The Moment You Realize No One Is Afraid Anymore

By: Paco Campbell
Published: Monday, February 16th, 2026

I quit T-Mobile.

Not as a protest. Not with a LinkedIn post. I just got tired. The service kept getting worse — dead zones where there hadn’t been any, dropped calls that made no sense — and then there was yet another breach. Another reminder that a company entrusted with the most static parts of my identity had once again misplaced them.

So I left and went to Verizon.

It cost more. It was annoying. And I’m under no illusion that this mattered to T-Mobile in any meaningful way. I’m a rounding error. A statistical outlier.

That’s the point.

The system isn’t built around people like me. It’s built around the fact that most people won’t move, even when they’re unhappy, even when they’re exposed, even when they’re tired of apologetic emails offering free credit monitoring like a consolation prize.

Companies know this. They plan for it. And once they internalize that knowledge, something shifts.

When Failure Becomes Background Noise

T-Mobile didn’t wake up one day and decide security was optional. They learned it the same way everyone learns uncomfortable truths: through repetition.

After enough breaches, each one stops feeling exceptional. It becomes operational. Manageable. Survivable. The harm is real, but it’s diluted across millions of customers, none of whom individually have enough leverage to force change.

No executives fall.
No boards revolt.
Revenue continues.

So the lesson writes itself: failure is tolerable.

Not desirable.
Just tolerable.

And once that lesson sinks in, it doesn’t stay confined to security. It spreads outward into culture, decision-making, and risk appetite. If nothing really happens when you get it wrong, why be careful?

Disney and the End of Custodianship

Disney is where this stops being subtle.

For most of its modern history, Disney behaved like a custodian. Overprotective, even. They understood that their real asset wasn’t characters or franchises, but emotional memory. You don’t just monetize that — you guard it, because once it degrades, you don’t get it back.

Which is why the OpenAI deal feels so alien.

Inside Sora, Disney’s aesthetic is already being used to generate content that collides symbols without context or restraint: mockery of a trans woman rendered in Pixar-soft tones, 9/11-coded imagery reframed as whimsy, brown children on inspirational poverty quests. The system doesn’t understand why those things are loaded. It just knows how to make them look “right.”

None of that will ever appear on Disney+. Everyone knows that. The lawyers will make sure of it.

But that’s not the danger.

The danger is that Disney willingly injected its visual language — its tone, its emotional grammar — into a system that has no cultural memory and no ability to feel the weight of what it recombines.

That’s not innovation. That’s abdication.

Doing the Dirty Work, Then Calling the Cops

What makes the Disney story land with a thud is what came next.

After partnering with OpenAI, Disney sent a cease-and-desist to Google for training on its IP.

The contradiction is almost elegant.

Disney will allow its culture to be metabolized upstream by one partner, while policing everyone else downstream. The rules aren’t gone — they’re selectively enforced. Ownership still matters when Disney invokes it.

That’s not confusion.
That’s confidence.

It’s the posture of a company that knows the backlash will be noisy but brief, and that nothing structural will change as a result.

Bob Iger Didn’t Need This Ending

Bob Iger could have retired a steward. That arc was complete.

But the second tenure doesn’t look like the first, and the tempting explanation is that the man changed. Maybe he did. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the chair hasn’t changed. The incentives around it haven’t changed. When outrage burns hot and fast, when trust erodes slowly and invisibly, and when quarterly performance matters more than cultural half-life, the chair tilts toward extraction regardless of who’s sitting in it.

You stop asking whether something is wise.

You ask whether it’s survivable.

And the answer, again and again, is yes.

Disney didn’t need a different leader to arrive here. It needed exactly the environment it has — one where carelessness is consistently cheaper than care.

Coke, McDonald’s, and the Art of Blame Routing

I wrote recently about Coke and their new AI-generated holiday ad. It was not a scandal, just indifference. A company that once sweated craft deciding it doesn’t need to anymore.

McDonald’s made the pattern explicit.

When McDonald’s Netherlands released an AI-generated ad mocking the holiday season — framing Christmas as something to endure inside a McDonald’s until January — the backlash was immediate. And corporate McDonald’s response was revealing.

This wasn’t us.
This was a local decision.
A subsidiary misstep.

On paper, it sounds like accountability. In reality, it’s containment.

Local subsidiaries don’t get to improvise the brand. They don’t suddenly decide to invert decades of emotional positioning around family and ritual. You want proof? Let McDonald’s Netherlands redesign the arches. Let them swap the Big Mac sauce for black licorice. That autonomy evaporates instantly.

What happened here wasn’t independence. It was insulation.

The subsidiary absorbed the blast so the core could remain untouched.

So Do Consequences Still Exist?

Yes.

They’re just carefully scoped now.

Consequences exist at the edges, not the center. A local team takes the hit. A department restructures. A statement is issued. The system itself remains intact.

This is accountability redesigned for survival. Not to correct behavior, but to protect the institution.

The Quiet Truth

The through-line here isn’t incompetence or malice.

It’s that companies have learned — correctly — that they don’t need to be afraid anymore.

Data breaches don’t end companies.
Cultural dilution doesn’t either.
Even open contradiction barely dents them.

So they thin out. They outsource care. They route blame. They survive.

And in that world, the most unsettling realization isn’t that companies no longer give a damn.

It’s that the system has proven, over and over, that they don’t have to.

Inside a Costco, somewhere.

<Looks at my phone>

Verizon 5G.

1 bar.

Sigh.