Lovely column, hate the phones: "tech-free events are proving increasingly popular."
It wasn’t so long ago that acts like Coldplay were actively encouraging audiences to use smartphones during live performances. The band’s frontman Chris Martin would ask crowds to create a sea of phone flashlights during the song Yellow, or to create a “cell phone lights wave”. “Forget cigarette lighters, mobile phones are the new glowsticks!” one of the band’s roadies enthused on their official tour blog back in 2008. Perhaps, if we’re being generous, it sounded cool back then. Today, it feels rather depressing — démodé, even. Indeed, these days the band gives out LED wristbands so the crowd can create the sea-of-lights effect without their phones, and Martin routinely asks audiences to put their phones away entirely for a single song.
"Others are taking further the wacky idea that going to see a gig should be about a shared human experience rather than content-gathering."
...and it's not the technophobic boomers driving this trend
You might think it is stodgy old technophobes or techno-incompetents who are driving this trend, but no. A study from gig-booking website Eventbrite earlier this year, which reported a 567 per cent increase in the number of explicitly phone-free events listed between 2024 and 2025, found that 49 per cent of Gen Z and millennial respondents agreed they wanted live experiences “to feel less curated and more real”.
It appears that even those who would like experiences to feel “more real” still feel the need to capture the moment they are ostensibly living, so that after the event they can show others what a great time they were filming — sorry, having.
This one, though, is just outright depressing:
So pervasive is the youth’s tech fatigue that many of them wish they had been born in an altogether different era: a large-scale NBC poll released in April found that 47 per cent of 18-29-year-old Americans would, if they had the option, choose to live in the past. (Just 38 per cent said they would rather live in the present, while 15 per cent would like to live in the future.)
WHERE THE BOOMERS RIGHT ALL ALONG?!
INeedPaywallHelp.com: https://archive.li/https://www.ft.com/content/471ee22e-af95-4ada-a272-a6a876bc5234
It's coz they'd don't grow up playing Oregon Trail like my generation did.
"You have died of dysentery" keeps things in perspective
Fucking eh!
did you play that growing up? dunno if it was more of an American thing
More American, I suppose, but I have definitely heard of it and of that iconic dysentery death
I intend to live in the future
Zenos paradox implies the future can't exist
Maybe it can’t. Have you ever been there?
Going to see a gig has an effect on content-gathering when it comes to the pervasive audience from millennial boomers!
The Boomers spoiled their children and now the children are revolting.
The collective sins of US imperialism created a moral deficit that cannot be repaid without generational humiliation.
Neoliberalism created vast inequality and cannot compete with Chinas state capitalist-free market hybrid vigour.
Libertarians remain silent in the face of the US sponsored genocide.
Give up your Libertarian delusions and hypocrisy, and learn Chinese.