Disney Just Elevated the Gathering Economy to the Corner Office

Josh D’Amaro’s appointment as CEO signals that shared experience—across parks, films, and live gatherings—now sits at the center of cultural power.

I want to be explicit about why I’m stopping to mark this moment, because this is not a reaction to a press release and it’s certainly not a piece of Disney fandom dressed up as analysis. I’m calling this out because I’ve spent years arguing that the Gathering Economy and what I call the convening class are not secondary players orbiting media, technology, or marketing, but central actors in how culture, trust, and meaning are formed. When The Walt Disney Company named Josh D’Amaro as its chief executive, it didn’t validate that idea rhetorically. It validated it structurally, by handing the company to someone whose entire professional life has been shaped by participation rather than projection.

This appointment lands after a long, uncomfortable period for Disney, a company that knows how to tell stories better than almost anyone yet struggled publicly to tell a coherent story about its own leadership. The Iger return, the Chapek rupture, the visible anxiety around succession all pointed to a deeper confusion about what kind of intelligence the company actually needed at the top. By finally choosing D’Amaro, Disney answered that question with unusual clarity. It chose someone fluent in what it feels like to be there, not someone optimized to explain what people are supposed to feel from a distance.

That distinction is not cosmetic. It goes to the heart of how value is created now.

D’Amaro did not come up through studios or streaming or franchise management. He came up through parks, resorts, and destination experiences, environments where participation is unavoidable and where success or failure is immediately legible in human behavior. In those systems, people are not audiences. They are participants who co-create the atmosphere simply by being present. Excitement spreads socially. Disappointment shows up in posture and pace. Trust, once broken, lingers long after the day is over. You learn quickly in those environments that meaning is not transmitted intact from a sender to a receiver. It is triggered, collectively, through anticipation, movement, friction, and release.

This is what I mean when I talk about the goosebump business. Goosebumps are not metaphor or marketing flourish. They are neurological signals, the body’s involuntary response when attention, emotion, and social context align. Music can do this. Insight can do this. A great conversation can do this. So can standing in a crowd just before something begins, when everyone senses the same collective inhale. Disney’s most enduring magic has always lived in that narrow band where emotion becomes shared and memory is etched into the nervous system, not because it is clever, but because it is embodied.

Seen through that lens, D’Amaro’s appointment reads less like a break from Disney’s tradition than a return to its original logic. This is where Walt Disney belongs in the story, not as a sentimental reference point, but as precedent. Walt did not build Disneyland as an extension of film marketing. He built it because he understood, instinctively, something that learning theory and neuroscience would later articulate more formally: watching is not enough. Meaning has to be lived. Stories are invitations. The real work happens when people cross a threshold together and enter a designed environment that makes emotion social and legible.

Film invited people into the story. The park completed the circuit by turning spectators into participants.

Over time, Disney drifted, as many successful institutions do, toward abstraction. Content scaled. Distribution multiplied. Intellectual property became financialized. Experiences were reframed as monetization rather than philosophy. Participation was treated as something to be layered on later, a tactic to be engineered once attention stopped behaving. The language of marketing rushed in to fill the gap, inventing terms like “activation” to describe what was really a deeper hunger for involvement, presence, and shared meaning.

D’Amaro’s career unfolded on the opposite side of that forgetting. His leadership instincts were forged in places where the nervous system tells the truth long before the spreadsheet does. Parks and destinations force you to think in terms of arrival, transitions, waiting, anticipation, friction, delight, and recovery. They teach you that emotion is contagious, attention is fragile, and meaning emerges collectively or not at all. That is not a communications skill. It is a human one.

This is why the moment matters beyond Disney. We are living in a world of infinite content and scarce presence. What people will now pay for, protect, and remember are the moments they had to show up for, the experiences that required coordination, attention, and a willingness to be part of something larger than oneself. This is not a marketing insight. It is a human one, and learning theory has been circling it for more than a century. People do not retain what they passively receive. They retain what they help construct. Knowledge sticks when it is discovered, debated, and emotionally charged, when it is encountered in relationship rather than delivered intact.

Disney’s board may never frame its decision in those terms, but by naming D’Amaro it aligned the company with that reality. It chose a leader trained in designing conditions rather than delivering messages, someone whose professional life has revolved around the simplest and most demanding question in the Gathering Economy: what does it feel like to be there?

That is why I’m calling this Example One. Not because Disney is the only place this shift is happening, but because it is the clearest, most visible confirmation yet that the center of gravity has moved. The Gathering Economy is no longer a fringe concept. The convening class is no longer support staff for “real” industries. These are the people shaping how belief, loyalty, learning, and culture are formed now.

If you trace this all the way back, you end up where humans have always begun, around the campfire. Not as metaphor, but as operating system. Long before platforms and brands, people gathered around light to share stories, knowledge, warnings, and hopes. Participation was the price of admission. Meaning carried weight because it was witnessed. We never outgrew that biology. We simply learned to ignore it.

Josh D’Amaro’s appointment is Disney walking back toward the campfire, not because it is romantic or nostalgic, but because it works. This is why GatheringPoint exists, why the convening class matters, and why this moment deserved to be named.