I'm a huge fan of world's fairs and started going to them in utero. I've made several pilgrimages to famous world fair sites that are important to me. And I hav

I'm a huge fan of world's fairs and started going to them in utero. I've made several pilgrimages to famous world fair sites that are important to me. And I have lots of memorabilia and read lots of books on the subject, which is how I found this post. Here's the problem. Modern world's fairs aren't workable or practical economically. The part of Disney's Epcot that became the theme park was intended as a permanent world's fair. (Walt's father was a construction worker on the Chicago World's Fair.) Even with Disney's money and Walt's vision, the company could barely sustain Epcot after his death and toyed with the idea of getting rid of it for years. Even today, it is the worst performing property in the entire Disney system worldwide. Two things killed the world's fair: the cheap, mass distribution of goods and the internet. When fairs were hot, you could invent something like ice cream or the Belgian waffle and people would discover it at the fair. Now, everything appears everywhere at once because of cheap global travel and product distribution. The hottest snack in Korea will be available in LA in just weeks because the normal flow of people between there will move that product and the cultural knowledge to the new market. Mostly, though, what killed the fair is the internet. Epcot even had a pre-internet park-wide digital network with color touchscreens, virtual assistants, and live Zoom meetings. And this was in the 1980's. They had to get rid of it when AOL came around because everyone had something like that at home. All of the wild new tech that would be shown at a fair is now just a doom scroll away on your phone. You could hardly go around in modern society without finding out about every new invention and discovery. It would be harder to stay uninformed. This was not the case in the heyday of the fair when communications, travel, and even literacy were less common. Even though travel is easier than ever, it's also a huge pain in the ass and expensive in its own right. People worry about catching a virus. And big logistics things like fake buildings and fancy displays cost a lot to put up. At the beginning, Disney had corporate sponsors for individual rides and attractions (an idea he invented to get funding for It's a Small World at the New York World's Fair). That idea wasn't sustainable and within a few years Disney was paying part or all the costs of some of these expensive attractions on its own. That's not very profitable, and it's a problem that a permanent world's fair will have, too.