I’m currently making a video essay about this story, exclusive for my patrons. As media artists, who have spent the last 35 years or more of our lives enjoying live music and concerts sometimes as much as 3 times a week, even going so far as to time our honeymoon in concert (pardon the pun) with my favorite band (Fever Ray), we felt this was something that deserved our attention.
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This week the propaganda wing of the Corporate owned State wrote many stories that caused an uproar in people who like to go places where tickets are required, places like concerts and football games. There were many propaganda outlets that covered this story but I will focus on the one from Billboard.
Read it here: here
There are seven take-aways from this story:
1. You’re already experiencing COVID-19 safety protocols every time you stand on line in a little circle or every time you mask up to go to the grocery store. This story is meant to prepare you for next level protocol in the Age of COVID.
2. The public were manipulated to respond. The emotional outbursts were heard all over social media. The manipulation may have caused a response on the street. The point is the story itself was meant to provoke a response of some kind from the public and it worked.
3. The story made seeing a concert or going to a football game seem complicated, expensive & time consuming. The anti-life goal in floating this story is to make you want to have all your experiences that require tickets whether it’s a concert or football game, enjoyed from the comfort of your home in front of your computer screen. You’ll happily avoid getting tested or getting a vaccine and you’ll do anything to avoid having to wear a mask. The goal is to get you to opt out of the real life experience and opt in for the online stream experience. You will not only buy the ticket but you will also buy the streaming service in order to have access to the experience.
4. There is an important sentence in the Billboard story which proves medical martial law or bio-fascism as I like to call, is underway: “Here’s how it would work, if approved: After purchasing a ticket for a concert, fans would need to verify that they have already been vaccinated (which would provide approximately one year of COVID-19 protection)“. To translate, after you’ve been vaccinated the first time, you would need to get another vaccine in a year. This is true. As many of us have said, in bio fascism where you are the chattel to make an industry rich, you won’t just get off with one vaccine. It’s many. And from this simple statement under the cover of a Ticketmaster story, you discover that yes, you will most likely be required to get one vaccine per year. In other words, COVID19 is here to stay.
5. Each venue will decide on their own if they want to institute these new policies. This tweet from Ticketmaster Fan Support is classic corporate speak. Of course Ticketmaster doesn’t pretend to be your doctor or the Ministry of Health. But, as they clearly state, they will work with event organizers on COVID safety measures & it will be up to the discretion of each event how they want to proceed. You see this kind of language on websites for all the stores and various other institutions where “covid safety measures” are put in place even though the stores or companies themselves play innocent to their role in these measures.
6. This sentence says a lot: “Ticketmaster also plans to deploy its new SmartEvent system, which helps event organizers and fans manage social distancing, delayed entry and provide possible opportunities for contact tracing.” To translate this means that investment opportunities will be made for venues and services who provide your personal health data. How is it that the venues can suddenly find the income to pay staff, run their light and sound, etc.? It’s because they’ve contracted themselves out to be contact tracers. I would even go so far as to say if a venue isn’t acting as cover for contact tracing, they won’t be allowed to open.
7. This is something I like to call the “Experience Industrial Complex.” What this story is telling you is that whether you attend the event or not, capital will still be made. People will still get paid. A term you should really normalize in your day to day language which is boring and corporate sounding is “impact investors”. In this particular scenario, impact investors are paying the following people: The drug store or health provider that takes your COVID-19 test which you will have to pay a fee for so not only are they making money off the cost of the COVID test from you, but they are making money from the impact investor on the back end; the impact consultant that makes every venue “COVID ready” is also getting paid- this is the person that walks around with the House Manager at a concert venue and gives them suggestions on how to “improve their COVID regulation” – they hand them over to another company that does the buildout of these new regulations; the person who actually re-does the physical space through installing safety zones or plastic dividers or various other specific COVID stations also makes money; the start up that designed the app you have to download onto your phone to prove you took the vaccine or took the test to prove you did what you had to do have your human-approved experience is also making money. There are a myriad of companies, investors, social impact consultants or investors, that have turned your experience into a money making scam. By the time you get into the venue, money has been made on all the hoops you jumped through just to get to the venue. And, if something comes up and you have to work late and can’t make the game or the concert, you will no longer be able to sell your ticket on Craigslist or Facebook. Your entry to the event is attacked to your passport, which has your health data and a picture of you. So, if you can’t make it to the venue, you eat the cost of the ticket too.
This story, if you really read it, is an opportunity for a myriad of people who you will never see, working behind the scenes, to make a lot of money based on a perceived need. If you want to experience a concert, a football game, a museum, a play, the symphony, a festival or anything that requires a ticket, then that experience will be turned into profit, big profit.
The days of just buying a ticket at your local box office to see a show is gone. There’s no money to made in that direct, easy transaction. The worst part of this, which is why I’m glad to see such an explosive response to this exploitation of our human experiences, is that the performers, the musicians and those who we want to see live and in person will see very little, if any, of the money that’s being made.
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