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Dovetails with my own bemoaning of the seeming demolition of any 'spontaneous' happenings where people with similar interests can, on a shoestring budget, throw together an event mostly on the backs of volunteers and without much centralized organization have an 'organic' gathering of people who actually just want to be there and are, if indirectly, invested in its success. Since Covid disrupted ALL in-person gatherings, I've seen a decline in house parties, block parties, and pub crawls in favor of corporatized events that charge increasingly exorbitant ticket prices and have the most blasé, sanitized entertainment options on offer, often tuned for maximum family-friendly mass appeal. It is very hard to build a 'scene' around these because they don't actually have anything distinct on offer. The profit motive (I think) prevents them from staying in their niche appeal, which requires being somewhat repellant to normies.
I'm not a drug guy myself, especially not hard drugs, but there's absolutely more 'authenticity' in an event where you have people ripping lines of coke in the bathroom and shotgunning Natty Light with Vodka chasers than paying 20 bucks for a domestic beer, 30 for a watered down cocktail, and then shuffling around in a crowd of people to whatever amusements the organizers could get on their budget. The whole thing is, when money/profitability is on the line, the objective is to provide as little of an experience as possible without people actually feeling they wasted their money.
The Ur Example of failing to produce that minimum viable experience would be that Willy Wonka Experience. Well no, actually its Fyre Festival but that one is a class of its own. In contrast, with the organic events, its very very hard to feel 'cheated' when there's no cost of entry and the event is supported by the efforts of committed fans and enthusiasts, yourself included, and people are thus more aligned towards creating good vibes than moving money to the organizers.
In my case, the remedy I've found in the short term is car meets. I bought a 1970 Chevelle a few months back, it is VERY fun to drive, but there's not much you can 'do' with it (legally) unless you go to a racetrack, and the nearest one to me closed down right around when I got the car. So I looked into 'official' car shows, and those are neat but... they feel just like those corporatized events, where the goal is to put money in someone's pocket in exchange for that minimum viable experience (you can LOOK at the pretty cars, don't touch. And definitely don't drive. And if you even THINK about breaking a traffic law we will boot you out). That said, safety and insurance regs basically demand this approach, and the risks to participants would be pretty sizeable otherwise.
But I also discovered that various enterprising individuals will organize a 'meet', usually in some industrial park after dark or a large parking lot after business hours that's somewhat distant from residential zones. And dudes with their tuned up, pimped out, and otherwise kitted out vehicles will ride out to admire each other's cars, posture up a bit about the superiority of their preferred make and model, leave a few skidmarks and take tons of video to edit and post to instagram.
Unfortunately they're rarely as exciting as the movies make them seem. The women in this area also tend to wear jeans and baggy t-shirts instead of high heels and clubwear. Vin Diesel may have lied to me. Cops often show up but generally they will let things be unless it gets rowdy and then they can just politely get the people to disperse. I assume they vastly prefer this to kids doing takeovers or racing around the streets. (The kids still get up to mischief, mind, there's been a number of arrests and a couple deaths in the local area due to street racing. Florida's new Super Speeder law is aggressively enforced)
But it is authentic. People showing up with cars they built by hand, food trucks with various options on offer, 3 different genres and languages of music blaring from sound systems around the parking lot. It becomes whatever the attendees make it, not what the organizer creates. Occasionally a head-turning supercar or some RIDICULOUSLY built out ride rolls through and Mogs everyone, and on occasion they actually do a revving or burnout contest if they can get permission from the property owner.
I'm not the young guy who feels the need to puff out my chest and prove my masculinity anymore so I sort of keep a low profile (although the car draws a LOT of attention) but I've also never seen an actual aggressive interaction at these meets, which is interesting because there's no gatekeeping whatsoever, other than the need to own a car with decent specs to be worth showing up. And THAT is what I like best about them. Even though there's no organized security, no bag checks, no strict rules enforcement, people are on good enough behavior that everyone feels safe to come back each week, and people even bring their kids out for fun. It could very easily devolve and crumble if there were just a few dedicated bad actors.
The culture itself is pretty positive. Mechanically inclined, skeptical of traffic laws, some lacking a certain amount of common sense but generally not malicious about anything. Its been a fun thing to participate in and reminds me that we haven't completely gone over to the dark side where ALL social interactions are monetized and marketed and every spare dollar is squeezed out of your joy for a hobby or activity.
Which of course means there is SOMEBODY out there scheming to find a way to capture all this spare surplus and enclose the commons to funnel that value to themselves. Here's hoping they don't succeed any time soon.
Great post about a subculture I know nothing about and the corporatization of everything. I'd guess it's a function of lack of social trust and liability law plus the general collapse of community but it seems like organic events like this have been dying off for decades until there's barely anything left.
Liability plays a large role.
Such events can persist until there's a mass casualty event or one (1) child is seriously injured or dies and then public attention and outcry will demand they be shut down.
The big 'appeal' of an organic gathering is that there's not technically any person 'in charge' and thus liable for the actions of the whole. A true "flash mob" (remember when THOSE were a thing?) is a bunch of random folks gathering at a given Schelling point to do a thing that they've all individually, peer to peer, agreed to do with no single person guiding the decision to fruition. Its a semi-random mass cooperation event.
In practice, there's usually someone or someone(s) who is the actual ringleader and can be singled out for legal prosecution, and that disables the event from organizing, or once THAT person serves as an example, the rest will opt not to put themselves at risk too.
The lack of social trust is a subtler problem. Covid itself didn't kill all the social trust. At least, my perception is that governmental institutions took the brunt of the trust hit there. BUT, we also learned that one defector can out you TO said governmental institutions and get you fined, prosecuted, possibly imprisoned.
So generally such a social group will have to be SO secretive and careful about gatekeeping that none of the members are too worried about being betrayed, or your group's activities are innocuous enough that they're beneath the notice of the local sovereigns even if a turncoat goes and reports you.
Car meets thus far occupy the second category. I am pretty sure at SOME point some incident will occur which will bring them under greater scrutiny, it still something very enjoyable while it lasts.
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I guess it's pointless to ask this but are they generally just tagging along or do they also do some of the driving that happens? Because that'd partially explain the lack of high heels.
lol its a mix of that. Some women drivers, although there tends to be more even gender ratios amongst the bikers, I've noted. Mostly tag alongs.
But I went to one event that was put on by the local college's car club and even the college girls who were just wandering through to check things out were generally dressed down.
And look, I'm not expecting most such women to be dressed up like skanks to flirt with the car guys, I just notice the overall style is usually not in the "I'm here specifically to grab attention" mode. Which on net is probably a good thing, but it'd be nice to counterbalance the greasy-looking guys hanging around.
My guess is that the scene around Miami feels a little closer to the Hollywood ideal.
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That's honestly sick. I didn't realize people still did that. If you don't mind me asking, do you live in a rural area?
Not at all, I'm in Coastal Florida. There's rural areas about 20 minutes inland, but its one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country.
And check instagram, that's how they usually organize.
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