People whine about billionaires, but consistently throw money at them.

And their children’s brains.

This foot-in-the-door is nothing new. When schools are underfunded and seen as glorified babysitting services where there is no learning, but rubber-stamping A’s, any content, especially free content will be vacuumed up, regardless of how toxic it is.

Warner Bros. provided schools with DCU content. Disney, on the other hand, has favored a diffuse, multi‑channel strategy: less a dedicated textbook line than an entire ecosystem of educational products, partnerships, and donation drives, of course, through which Disney characters are woven into classroom materials, school libraries, and arts programs.

This is how to hook your future audiences as young as possible and make the characters stalkers who have their faces everywhere. Disney is a gateway IP.

Now Alphabet is playing a similar game. Get them early, and get them hooked.

 “Screens,” themselves are not poisonous to children, but who puts them there, on what terms, and with what baked‑in incentives. The prefab aspect locks pedagogy to a corporate template. The problem isn’t that children see a screen; it’s that their entire school day now runs through a corporate template, delivered on subsidized hardware from a company whose profits surge when districts surrender pedagogy to prefab platforms.

When a nation runs on a livestock scaffolding, it is up to the farmers how the livestock will be trained. Disney and Warner Bros. have a monopoly on the content, but Alphabet is grabbing the structure for itself.

And when your brain is trained to think in a certain way, escaping that influence becomes that much harder, but hey, it’ll make some psychopaths richer without the effort. Disney won the stories you believe without question, and now Alphabet is stealing the cognitive scaffolding of your children.

But that’s what happens when you’re settling for under-funded schools and an es easy out. We spent decades letting studios monopolize our children’s fantasies; now we’re letting platform companies monopolize their thinking habits, and we even pay them to install the templates. Good job!