“We Got 7 Back!” Oh, Fuck You, Walt Disney
September 16, 2023
Here’s an unpleasant truth: corporations treat us like assholes because that’s what we are.
There was a two-week period not too long ago when I could not watch ESPN on my local cable network, Spectrum. Although not a rabid college football fan by any measure, I did tune in to watch the team from my son’s school play on national television, but could not. I flipped to ESPN and it told me, in no uncertain terms, that I could go fuck myself. I was angery. A week later, I was watching something else on TV and on the corner of my screen it said “Upset Watch – Texas leads Alabama in the Fourth Quarter! Click here to watch.” I clicked there to watch, and it took me to ESPN, which told me again to go fuck myself. It seemed intentional, like an AI-generated practical joke, and I fell for it. I might as well have been Rick-Rolled.
If you were not following the situation, or more likely if you have already forgotten about it, the background is that this is part of a recurring drama that happens every few years where two big media companies, in this instance, Charter Communications, Inc. (CHTR), which is Spectrum, and The Walt Disney Company (DIS), play chicken against each other in order to extort a few extra pennies on their licensing deal. During the standoff, the channels owned by that content provider don’t work on the TV, and people get so mad that they start calling and cancelling subscriptions and otherwise stomp their feet.
I admit, part of it sounds stupid, and spoiled, and ignores the fact that there was time in my life where there were only seven channels on television plus UHF (the title of an 80's movie starring Weird Al. Of the Yankovics.) But I also know that the content that was purposely withheld was meaningful to many folks. As angery as I was, I sensed that there were a lot of good people who would be a lot more inconvenienced than me in connection with this situation. On their behalf, as a Man of the People, I became angeryer.
This wasn’t a two day thing, mind you. It turned out to be a two week thing. One day during this period, as my blood simmered on a low flame, I called my mother. During that conversation, I found the first genuine human casualty in this corporate war, the actual victim I knew was out there. She immediately lamented that she was miserable because she didn’t have Channel 7 and was unable to watch The View every morning. Channel 7 is ABC, which, like ESPN, is owned by The Walt Disney Company, a Dystopian Tyrant if there ever was one. Part of me was secretly happy about this because I don’t think The View is good for anybody not named Satan. But then she said that she was even more upset because she also couldn’t watch Jeopardy, which she watches religiously and after each episode immediately calls her sister on the phone to discuss – every night. Her sister is my 86 year old aunt, and their daily conversation about Jeopardy is by now a ritual. I don’t know what they specifically talk about when they discuss the latest game of Jeopardy (“Did you get Final Jeopardy? No? Me neither.”), but this is a ritual that may well be keeping certain people alive.
And my mother wasn’t alone. For example, I know a serious college football fan who was so irate and helpless about missing games that he “spent several hours” on the phone trying to get through to Spectrum, “without satisfaction.” What in the blazes did he think was going to happen? When was the last time you dialed a customer service number and felt better after the call than you did before? “Without satisfaction” indeed. Did I mention that all of these good people pay their cable bills on time every month?
There has been a lot written about this corporate dispute among smart people who follow these things, and I have admittedly read none of it. I don’t have to. I am content with the Knowledge-slash-Intuition (and maybe I’m wrong, but probably not) that both companies were negotiating to maximize their respective financial positions in what boils down to a zero sum game, but I also know that both sides can most-assuredly go fuck themselves.
Despite the reality that these incentives are built into the fabric of our capitalist system, each of these entities are nonetheless managed by human beings, human beings with free agency who are therefore complicit in what amounts to a moral sin. Why? Because the leverage they use against each other in a situation like this is our level of actual misery. They knowingly use the disruption in the lives of my elderly mother and her infirm sister as currency in their little business negotiation. It is a tried and true strategy, employed by autocrats throughout history, to extract as much as possible from the general welfare while keeping a steady eye on whether a revolt is imminent. The French royal family used it to questionable effect, crystallized in the immortal words of the wife of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette: “Let them watch the Price is Right!”
Now that the stalemate has ended, predictably with no great revelations about the future of entertainment, the moral of the story that most people will take away is that there must be a better and more efficient package of entertainment offerings that will avoid this happening to me again. Fair enough. But that misses the larger story. The larger story is that this happened because we’re all a bunch of assholes.
We are not assholes because we still have cable. We are not assholes because we did something stupid or wrong. We are assholes because that’s simply the role we play in the world today. We are consumers. We buy stuff, and that stuff is controlled by corporations, and while it might seem like we have a semblance of control and dignity in this system—you know, supply and demand, the customer is always right—this is an illusion. If the corporations that control all the stuff regard us as assholes, guess what? On some level, that’s exactly what we are.
It’s no coincidence that The Walt Disney Company was in the middle of this. No one knows better than The Walt Disney Company that we’re all just a bunch of assholes. Look around you on the cattle car entering The Magic Kingdom. Laugh and point all you want, and then look in the mirror. Hello, Asshole. They know they are reliably able to coax a hundred thousand anuses into their dilapidated theme parks every day without batting an eye. We might be able to choose among many delightful entertainment options in our day-to-day lives in 2023, but this Disney fiasco was a reminder that the price we pay for all that stuff is that we are and will always be at their mercy, and they will continue to treat us like the assholes that we are as long as we let them.
Earlier this week, my aunt celebrated her 87th birthday. She made it. Despite warnings to the contrary, she somehow survived without The View for two weeks. I called her to wish her a happy birthday and she breathlessly told the story about when she first found out that the corporate stalemate had ended. She was triumphant, like she was reliving when she first learned of the moon landing or the fall of the Soviet Union. “Your mother called me and said, ‘We got 7 back!’ I couldn’t believe it! I turned on the TV, and there it was. The View was on!” Heroic shit right there, felt like D-Day all over again.
On 14 July 1789, an angry mob stormed the prison fortress in Paris known as the Bastille, which resulted in, among other notable outcomes, seven prisoners being freed and the heads of the local governors being displayed on pikes. This revolutionary fervor intensified over the coming months and led to several years of terror and all-out mayhem, including over 10,000 executed, among which was our dear old autocrat, Louis XVI, and of course his wife. In retrospect, their strategy for dealing with the masses might not have ended exactly as they intended, but I assure you The Walt Disney Company will be just fine. Disney knows the truth. They just don’t make angry mobs like they used to.