#32: Jude, Ed and CR7, Memes Vivant.
This week: a deep dive into the digital edges of Glastonbury, the UK election and the football Euros // Then all the best stuff in the digital ecosystem, including must read research on immersive...
Hey gang.
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This week we’ll look at if and where the innovation has been happening in a crazy week of major media events in the UK - Glastonbury, the General Election and the agony of the Euros.
This week I’m also delighted to welcome new newsletter partner Existent. Find out more about their amazing full body VR tech below.
Plus there’s all the usual must-reads and more.
LET’S HIT IT!
Art // Glastonbury! Election 2024! The Euros!
It’s been a hectic week in the UK.
Last weekend we had Glastonbury, our biggest music festival. Then we had the General Election on Thursday. And across the whole week, the ongoing anxiety of England’s stuttering progress through the football European Championships.
For most of us, these three are primarily media experiences, so I thought it was worth some reflections on what each might be telling us about where media is at in a time of technology acceleration.
If I took the three as a whole, I’d say they show a certain cautiousness to integrating new technologies - I didn’t see much innovation in any of their presentation.
But what each has shown is the ever onward-creep of the meme-ification of human behaviour, with Cristiano Ronaldo, Jude Bellingham and Ed Davey forming a weird-as-hell holy trinity.
Anyway, some observations.
Glastonbury
Whilst it didn’t really make the TV highlights, I loved the look of the new Dragonfly DJ booth on the Arcadia stage. A spherical booth attached to a repurposed Navy Helicopter hovering above the crowd, lit up by projection, it brought the biggest wow factor.
The use of projection was also noticeable during Coldplay’s headline set where Korean megastars BTS were projected onto the external fabric of the tent. This was explicitly done for TV viewers - there was no way to see it from the ground.
It was a nod to The Sphere and the other emerging Immersive Institutions I’ve written about before but seemed largely detached from the audience.
Coldplay also brought their Pixmob-made LED wristbands, a feature of their Music of the Spheres tour which turned the crowd into a glowing body of light.
I really, really dislike Coldplay, but this was a good feature…
… But message to Emily Eavis, couldn’t this be scaled across the whole of Glastonbury? A collective digital pulse that you could use and re-use from the tiniest tent to the headline act?
It feels like this is a space for innovation one very big band have stepped into that the whole festival could own.
UK General Election
The underlying story of the UK election is really about data-centric targeting of target voters at constituency level to over-come the limitations of our first-past-the post system.
The main UK parties are getting less and less popular with voters, and both the angry golf club racists of Nigel Farage’s Reform; the Green Party; pro-Gaza independents and more have been gaining real electoral ground. Meanwhile Labour and the Liberal Democrats broke the Conservative Party with hyper-localised campaigning that allowed them to pick up hundreds of seats whilst getting less votes than they’d had over the last decade.
This isn’t quite the transition point those polls which saw the Conservatives becoming the third placed party - a once a century-level event in the UK - pointed towards, but it may be the precedent to it in election 2029. If that “other” vote continues on its long-term trend line, the face of British Politics will look very different over the coming decades.
Beyond this data-centricity, the election’s digital legacy will be two things - the failed attempt to deepfake Rishi Sunak, and Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s abandonment of political leadership to become a living Meme.
First up Rishi.
There have been a lot of deepfakes of the now ex-PM. Flagged by The Guardian a couple of weeks back, 400,000 people might have seen RishAI talking various strands of generative nonsense.
Honestly here I think it’s washed away as the weirdness of the real Conservative campaign took over. From its launch in a rain-storm to the betting scandals of his various team members, the real campaign was much, much weirder than AI hackers could dream up. The threat won’t go away, but real life proved a blocker to tech-incursion … for now.
And lastly Ed. Ed Davey was the digital story of the Election.
What a weird, odd, brilliant, stupid but, I guess, effective, way to bring a party that nearly died over the last decade back to a significant foothold in parliament.
Ed Davey is a dull politician. A male, pale and stale he has very little to say except on his own experience as a carer.
So he decided to say nothing.
Faced with an opportunity to rebuild his party across wealthy, liberal parts of the UK who were morally sickened by Tory extremism on immigration, and hit hardest by ever growing taxes, Ed decided to make himself into a series of memes.
Over the last weeks, Ed went bungee jumping; drove a tractor through a blue wall of hey bails; fell off a paddleboard and more.
Each time it came with a tweet or thread where he wrote his own memes.
The actual political argument was left to his deputy Daisy Cooper who was a lot better than him.
I don’t know what this means - it’s a very odd expression of English eccentricity at best. But it worked.
The heirs of John Locke, Hume and Thomas Paine - the great liberal tradition of personal freedom was utterly engulfed by 21st century digital madness.
I’m with Marx here, the first time history happens it’s a tragedy, the second time it’s farce and this is definitely second-order history.
So Ed Davey’s memetic farce probably tells us more about 2024 politics than Keir Starmer’s honest man schtick or AI Rishi. At a point where we really don’t know how to fix capitalism, doing it for the LOLs is probably, tragically, hilariously, the best we’ve got.
The Euros
My god this has been painful. Watching England - and France as well - has been like being tortured by Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones.
Whilst England could well win, the tournament itself seems memorable only for one thing, which is the handover of power from Cristiano Ronaldo to Jude Bellingham as football’s own macho meme-maker in chief.
There’s never been any doubt watching CR7 that his greatness is intimately connected to the experience of being watched. He lives both with the crowd and with the camera. But as age withers him, it feels like finally the show is over.
It’s not really because he can’t play like he used to.
It’s because Jude Bellingham has occupied the space Cristiano’s owned for the last twenty years, and his swaggering machismo isn’t going to let anyone else in.
We’ve never seen a sports-man like Jude in this country before.
Tyson Fury’s close but he always seems so close to madness that his unbreakable brilliance comes with too many weird edges.
But Jude. He’s closer to big stars of the NBA or NFL in that sheer testosterone powered certainty.
He’s a genius.
And the camera’s all on him.
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Ideas! // Stories from the digital edge
First up this week, two must read pieces of research. First is a piece from the the Immersive Experiences Network on audience response to the - still emerging - medium. It’s a good foundational piece looking at core metrics around gender, age, location, price sensitivity and more. Did anything really surprise me? Probably not. But the fact that value for money was the most important decision driver for audiences tells us that the sector has a long way to go. This is NOT the driver for more traditional arts and culture audiences who are highly price tolerant and where medium matters more than they money. Immersive’s have got to keep convincing people they’re brilliant for this to change…
From the Immersive Audiences Report 2024 Second is a really useful annual report from AEA Consulting - what they call the Cultural Infrastructure Index. It’s a chart of what new museums, galleries, performing arts centers and other arts venues have been either commissioned or completed in the last year, and the budgets associated with their build. The big difference this year is that “immersive” galleries have become a category all of their own. Their count - 17 - is a lot lower than I found in the research that led to my article for The Art Newspaper on this very topic. But hey, it’s more important we recognise and understand this distinct new category of 21st century art institution than quibble on numbers..
This substack from the
is worth reading on all the things they’re up to ahead of this year’s awards.I LOVED this detailed piece from The Mediator by
which breaks down the real status of gen AI in Hollywood. Main takeaways - we are a long, long way from AI generated movies, but the seepage inward will happen. The use cases for creators, advertising, music video and other screen sub-sectors are much closer at hand. Great piece.Given the size of their majority, it’s worth reading the Labour Party Manifesto. It waits and waits before talking tech, but the section on innovation is hopeful. Thinking towards 10 year cycles of investment is right and will unlock more change than short-term projects. Not sure Starmer’s really got the Harold Wilson “White heat of technology” vibe in him, but it’s a start.
We’ve run out of space for a dedicated tech story this week - we’ll be back next week with more.
Finally, on the Glastonbury tip - track of the weekend?
Always going to be All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem for me. Perfect festival moment.
You can watch it on iPlayer here - still no embed!! - or go back to their playing of it in 2016 or 2010 below.
See you later innovators.*
XOXO
(Arctic Monkey lyric, can’t remember which song)