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I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
I'm realizing slowly but surely that most of what is afflicting Disney isn't ideology itself but sheer incompetence of people that run the company, they just get to use the ideology as a shield for their inability. Also because of the mechanics of ESG(so they are funded on arbitrary ideological metrics) and bad media analyst company like Parrot Analytics using social media "engagement" as a success metric not the sentiment. So Disney can shove ideology to pump the ESG numbers and when the audience notices the bullshit they go on social media complain about it, we get response from culture warriors calling them everything bad under the sun, and Parrot Analytics claims it a success because people talking about it. So the incompetent people that decides on all of this get to keep their job because it doesn't affect the investments and they have an analytics company claiming success on something else than if they audience actually liked the content or not.
I suggest an amendment to a popular adage :
It is not incompetent of Disney middle-managers to care about DEI and ESG. It is intentional. It is as malicious as any well-intentioned actions that constitute the road to hell. "It's not malice when the good guys do it", sounds fairly close to what a Tankie might say. And you never want to start sounding like a Tankie.
I have no claim of speaking for ordinary people. But in light of recent events DEI and ESG is failing the messaging for ordinary people. Nobody is watching new star wars except for notable exceptions that have good story telling in it. Like the two first seasons of The Mandalorian and now recently Andor. Like the rest of it could be "making money hand over fist" too, but they insist on weird messaging instead so people don't watch it! That is the only incompetence that I'm talking about. According to meager public data on viewership and online sentiment they are not being watched, and it is possible that it would be so much better without the "weird stuff".
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Oh come on! Your whole shtick here from the start, including your username, was "it's all just incompetence and mundane market forces, guys!"
The ideology creates incompetence though. One of the culture war fronts was woke culture's hostility to meritocracy.
It's almost like this is exactly what ESG was specifically designed for.
It's not incompetence at all. Disney has portions of the company which are basically money printers, and this money is deliberately used in service of pushing the ideology of the woke culture warriors controlling the company.
Where does it make money? They are in discussions on selling theme parks outside of the US, toy licensing is cratering because the action figures are collecting dust on the shelves, they picked a fight with the UK over the terms of Disney+ streaming (which is not profitable btw) and the box office keeps on bombing.
They're making money somewhere. A few billion dollars a year net income currently, on 80 billion a year revenue.
But that's not to say there's nothing for them to worry about. Going into 2019 they were topping $10B/y income, which had been smoothly climbing for a decade, on $60B/y revenue. They had a shock during the pandemic, but it doesn't seem to have been the initial problem and they don't seem to be recovering any further from it. They're making a fifth of what they'd have hoped for from a straight extrapolation of 2018 numbers, and they've got to be freaking out about whatever's gone awry.
I don't know if "money printers ... deliberately used in service of pushing the ideology" is the right explanation. I suppose it would fit the "revenues and gross profits are still fine; operating income tanked" data, if ideology-pushing-overhead metastasized somehow? But accounting is trickier than you'd think, especially at this scale. I'd be unsurprised to find out there was just something that went wonky in their depreciation/amortization numbers. The most interesting thing is the timing, I think.
Everything since the pandemic might be explained by the worldwide roller coaster of consumption and interest rate changes ... but Disney's operating income started to flatten out as early as 2016 and started to clearly decline in 2019...
Accounting can be tricky and if it comes from Hollywood it is Hollywood accounting where surprisingly many movies are booked as losses in the books. It is not as cut and dry that is why I use examples from headlines rather than the annual report, there is trouble brewing in the horizon... especially from the stuff that cost a lot of money that nobody watches! There is an accounting reason for pulling Willow of Disney+ so shortly after the premier, but the exact reason for it well... I'm not an accountant. Disneys troubles has been a constant in the headlines recent months and I'm trying to speculate on it.
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https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2023/02/2022-Annual-Report.pdf
Starting page 67. Revenue of $82.7 billion, net income of $3.5 billion. They are making money hand over fist.
That's about a 4% annualized return, only 'good' because the stock market tanked that year. But it's still not terribly exciting given the built-in risk of losing your shirt running any sort of entertainment company, even a tbtf one like Disney, and given their relative box-office dominance it seems beyond underwhelming. If I was a major shareholder in a the titan of the industry, I'd want to know why they weren't crushing it!
4% net profit. It's only ~2% annual return. Even after their share price tanked, $DIS market cap is still $160B.
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Why did they layoff staff then? https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/ to make more money so they can fund more activism?
presumably their costs were greater than loss of profits
(or it was a bad idea but some manager benefitted personally)
Yeah but the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't what was on the books in 2022 but what is going to be on the books now. We don't know how the annual report for 2023 is going to look like but if the headlines and layoffs are any indication it is not going to be as good as 2022.
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Yes that is the shtick, give me an example where is there more to it then! I want to have the shtick tested, it is the point of me having it! But it is not only mundane market forces, there is a bit of corruption and dare I say conspiracies there, the reason why I'm claiming the incompetence angle here is that it is obvious in income of the company that there is no customers for what they are selling, why are they still persisting with it?
So the incompetent don't join the ideology because they see that it hostile to meritocracy and use it to avoid becoming competent? Can we reverse the cause and effect of your statement?
So if we have a sketch on how the ESG system is designed: Who benefits if they aren't making profits by doing this?
Right, that's fine, but my point is that it's not "realizing slowly but surely", it's just your initial assumption.
Maybe they only care about profit as a means to an end, and one of the ends is pushing these messages. After all, what's the point of having money and influence, if you can't spend it on anything?
OTOH, if it's incompetence, how did all these people end up on the top of all these companies at the same time? They are all incompetent, and never got weeded out?
That sort of works too, but at some point you have to ask - if the incompetent are able to push through against everyone's wishes an ideology that will shield them against meritocracy, are they still incompetent?
People who want to use ESG to reshape the world according to their vision.
Well almost. My username is based on how the COVID response was handled and listening to conspiracy theorists talking about it, like there is no conspiracy there... politicians just were incompetent and large corporations(e.g. amazon and pfizer) took advantage of to increase their profits of the cost of the citizens. So I'm just reprogramming my brain from thinking that it is grand conspiracy by changing from the first thought what is going on from that someone is puppeteering the masses in the background to trying to identify who knows what they are doing and those who don't. So the initial assumption here is Disney don't know what they are doing, so who knows what they are doing, takes advantage of it and why. I'm being honest here, it is a long slow process for me.
Yeah but they are spending the money to send message in media that no one is looking at? So if nobody is paying for it or even looking at it, isn't it a failure in activism too when nobody wants to hear the message?
Well that is the little flaw in my theories, that is why I discuss it at all I'm trying to find out! I found partial explanations in Stupidity Paradox and Bullshit Jobs but it is not covering all the holes.
Well it is assuming that the incompetence is on all areas. They are maybe more competent on keeping their job and blaming it on bigots but not competent on producing mass market media. Like I'm fairly competent at my job but I suck at organizational politics so it has hurt my career.
So if ESG is fighting against climate change why does Shell have a higher ESG score than e.g. Tesla that is more inline with the current ideas on how to reach the vision on climate change?
Fair enough, in my defense, this side of you is all that I've seen.
Not necessarily, it's all a question of relative to what. If you're doing your activism with full knowledge of how unpopular your views are, having your message pushed through Disney is still a win, relative to it never making it out of the fringes of society.
Bullshit Jobs feels to me like kicking the can down the road. Yeah, it's not the fault of an individual bad actor, or even a group of bad actors working together, it's... that our system maintains legions upon legions of workers that bring absolutely nothing? I'm not against the theory, but the magnitude of the systemic failure is about as mind-boggling to me as an outright global conspiracy.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Though with that phrasing it becomes less distinguishable from my theory. Is a conspiracy to push an ideology all that different from a conspiracy of incompetent people using an ideology to cover their asses?
Others pointed it out already, but the whole idea is that ESG is not about fighting climate change, but about propping up political/ideological allies and punishing enemies. Under this view, their decisions re: Tesla are a lot easier to explain.
It is a online persona that I use only here where I want to discuss semi controversial views. It is the only side you are going to see. And for the first time it is working.
In many ways the culture war is virtual where they consider themselves as being mainstream and not at the fringes of society. In many ways it could be considered the mainstream views, that the majority of people that is not on Twitter and so on(i.e. virtual milieus) don't think it should be in their entertainment.
Yeah welcome to my world view.... the stupidity paradox comes into play with that maybe the systemic failure is because of a reason, some mechanism in our world makes it necessary. Even if the book about stupidity paradox only talk about organization, my synthesis of the two essentially touches there is a reason for Bullshit Jobs is that there is a functional reason for them to exists which Graeber only touches upon but don't delve into deeper. The mind-boggling nature of it validates is a "incompetence theory" akin to "conspiracy theory". On the other hand the question is though if the framework of "incompetence theory" is useful for me, I haven't decided that yet. Also it all could be wrong and useless and then I'll invent a new persona instead.
Well it is a question if they are true believers or if they are adherents of practicality. So if it is practical adherence when the ideology is not useful for them anymore they dump it and move on to the next thing to cover their asses. True believers would stick to it unless they end up in a crisis of faith which is a higher bar for change. So I'm just speculating about the future of the ideology, that when reality strikes and how high the bar is for them to change. Much of the culture war is just virtue signaling for status and if the number of true believers are low then the shift might be faster when people break ranks around the issues.
So it is corporatism where corporations dictate the state and politics?
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini (although disputed if he really said it)
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Not who you're arguing with but Tesla gets a low ESG score because Elon Musk runs twitter, and that allows for problematic badthink to spread. It wouldn't even matter if Tesla had a factory that converted greenhouse gases directly into electric cars and food for the poor - Elon Musk is on the wrong side of the culture war and so his company is Bad.
It is a forum with a discussion in the open so feel free to chime in.
Yeah so we can change the climate of the planet(If I personally believe or not doesn't matter, it is the mainstream narrative) so the most marginalized people are impacted by various ways all over the world, but that doesn't take precedence over hate speech for a minority of people that we would classify as twitter users and a minority of that reading it and an even smaller piece(if any at all) of it enacting that speech in the world.
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