May The Market Forces Be With You

Back in May, a YouTuber posted a four hour long video dissecting what went wrong with Disney's Star Wars hotel. A four hour long YouTube of Jenny Nicholson just talking about the problems of a failed theme-hotel experience project. It has 11 million views.

The Star Wars hotel served 71,000 guests.

Now sure, it's not a fair comparison - a Star Wars hotel cost thousands of dollars for a two night stay. That was one of the criticisms - even at Disney-level premiums, this experience was a huge rip-off, whereas watching a YouTube video only costs whatever time you are willing to spend watching it. And also, the hotel can only accommodate 370 people at a time, whereas any number of people can click on a link.

But I think it is still informative. The idea of a deeply immersive ultra-premium experience set in the Star Wars universe seems like a no-brainer. There has got to be demand for this sort of thing - to engage in getting as close to actually being in Star Wars as reasonably possible. It is one of the biggest and most iconic franchises in the world and has a very large and very devoted fan base.

But it is less than niche when compared to the thing that Jenny Nicholson gets around to talking about. And that is the garbage that capitalism and the equity fund/MBA approach to delivering services is inflicting on us. The 2023 Word of the Year from the American Dialect Association was that wonderful term coined by Cory Doctorow - "enshittification".

We're all mad as hell about enshittification. The gradual monetization of things we've taken for granted - all of the service fees for stuff that should just be included. In Galactic Starcruiser's case - there was added insult in that charging more for all of the "optional extras" still resulted in a blistering base price. Nicholson nails this buy noting that having extra charge add-ons for an already very expensive premium experience just undercuts the thing at its heart. Your extra special super expensive vacation has stuff you are going to miss out on. The money guys probably thought of this as a feature as it would naturally push the upsell by itself instead of just undermining the whole experience completely.

But we're stuck in this weird Catch-22. Discourse about enshittification is always going to be niche and marginal despite their being massive demand for it. Because that message will not have access to platforms where the business model is enshittification. If we want to stop enshittification, we need a non-enshittified platform to talk about it but we won't get that platform until we talk about it.

Which sadly gets us to the point where everyone knows what's wrong - we all know what enshittification looks like - but nothing gets done about it and it all gets normalized. That's just the way it is. Some things will never change? Don't you believe it - it's going to just get worse.