Welcome to LOST WEEKEND, VICE’s Monday briefing.
Forget about curing cancer and ending war; what I really need from AI is it to get me a ticket for the Glastonbury Festival.
If I had my way, Glastonbury would become a gathering of the 210,000 most effective users of agentic AI in the world. The hippies and hedonists who’ve hogged it for the last however many decades have had their turn. Newsflash, wastoids: There are plenty of other parties where you can torch your brain cells and pump your biological age up a full generational bracket. Surely what I’m saying isn’t even that controversial. The true spirit of Glastonbury is transformation. And what could be more transformative for Western Europe than its very own Burning Man?
The second- and third-order benefits are difficult to compute. In my brave new world, Glasto would simply be attended by a better quality of person, the whole thing undergoing a kind of demographic transfusion: partygoers out, go-getters in. What, you thought us AI guys would be handing over our entrepreneurial smarts at the gate? Before you know it, we’ll be monetizing the portaloos, converting human waste into revenue for the suits in charge. We’ll be bussing in blood boys to turn the VIP into a hangover-free zone. The chat at sunrise will be like nothing the Stone Circle has ever heard before, as tech-bro visionaries debate the merits of psychedelic drugs and whether or not we’re living in a simulation.
“Before you know it, we’ll be monetizing the portaloos, converting human waste into revenue for the suits in charge”
No doubt there will be naysayers. The usual suspects will complain that entry to Glastonbury should be determined by how much each potential consumer actually cares about music (yawn). But this would result in the most suboptimal festival in living memory, with disparate clusters of black metal connoisseurs and Japanese noise aficionados stumbling across the 600-hectare site, blinking like trapped moles. Some folks are just better off in their bedrooms.
I don’t know why people are crying about the price of tickets, which are just £408, or to put it another way, less than an annual subscription to GPT Plus. Fortunately, there is little need to worry about depressing brokies these days, after security tightened up around the turn of the century, cutting off the kind of audacious freeloaders who loved music so much they were prepared to pole-vault a moat of human excrement to listen to some.
Increasingly, the tides are shifting in our direction. Putting tickets for the world’s biggest festival on sale at 9AM on a Sunday felt like a message to the pill-poppers and freakniks that they’re no longer welcome; no doubt most of them were too busy sleeping off their hangovers to log into a platoon of devices and stare at a set of unmoving green bars for four hours. Even if the queue contained the odd degenerate who’d been awake all night, I’m confident they couldn’t have successfully navigated a purchase that didn’t involve at least one Albanian man. Which is great, as these are the last people you’d actually want to hang out with at a festival.
Since the introduction of ID verification, buying tickets for Glastonbury has been a test of how effectively you can organize friends and family members into your very own home bot-farm operation. AI puts an end to that. There will be no more screaming at grandmother because her arthritic fingers can’t enter the registration numbers fast enough to complete a purchase on her Kindle’s internet browser. AI can do that job way better, then book flights to Ghent so we can euthanize her.
There was a last-minute change to the system this year, but it was easy enough to get around. The new “hack” was to gather up as many unused registrations as possible—begging, bribing, or blackmailing anyone who’s had kids or got sober since the last instalment of the festival in 2025—and making use of the extra unique queue numbers. I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an underground trade in the registration numbers of the recently deceased. Did you know they eat their fries with mayonnaise in Belgium?
“I don’t know why people are crying about the price of tickets, which are just £408, or to put it another way, less than an annual subscription to GPT Plus”
I learned that this week. AI agents are already making dinner reservations. Once they work out how to get into Glastonbury, you’ll know the singularity isn’t far away. AI can refresh a browser window faster than any human in history, so hopefully next year, the ticket rush will be a thing of the past. And if you drugged-out doomers don’t like the sound of that, you can stay home and watch on the BBC—as long as your agent has sorted out the license renewal.
OTHER NEWS
- Shout out to Kid Rock collaborating with Eminem for some religious rap about staying friends despite having political differences. Gonna be one of my least favorite genres.
- FBI Director Kash Patel just got engaged to country singer Alexis Wilkins, which implies the existence of unfathomably hideous his-and-hers customized Nikes (good luck finding a wedding dress to go with them).
- London’s underground art fair, Minor Attractions, returns this month and will include live music for the first time—one of the venues is the kinky co-working space STÜCK (which we’ve written about before), which I guess makes sense as it’s a pretty… fluid space.
PREDICTION FOR THE WEEK AHEAD
- After the release of single “Patient Zero”—which tragically coincided with the death of a scientist at a Russian plague laboratory—Taylor Swift’s new track, “Mass Extinction Event”, is an unexpected return to form (streaming numbers are down though after millions die from Black Death 2.0).
BRAND NEW SENTENCE
Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi
The post When Is Glastonbury Going to Let My AI Agent Buy Tickets? appeared first on VICE.
