Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate…

Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the community together. /1 https://t.co/jzSdxXCvJH

Events with little practical outcome, apart from tourist and other business dollars. At the same time as the old community-focused clubs like Lions, Rotary and Apex are on their last legs, clubs that focused on community bonding and community projects. /2

The big push for decades has been to ‘mobilise’ the population, with transport. Lots of debates over private vs public transport, hardly any about why transport is so central to our society now. It’s central because the whole ‘economic’ shift has been to displace people. /3

From their communities. Where we spend most of our days, working, is rarely where we live. If a society is expending little energy doing things within its own communities, those communities will disappear, replaced by suburban quarter-acre car parks for commuters. /4

Suburbs are now rarely real communities. People flock to events like Vivid because the desire for community is healthy and deep, and it’s all that’s on offer. It’s not Amish barn-raising, a community doing something, for its community. It’s us being tourists in our own land. /5

Zoom out and it’s the old colonialism now extending within our borders, where there are centres of power and wealth that mobilise people and resources to funnel them, towards those centres. Just as I tweeted previously about how citizens of rich countries now are also just…/6

…’customers’ of a global market. And infected without conscience with ‘endemic’ disease, as we used to do only for poorer nations, in the earlier days of colonialism. It’s all connected, the same colonial framework still playing out. /end