Darkbeer
01-23-2003, 01:44 PM
Q&A: Cory Doctorow Science-fiction novelist on Disney, Whuffie, Napster and what's wrong with San Francisco (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/01/23/cdoctorow.DTL) - SF Gate.com, 1/23/03
Cory Doctorow, author of the Science-fiction book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" (http://www.craphound.com/down/) , which is available free on the internet due to his use of the Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0) discusses his obsession with Disney.
QuikQuote: Yeah, I'm a little obsessed. There's so much to love and so much to hate about Disney World and about the Disney corporation that it's the perfect obsessive material for someone who wants to mine the cultural space.
There's lots you can say about [Disney chairman and CEO Michael] Eisner that isn't very flattering, but the one thing you can say is that under Eisner's leadership, there has been a definite focus on innovation, at least in Florida. At Disneyland, unfortunately, they brought in these idiot McKinsey consultants, they stopped spending any money on R&D and they bought all these off-the-shelf midway rides, with Ferris wheels, for the California Adventure. They built this incredibly dreary, boring, banal theme park that is like an extremely clean but less fun version of the Santa Monica pier, and, unsurprisingly, it's a ghost town. You could fire a cannon down the main drag without hitting a tourist.
Cory Doctorow, author of the Science-fiction book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" (http://www.craphound.com/down/) , which is available free on the internet due to his use of the Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0) discusses his obsession with Disney.
QuikQuote: Yeah, I'm a little obsessed. There's so much to love and so much to hate about Disney World and about the Disney corporation that it's the perfect obsessive material for someone who wants to mine the cultural space.
There's lots you can say about [Disney chairman and CEO Michael] Eisner that isn't very flattering, but the one thing you can say is that under Eisner's leadership, there has been a definite focus on innovation, at least in Florida. At Disneyland, unfortunately, they brought in these idiot McKinsey consultants, they stopped spending any money on R&D and they bought all these off-the-shelf midway rides, with Ferris wheels, for the California Adventure. They built this incredibly dreary, boring, banal theme park that is like an extremely clean but less fun version of the Santa Monica pier, and, unsurprisingly, it's a ghost town. You could fire a cannon down the main drag without hitting a tourist.