Sometime in 2010, in my twenties, a Canadian HR manager tried to convince me that I’d find the meaning of life in the Nevada desert. She was a ‘Burner’, and Burning Man festival was the solution. There were ski goggles, silly hats, experimental music, and a black cat called Moop, named after the festival’s matter-out-of-place principle. I ran a mile after the cringeworthy group hug sessions and drunken lectures to take my trash home with me. I was and remain too English to belong to this particular group identity.

Yet the Burners may have been onto something: they felt that a festival is a vessel for identity, something to join rather than simply attend. While most festivals have tried to copy Burning Man, many of them are now in trouble.

Most recently, this summer’s Womad Glasgow was canceled. It was set to be the first Scottish edition of Peter Gabriel’s world-music festival, but sold too few of its £145 tickets to go ahead. It joins a list kept by the Association of Independent Festivals of 20 cancellations or postponements so far this year. Womad’s trouble was partly geography: a festival frequented by people who live in the South of England, that has now moved too far away. The usual suspects are also blamed: big corporate beasts suffocating the little guy, and the fees that some musicians charge. But is this really the death of music festivals?

Not exactly. The numbers show a bubble deflating after Covid, with 43 closures in 2025 and 78 the year before, the slow unwinding of a glut funded by cheap money and more disposable income. Even if it’s just a correction, something is still being lost. A festival used to be a simple thing: a field, a sound system, a love of a subculture, and a few thousand strangers misbehaving. It did not need to have grand ideas. That was rather the point.

Slowly, however, they have acquired lofty visions — and a price tag to match. When Rage Against The Machine headlined at Coachella in 1999, tickets cost $50 and the band returned half their fee to help the organizers out. Then the need for more money immediately led to the introduction of VIP tickets. Perhaps desperate for relevance while the audience preened, this year The Strokes showed a video montage of US bombings in Iran, a year after Kneecap used their set to call for a “free Palestine”. Coachella tickets now cost $650.

Similarly in the UK, Glastonbury (£375) started as a rock festival but is now mostly pop for middle-class people who want to muck in for a weekend, but at least the wellies serve a practical purpose. Meanwhile, Mighty Hoopla (£160) in Brockwell Park is seen as the ‘gay Glastonbury’, and everyone wears gold or silver lamé shorts.

The decline of Burning Man ($550) shows where this road ends. What began in 1986 as a beach bonfire with no rules or brand guidelines was ruined by guardrails. The original free-spirited principles of the Burner community became bureaucratized, and what was casual and spontaneous became a prescription. Last year the festival made a loss.

Womad and the 19 other casualties this year were never as big as some of those famous festivals, but they all suffer from similar problems: an obsession with planning led by outward appearances, the politicization of everything, the demands of modern laws and regulations, residents getting better at blocking events, and a changing wider culture.

It’s not that it’s good that some festivals are closing, or that organizers are losing money. Their retreat shows how culture has shrunk. What we should return to is smaller, more nimble, unbranded, and perhaps more lawless occasions.

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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