Picture the scene: it’s New Year’s Eve and the city is alive with anticipation. Crowds of revelers stream into the streets and public squares, ready to ring in the new year together. Strangers become friends as the clock strikes midnight, united in a joyful, chaotic celebration. This carnival spirit — where social hierarchies dissolve and everyone is equal for one night — used to be the essence of New Year’s Eve.
But in recent years, this festive egalitarianism has given way to a new paradigm: the controlled, monetized, and exclusive New Year’s event. In major cities around the world, what were once sprawling public celebrations have been replaced by ticketed spectacles, complete with security checkpoints, VIP sections, and strategically-placed barriers to control crowd flow.
The Shift to Controlled Crowds
This transformation can be seen clearly in places like London, where until 2014, watching the famed New Year’s Eve fireworks display was a free-for-all. Up to a million people would cram into the streets around the Thames for a glimpse of the spectacle. Messy, yes — but also magnificently communal.
No longer. Mayor Boris Johnson introduced ticketing for the first time that year, arguing it was needed for crowd safety. Now, if you want a spot near the river, you’ll need to shell out £10 to £50 for the privilege. Similar “upgrades” have been introduced in New York, Sydney, Edinburgh and beyond.
Authorities claim it’s about reducing crowds to manageable numbers. And after tragedies like the Halloween crush in Seoul that killed over 150, that’s understandable. But top crowd control experts say safety measures can be achieved without turnstiles and tiered access. Notting Hill Carnival, for instance, draws over a million attendees into a tiny web of streets — relatively incident-free, by strategically removing barriers to facilitate flow.
From Festivity to Finance
So if not purely for safety, what’s driving the shift to controlled crowds? Look no further than the exploding urban events industry, now a key part of many cities’ economic engines. Fireworks alone are big business, with Sydney’s display costing over $6 million. Turning New Year’s Eve from an organic gathering to a ticketed extravaganza captures more disposable income, from entrance fees to concessions to special viewing packages.
But something intangible is lost in the process. The evolutionary imperative to come together with strangers to celebrate has deep roots. There’s even a Finnish expression, torilla tavataan or “to the town square!” that’s used to express shared elation. Yet increasingly, our public squares are being privatized, redesigned to restrict rather than foster collective festivities.
Trafalgar Square is a great example: when it was first laid out in the early 19th century, the Chartists were on the rise, and there was real clamour and public protest about the extension of the electoral franchise. And because of the concern of the vast amount of space Trafalgar Square offered, after a year or so they added the vast fountains – they take up almost half the entire space, and the only reason they are so big is because it reduces the space available for the crowd by half. So the authorities have always been concerned about large crowds, and will try to mitigate that by designing them out.
– Dan Hancox, author of “The Village Against The World” on historical crowd control
A Blessed Moment of Equality
The great 20th century sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich argued that over hundreds of years, spontaneous festivities have been incrementally suppressed by the forces of “official” culture and commerce. New Year’s Eve is perhaps the last vestige of the carnival tradition, in which the usual rules of society are suspended and inverted.
Carnival is … the place where people can ‘lose their heads’, let go, and be free for a day. The masks and costumes erase signs of class so that a servant and a master are indistinguishable. Its spirit is anarchic and rebellious, mocking privilege and making light of authority.
– Barbara Ehrenreich on the subversive power of carnival
Yet this one night of joyful anarchy is being relentlessly tamed and repackaged for profit. The shift from open to closed crowds introduces economic and social barriers, where your position depends on your ability to pay — antithetical to carnival’s equalizing essence.
Reclaiming Festivity, Crypto-Style
So what’s a reveler to do? Perhaps turn to alternative celebrations that preserve the organic, anarchic spirit of New Year’s Eve. And in the crypto world, that ethic is alive and well. Decentralized autonomous organizations are throwing virtual raves and”Consensus New Year’s Eve” parties where pseudonymous merrymakers can transact and transfer value without centralized oversight.
Like the crypto ethos itself, it’s about circumventing traditional gatekeepers and hierarchies — whether the velvet ropes of a VIP section or the iron gates of the financial system. True, virtual festivities may lack the raw energy of bodies moving together through a city. But in embracing the pseudonymous, peer-to-peer interactions at the heart of cryptocurrency, they embody the vital carnival tradition.
So this New Year’s Eve, as cities around the world stage their tightly-controlled spectacles, the crypto community offers an alternative vision. One where the transformative power of coming together is available to all, regardless of status or identity. Where the ancient urge to gather and celebrate, free from society’s strictures, lives on in digital space. And where, for one blessed night, we can experience the equalizing joy of being just another face in the crowd.
