Even Disney Can Fall Into the Dark Age

I should warn you up front: I am a Disney Adult, and I am not the least bit sorry about it.

If you grew up like me, you understand. I was raised by a single mom who worked herself to the bone, and every couple of years she scraped together enough to take me to Disneyland. When the real world got too heavy — and it got heavy a lot — we'd duck into a dark theater and let a Disney movie carry us somewhere kinder for ninety minutes. That wasn't escapism for us. It was oxygen.

So when I tell you Disney shaped me, I mean it down to my career. I went into UX and product because, somewhere along the way, I learned what the gold standard of experience design actually feels like. I learned it standing on Main Street, U.S.A., where every trash can, every sightline, every note of piped-in music exists to protect one fragile, beautiful thing: the illusion. Disney even shows up in my dissertation. That's not a flex. That's a confession.

I'm telling you all of this so you understand the spirit in which I say the next part. This isn't a hit piece from someone who hates the brand. It's a love letter that turned, mid-sentence, into something closer to grief.

Because in my last post I introduced a pattern I've been calling the Dunning-Kruger Dark Age — the slow erosion of shared reality, and the way it quietly breaks the feedback loops product teams rely on. I argued it shows up at the user level as motivation without ability, and at the org level as ability without motivation.

Then Disney went and gave me the cleanest case study I've ever seen.

The Day the Spell Broke

The day after Charlie Kirk was killed, I was in the park. And there, on Main Street, the flag was lowered to half-mast.

Now, here's the thing most people don't know — the thing that makes this worse, not better, for someone who studies this stuff. The flag flying over Main Street, U.S.A. is famously not a regulation flag. As I understand it, it's missing a stripe or a star, deliberately, so that Disney isn't bound by the U.S. Flag Code. No mandatory half-mast on days of national mourning. No external rules dictating when it rises or falls. It's a prop in the most sacred sense — a piece of the spell.

The whole reason that flag exists in altered form is so the illusion never has to break. So that Main Street stays in its bubble, untouched by whatever ugliness is happening out beyond the berm.

They had no obligation to lower it. They chose to.

And they chose to lower it for a man who once said women lack "the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously." A man whose worldview is roughly the opposite of every inclusive, generous value I associated with this company my whole life.

I'd love to tell you I handled it with grace. Instead, I found myself in line at City Hall — the actual in-park guest relations spot — with about a dozen other visibly rattled Disney Adults, all there to file a complaint. We were a strange little congregation. Grown adults in Mickey ears, voices shaking slightly, trying to explain to a very patient cast member why a flag had ruined our day.

Let me be clear, because this matters: Kirk's death was shocking, and I feel genuinely terrible for his kids. Nobody in that line was celebrating. What we couldn't understand was simpler and stranger. Why would Disney think their fans wanted this? Who, exactly, did they imagine they were comforting? They had the one piece of theming explicitly designed to stay above the fray — and they used it to wade right in.

Then They Doubled Down

If the flag was a stumble, what came next was a faceplant.

Shortly after, ABC — which Disney owns — pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air. His suspension followed remarks he made about the response to Kirk's killing, and it arrived hours after the FCC chair publicly threatened action against the network and its parent company. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," he reportedly said.

Disney chose the easy way. Then watched the backlash roll in. Then kept choosing it.

The Disney+ cancellations spiked. Hollywood figures called it censorship. And a whole lot of fans — the inclusive, free-speech-loving, "the magic is for everyone" fans Disney has spent a century cultivating — felt the floor shift.

So let's count the moves, because the sequence is the story:

1. They violated their own experience pattern by puncturing the Main Street bubble — the one thing their design philosophy exists to protect.

2. They ignored the in-park backlash from the exact superfans standing in line at City Hall to tell them, gently, that this hurt.

3. They doubled down with the Kimmel suspension, escalating a values fumble into a national one.

That's not a single bad call. That's a trajectory.

Running the Dark Age Diagnostic

Here's where my product brain finally elbows my broken heart out of the way.

Remember the framework. At the organizational level, the Dunning-Kruger Dark Age looks like high ability, low motivation — a company perfectly capable of seeing the truth, profoundly unmotivated to act on it.

Does any company on Earth know its audience better than Disney? They've spent a hundred years studying us. They have the data, the sentiment analysis, the obsessive guest research, the cast members who literally stood there absorbing our complaints in real time. Their ability to understand what their fans want is not in question. It might be the highest in the entire experience business.

What failed was motivation.

When the choice came down to "honor what our audience actually values" versus "appease external political pressure and a regulator," the org didn't lack the information. It lacked the will to let that information win. The data spoke. They declined to listen — not because they couldn't hear it, but because hearing it was inconvenient.

That's textbook drift. In the Health-Driven Operating Model I keep coming back to, you can watch an organization slide from Aligned (signals shape decisions) to Drift (signals are gathered but selectively applied) to Detached (signals are overridden entirely, and success is declared rather than demonstrated). Disney just speedran all three in about a week. The signal — your most loyal fans are standing at City Hall begging you not to do this — was gathered, then waved off, then contradicted with an even bigger move.

This is what the Dark Age does, even to the best. It's not that the truth disappears. It's that the truth stops being allowed to matter.

About Those Disney Adults

And here's the part that should haunt the people who made these calls.

The fans they overrode are not casual. We are the opposite of casual. The numbers on Disney Adults are genuinely a little unhinged — said with love, from inside the glass house.

A LendingTree report found that 24% of people who visited Disney borrowed money to do it. Among parents with kids under 18, that climbs to 45%, with those parents borrowing an average of $1,983 per trip. One couple reportedly took on roughly $70,000 in debt, partly to fund Disney trips. Another fan blew through $15,000 in savings — plus a grand on a credit card — even while having free park entry as a perk.

I'm not holding these numbers up to mock anyone. I'm holding them up because they're the loudest possible evidence of trust. These are people who borrow against their futures to stand on your Main Street. They are not a market segment. They are a congregation.

And you don't preserve a congregation by quietly betting they won't notice when you break the spell. You don't keep the most devoted, debt-laden, ride-or-die fanbase in entertainment by assuming they'll swallow a values flip because the churros are still warm.

The magic was never the flag, or the fireworks, or the perfectly weathered paint on a building that's only one story tall but tricks your eye into thinking it's three. The magic was the promise — that inside the berm, the company shared your better instincts and would protect them fiercely.

What I Actually Want

I don't want Disney canceled. I'm not building a bonfire out of my ears.

I want the company that taught me what great looks like to act like it remembers. I want them to run their own diagnostic and ask the only question that counts in a Dark Age: Were we incapable of knowing what our fans valued — or just unwilling to act on it?

We both know the answer. The ability was never the problem. It never is, with them.

So here's my move, and maybe yours too. The next time your organization knows the right thing and does the convenient thing anyway, name it out loud. Call it drift. Call it the Dark Age. Because the first step out is admitting you could see the signal the whole time — you just decided it didn't get a vote.

Disney can find its way back. They wrote the book on second-act redemption arcs, after all. I'll be standing on Main Street, ears on, hoping they read it again.

I just wish they hadn't made me complain in line at City Hall to prove a point I already knew was true.

Main Street at half-mast — and for the first time in a long time, the magic gave way to something smaller; Walt would’ve been ashamed.