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The definitive answers to Disney’s pernicious queueing debates
Defunctland simulated a themepark and produced the first public data on queue-management strategies.
Last summer, I wrote a six-part series on the history, future and present-day of queue- and crowd-management strategies at Disney themeparks, summarizing my endless reading, rumination, and direct experience on the question.
https://doctorow.medium.com/disneyland-at-a-stroll-part-vi-62934f35aac1
Who gets to do what and when at a themepark may sound like a trivial question, but I think it’s a perfect little microcosm for the distributional problems that are at the heart of all political economy — questions that the pandemic’s shortages and shocks threw into stark relief.
It’s a question that’s animated my work since my first book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is literally about how people lay claim to priority over scarce systems, using methods that aren’t driven by spot markets or other faith-tenets of neoclassical economics:
That question continues to come up in my work, tangled up with complicating factors of psychology, economics, material culture, high technology, and distributional philosophies, which…
