A recent New Yorker piece about a new Star Wars-themed LARP created by Disney explores what experiences keep bringing people back to theme parks. I mean, check out this LARP! What the what!
While I have seen the Star Wars, this is exactly the moment to tell you that I’ve never been to Disneyland. As much as I kicked and screamed as a 90s kid, intoxicated by my classmates’ Lion King lunch boxes, my immigrant parents never caved in to a trip to Magic Kingdom. They had escaped communism in the early 80s after spending the first thirty-some years of their lives behind the Iron Curtain idolizing America for its freedom. At the time, the USA was the absolute opposite of the authoritarian oppression their daily lives in Poland were rooted in. If you wanted to leave the country, you had to go ask for your passport, which was locked up at the police station. You got interviewed for your reasons for needing to travel abroad, and more often than not, they didn’t give you your passport. The end. The Iron Curtain was shut, simple as that. After achieving freedom in Canada, though, my parents still didn’t see Disneyland as a worthy adventure - I guess the Disneyland part of America didn’t equal freedom to them. And so, my perspective on Disneyland is objectively skewed but read on, I’ve got a point.
Referring to Imagineers, which is what Disney calls its designers and researchers, the LARP piece describes a Beauty and the Beast themed experience at the Magic Kingdom, where guests participate in scenes from Beauty & the Beast with Belle, in a place called “New Fantasyland”:
The experience, Enchanted Tales with Belle, was surprisingly popular. There are complex animatronics involved—Lumiere, the candlestick, stands on a mantel, bending his metal waist as he tells a story—but the primary appeal is the interaction with Belle. “Our live characters are the most important part of our parks and resorts; they’re the enablers,” Scott Trowbridge, a senior Imagineer, told an interviewer shortly before New Fantasyland opened. “We’ll probably replace our Imagineers with robots before we replace our cast members,” he said.
I’ve never seen Beauty and the Beast for the same reasons I’ve never been to Disneyland (someone once called me a pop-culture-know-nothing and they weren’t wrong). Nevertheless it seems to me that the makers of these extremely intricate imaginary worlds, created for pure entertainment and seemingly succeeding at a magical transportation to another place, need people to interact with other people in order to succeed with the fairy tale. Visitors just don’t relate to the animatronic Lumiere like they can to the actor who plays Belle. I can only imagine that nothing you see when in Disneyland is an accident, that it is all completely controlled. Props have been placed and sets have been painted and characters are dressed and trained to exacting precision, all to manufacture the scaffolding of a dream.
Yes, the actor who plays Belle is hired by a giant corporation to play a character that’s trademarked to kingdom come and strictly kept to script. But she’s also the real person adding the je-ne-sais-quoi to the whole fake environment Disney has built. Actually, je-sais-quoi: it’s the human craft of acting, or maybe just breathing and having a pulse, adding to the experience of interacting with her. The actor makes the dream truly real. I totally get why Disney will never get rid of the human touch - they know where authenticity comes from, they know what people need to be comfortable in la la land.
The social media platforms, on the other hand, have gotten rid of the humans. Much like Disneyland, social media platforms aren’t anything other than carefully constructed worlds, and they are unable to operate outside of strict boundaries set by people who design them. We know why the platforms don’t really give us what we want out of social media. Social media feeds are entirely controlled by algorithms, and lately have been serving us all sorts of junk content we don’t want to see. Our friends are missing from our feeds, the photos we want to see are gone, and it’s raining influencers in dreamland.
And who is the Imagineer behind the Instagram world? Who’s the puppeteer of the digital space that occupies so much of our minds these days? Why it’s Head of Instagram Adam Mossari, and he’s getting draggggggged this week for destroying Instagram and for emphasizing that “photos are part of Instagram’s heritage” and “we’re making video the future”. Read his tweet’s responses and feel some major satisfaction - the annoyance is universal! Cathartic parody videos abound everywhere (thanks for sharing these w me, Anne and Jim!)
Can someone tell these technocrats that your users aren’t your employees and you can’t just tell them what to do and what to want? Meta is not paying us a salary to sit and watch things on Instagram. We don’t owe them a thing. A delicious quote from Delia Cai on whole thing (via Today in Tabs):
But if we citizens of Instagram were looking for an apology on the pivot to video, we were in for a reality check. “I need to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time,” Mosseri warned. “So we’re going to have to lean into that shift.” Tech-exec talk for “Yeah, so, I’m going to keep doing me, sorry to you. It’s actually so toxic you’re even mad right now.”
A social network without any users is called a failure (who even remembers Google+), and what do you know: it turns out tech execs need us all more than we need them.
So I guess I’ve never been to Disneyland, but it’s been a real Disneyland in my social media life up until Lumiere took over the show. Will someone ever put the human Belle back? And if they do, I wonder if I will even want to take part in the social media LARP anymore? I’m surprised and elated to realize that maybe it’s too late. The spell, at least for me, has been broken.
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