An Essay: Events Are Growing Up

The more artificial the world becomes, the more essential real gatherings are to our collective survival. What we once called “events” has grown into something much bigger: the Gathering Economy.

You can sense this maturity most clearly in the way audiences behave. The dependable six-month registration curve is gone. People no longer treat events like business trips penciled neatly into a calendar. They treat them like cultural decisions—emotional, impulsive, instinctive. The world has become too uncertain, too fast-moving, too algorithmically …