme parks.

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The combination of the pandemic and the climate emergency have entered an era of supply shocks and shortages. The pandemic-related snags will eventually stabilize (for certain values of "eventually") but the climate-driven problems will only get worse.

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Theme parks may seem like an odd lens to look at scarcity, demand, rationing and expectations through, but I think they're a surprisingly reliable microcosm for understanding these issues.

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In part, that's because of their seeming triviality - as with science fiction and other pop culture, theme parks have served as incubators for weird ideas that might have been shot down in higher-stakes environments.

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And, as with sf and other pop culture, theme parks are anything but trivial: the desire to be immersed in a fantastic narrative is as old as the first story told before the first fire, and immersive built environments have a storied history - from palaces to escape rooms.

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Part I is "Are We Having Fun Yet?" and it traces the true origins of Disneyland - not just the official tale of Walt Disney's search for a place where parents and kids can play together - but also a place where Walt could escape his own company.

gen.medium.com/b-are-we-havin…

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Part II, "Boredom and its discontents," looks at the history of ticketing strategies for Disneyland, drawing - among other things - on a rare original Disneyland prospectus that I posted online after Glenn Beck bought the only copy and locked it up.

doctorow.medium.com/boredom-and-it…

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Part III is "Now you’ve got two problems." It looks at the psychological impact of different demand-management strategies - the problems that cropped up when Disney management "solved" its earlier issues with all-you-can-eat, single-price admissions.

doctorow.medium.com/now-youve-got-…

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I've just come back from a week in Walt Disney World, celebrating my 50th birthday. It was fascinating to spend a week in the park at this moment, when crowds are surging and management has removed its Fastpass systems. Next week's installment will dig into this.

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Future installments will look at the problems with adding more capacity - building more rides draws bigger crowds, and lines get longer, not shorter - and the tension between profit, service delivery, and competition.

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I'll also be discussing some of the paternalistic techniques Disney uses to manage its queues - like falsifying the expected wait-times as a means of discouraging people from joining lines - and what democratic alternatives for the "real world" might look like.

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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/agg…