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When Is Glastonbury Going to Let My AI Agent Buy Tickets?

Maybe next year Mr. Eavis will finally make the changes needed to open up an exciting new chapter for the festival.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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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”

“Before you know it, we’ll be monetizing the portaloos, converting human waste into revenue for the suits in charge”

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