My favourite uncle had a simple attitude to nightlife regulation. As we sat in a pub garden by a river in the county where we were both born, he told me:
“People have been sitting by this river drinking beer for a thousand years, so if a politician thinks he can stop me sitting by this river drinking beer… he should think again.”
Throughout history there have been times when visionary revolutionaries have been excited by catastrophe, predicted the end of everything and enthusiastically grabbed the opportunity to tell everybody that things will never be the same again. But after the revolution somehow everybody is still sitting by the river drinking beer.
There is a simple reason why the oldest and longest-surviving businesses in England are pubs, despite dozens of invasions, plagues, switchings of religion and beheadings of monarchs – nightlife will never change.
As Night Mayor of Vilnius and a proud member of the growing worldwide nightlife advocacy movement, I have recently been hearing a lot about the “new normal” and how nightlife must “reimagine” and “adapt” because the world “will never be the same again”. It’s true that the pandemic has hit the nightlife sector harder than any other sector, leaving a trail of disruption and devastation in every nightclub from San Fran to Seoul, forcing a complete shutdown of thousands of venues with no end in sight. But nightlife will never change, because humans have not fundamentally changed, and nightlife is fundamental to all of us.
Pubs were invented only hundreds of years ago, but nightlife was invented a hundred thousand years ago when apes started doing clever stuff. They made drums, they discovered fire, they started having all-night raves. As soon as they invented farming they used it to make beer. When they made too much beer, they had to invent economics and logistics so they could sell beer to other tribes in other villages.
Every twenty-four hours, as the sun went down, they would feel the magic of the twilight sparkling in their hearts and souls, they would dance and sing and bang their drums and lick frogs and pray for the dawn to come. Humans have repeated this activity every night in every century until this one.
But in 2020, so I hear, all this will change because of the coming of the millionth catastrophe that has affected mankind.
This millionth catastrophe is a special one, they say. It will break the ancient bond between the human spirit and the moon.
Soon we will all think it is “normal” to party during the day and dance without touching anybody. We will not only forget the “old normal”, we will embrace the “new normal” and “adapt” to it.
Bollocks to the new normal
As with all revolutions – the need for change is cynically synthesised by opportunists who seize the chance to pretend that reshaping the world for their own benefit is actually some kind of universally inevitable renewal that will, however painfully, eventually bathe the common man in the light of a new, improved utopia.
It doesn’t matter if you are Lenin or Hitler, the pitch is always the same: “People! You have no choice but to transfer power to my band of thugs! We promise to use this power responsibly to rebuild reality and save you from the imaginary disaster we keep talking about!”
These revolutionaries never come from the background of the people they claim to care for. Lenin wasn’t working-class and Hitler wasn’t blond. But the futuristic snake oil they sell becomes popular because in times of suffering people will believe anything and support any kind of change. Faith in the old normal sinks to zero and prophets offer competing visions of the new. All the fresh visions seem attractive, because things “can’t get any worse than they already are.”
The Nonexistent Nightlife Revolution of 2020
In the case of the supposed Nightlife Revolution of 2020, the story goes that the temporary closure of dancefloors will become permanent as we “adapt” to the “paradigm” of somehow raving online with an app.
This story is now being told by the revolutionary Lenins and Hitlers of the music industry. Their story is designed to attract the attention and support of another group of people who know nothing about nightlife: people who invest in apps.
These people hire other people who know nothing about nightlife: app developers. The app developers hire other people who know nothing about nightlife: marketing consultants. The marketing consultants create campaigns to attract other people who know nothing about nightlife: the technology and finance journalists. These journalists write articles to impress another group of people who know nothing about nightlife: the people who read newspapers in the morning instead of having a hangover. These newspaper readers then talk about “this very interesting article I read in the newspaper” with other people who know nothing about nightlife: their friends.
And so it suddenly appears that the whole world is talking about the inevitable coming of a new normal, like peasants in The Life of Brian holding up a shoe.
Of course, I know that app developers, investors and journalists participate in nightlife, they go to bars and restaurants, they sometimes hit the dancefloor and make awkward shapes with their arms, maybe they do karaoke with their work colleagues, probably they know their favourite cocktail. However, being on the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve doesn’t make you an expert, it makes you an idiot who will retweet anything that looks shiny.
Everybody knows what nightlife is, but very few people know where it comes from, how it is made, who creates it and how they make it happen, what drives it and what feeds it, how to engineer magic for an audience, how to provide them with unforgettable moments for fifty dollars.
The new normal is articles written about nightlife by people who know nothing about nightlife, shared on social media by people who know even less.
Meanwhile, people who spend their working lives studying and creating nightlife know that nightlife will never change, humans will never stop wanting to celebrate the dark by moving their bodies in synchronicity and proximity, we will never get tired of seeing other humans on stage coordinating sound and light to raise us into a state of ecstasy, to make our bodies produce sweat and tears, to feel the endorphins released by knowing that we are sharing this experience with the many other humans around us. Very closely around us.
Did the pandemic make you stop liking hugs? Would you swap sex for watching online porn? Are you sick of zooming already? The answers are: No, probably no, and oh my God yes. Therefore it’s safe to predict that this current period will one day end and nightlife will go back to the old normal. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
There is of course the possibility that some kind of amazing zero-latency solid hologram neuro-implant technology will be developed that will allow us to continue to be fully human and experience shared joy at night without touching each other physically in the same room. But that wouldn’t be any kind of new normal, that would simply be a new invention that helps us to preserve the old normal. And anyway, such an advanced technology could take another thousand years to invent, or at least a hundred.
Until then, if an app developer thinks he can stop us sitting by the river drinking beer, he should think again.
Mark Adam Harold is Chair of the Vilnius Night Alliance, unofficially known as the Night Mayor of Vilnius, a pioneer of nightlife advocacy in his adopted hometown. He was born British but will soon be changing his citizenship to Lithuanian. He is currently in the section of the nightlife Dunning-Kruger curve known as the Valley of Despair, but that’s OK. You can contact Mark by email markadamharold@gmail.com or on Whatsapp, or even by using the “Phone” app in your phone: +37065203303