I read on Schnews and Corporate Watch that the Big Green Gathering has been bailed out of its financial difficulties by a joint venture involving "AEG - the largest sports and entertainment corporation in the US, owning arenas, cinemas, newspapers and sports teams". It reminded me of what was said in The Rebel Sell about the counterculture being the vanguard of capitalism. The Big Green Gathering say that they:

"... developed organically in response to a desire from people within the green movement for a festival that was focused on Green issues. Now we have somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people expected this year. Staying Green is now a bigger challenge than ever."

Quite. I'm reminded of something the character Cayce Pollard says in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition:

"It's about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does." "And then?" "I point a commodifier at it." "And?" "It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed."

Which brings me onto this scene that I witnessed today:

The village green of the 21st century

Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is not some visual trickery at work. This photograph actually shows people sitting in deckchairs on a piece of artificial turf on a sunny day in the middle of Brighton. It causes my brain to disengage and spin uncontrollably. This is some weird copy-of-a-copy where there was an error in the duplication process so all we're left with is this ersatz thing that has had all meaning removed. I actually saw a flyer the other week advertising events happening in this location; a place where I'm entirely unclear as to whether it is a public space or private land on which the public are permitted to roam between chain coffee shop, chain hotel, chain cocktail bar, chain sushi restaurant and chain grocery store. You can see another chain logo reflected in the monolithic front of the library, which I suppose is intended to define this 'public' rather than commercial abomination in the middle of the North Laine that is without trees, grass or any pleasing natural form. We've not only sacrificed the places where we once gathered together but have also sacrificed our very ability to gather together freely.