The Party’s Done
presence to proof
Introduction
After a long hiatus, I went to the club this month. I noticed a group of people at the edge of the dance floor. Not dancing. Barely talking. Just standing there, phone at chest height, waiting. The crowd surged, they lifted their phones, filmed for maybe ten seconds, lowered them again, without ever looking like they were having any fun.
I miss the old nightlife. Not in the “kids these days” way; more in the way a certain song unlocks a memory from a past life. Parties are still popping and tickets sell out faster than ever. So what about the thing that made 2 a.m. on a random Thursday feel like anything could happen? That quietly left and never came back. The experience changed forever.
I
Let me describe what surveillance feels like. You’re in a room. The music is loud enough that thinking becomes difficult. Someone you find attractive is dancing near you; not at you, just near you, in that ambiguous zone where proximity might mean something or might mean nothing. 10 years ago, you had two options: move closer and find out, or don’t. The stakes were immediate and contained. Rejection stung for a few minutes, if that. Acceptance opened a night.
In 2025, you have a third option: do nothing, because you don’t know who’s watching, or worse, recording. Recording from an angle you’ll never see, out of context, to an audience you’ll never meet, with a caption you’ll never control. The person on the dance floor becomes a character in someone else’s content, and you’re auditioning for a role you never signed up for. So you hesitate, calculate, wonder if the person you’re about to approach has a friend who loves filming. You wonder how the spontaneous, messy, ambiguous thing you were about to say or do will look when it’s clipped into a 15-second video and shown to 1,000 strangers. In the few seconds it takes to wonder all that, the moment passes. I first realised this when I was partying in LA and my friends kept recording parts of the night for the sake of memory. Strangers I’d speak to would literally point at the camera; these were people who valued their privacy, who came out to escape being watched. By the time I told my friends to put their phones away, the moment had passed.
This is what the camera does. It doesn’t just record behaviour, it colonises your intention. You can’t truly be present because you’re modelling how presence will render as evidence. Every action splits into two versions: the thing you’re doing and the thing that will appear to have been done. The gap between those two things is where spontaneity used to live.
In nightlife, surveillance and aliveness are at war. For a space historically defined by temporary freedom from consequence, the introduction of permanent records didn’t just add safety, it restructured the entire possibility space of who you could be. Safety came at a cost; spontaneity became expensive. We sanitised the very thing that made nightlife visceral. Your night extends online now by default, stripped of context and judged by people who weren’t there. The rational response is editing oneself in real time. Patrons stop participating in the night and start performing in it. The stakes feel existential because in some sense they are; the internet never forgets.
So people stopped trying things. They started performing trying things, which is not the same. The performance is safer. It photographs better. Yet it requires a self-consciousness that kills the very thing it’s trying to simulate. I don’t know if this will ever change. I just know what got traded, and I don’t think we’ve properly reckoned with the cost.
II
Nightlife used to operate on a certain tradition. Not rules, more like a shared fluency in unspoken choreography. You learned how to be in a club the way you learn a language: through immersion, imitation, and accumulated exposure. You learned by watching. How to move through a crowd. How to read a room. How to turn a glance into a conversation. When to leave someone alone. When to extend an invitation. When to stay. When to go.
None of this was written down. It lived in bodies. It passed from one cohort to the next through something like apprenticeship; younger people absorbing the social technology from older people who’d absorbed it from people older still. The knowledge was embodied, contextual, illegible from the outside. Then, in March 2020, the music stopped. Not for a few weeks. For a year, eighteen months in some places. A generation’s worth of transmission just… didn’t happen. The people who’d been the carriers of that culture either aged out, moved away, or came back fundamentally different. The people who should have learned from them spent their formative social years on Discord, Houseparty and FaceTime. These spaces were controlled socialisation.
What that means is: if you became an adult in 2020, you didn’t go to the club, you didn’t have random hangouts with people you barely knew, you didn’t experience a house party, how to join a conversation in progress, how to exist in unstructured social space with strangers. You learned how to be social in environments with mute buttons, chat logs, and exit options. You learned connection with control.
So when nightlife reopened, you entered a space designed around the absence of control; no pause button, no log, no ability to edit in real time. The muscle memory wasn’t there. The fluency never developed. You didn’t know the grammar because no one had taught it to you, and the people who could have taught it were gone. Without control, people accustomed to it freeze. The result is a glitch. Conversations never start because no one knows how to initiate without an opening text. Dance floors where people move in isolated units, not because they’re antisocial, but because the protocol for joining doesn’t exist in their social operating system. The chain broke.
You can’t read a book to gain the knowledge of being social. It’s experiential or it’s nothing. The culture of old is severed.
III
Clubs used to make money by getting a lot of people moderately drunk. The business model was volume. Pack the room, charge for drinks, watch people loosen up and spend. The venue was democratic by necessity; profitability required filling the space with as many paying bodies as possible.
Then the math changed. Alcohol consumption declined. Health culture rose. The cost of living climbed. Rent in major cities has become obscene, and clubs have to charge more to survive. You can’t charge £18 for a drink and expect volume, so most clubs and venues have simply shut. The ones thriving on volume are university nights; the new adults enjoying adulthood’s novelty. The clubs that remain succeed on a different model: extract maximum value from minimum spenders.
The result is the Whale Economy: a small number of people spending large amounts: at least £1,000 for a table, £500 for a bottle of vodka; subsidising the cost for everyone else. The entire spatial logic of clubs reorganised around this. In 2008, most nightclubs existed as a dance floor with tables and a bar wrapped around it. A 2025 nightclub is a ring of velvet-roped tables surrounding a comically small dance floor that mostly functions as a runway. This doesn’t just change who gets in. It changes why people are there.
In 2019, I worked as a club promoter. If I wanted to make a party pop, I didn’t necessarily need reach. I could call up 20 people saying, ”I’m going there, do you want to come?” That produced far more “Yes” responses than blasting DMs to 1,000 people. Those people came because of me. They trusted the night before it happened. Then the model changed. Clubs started hiring anyone willing to spam people on the internet. Promoters stopped building networks and started extracting attention. Their incentive wasn’t to grow the club’s culture, but to use the club’s brand to grow their own. The internet made this possible at scale. When promoters act as brokers rather than hosts, guests stop being people and become units. There’s no reciprocal obligation, no shared norms, no accountability. The transaction is loud. The big spenders are landlords for the night, and everyone else is set dressing.
Once access becomes purely transactional, being there stops meaning anything. You’re not just going on a night out; you’re populating someone else’s investment. The women are curated specifically to attract the spenders, and offered free entry and drinks in exchange for aesthetic labour. The spenders are not just buying a good time, they’re buying proof that they’re the kind of person who can afford a good time. The promoters know this; they’re behaving like influencers within the walled gardens they have built. Nobody is having the night they’re pretending to have.
IV
People have started treating going out the way everything else is treated; as something to optimise.
Going out used to mean accepting uncertainty. You might have the best night of your life. You might go home early, bored and vaguely disappointed. You might meet someone. You might stand alone in a corner for two hours. The asymmetry was the point. You traded a cover charge and a few hours of your life for a dice roll on an experience that couldn’t be predicted or controlled.
Now, after a prolonged period of total control over our social lives, years of algorithmically curated social experiences, apps teaching people to “prescreen” connections, social media teaching people that our time is too valuable to waste on anything that doesn’t immediately deliver, the idea of leaving the house without a “guaranteed good time” has started to feel irrational. Unstructured face-to-face time became the enemy of optimisation. Why would you leave your house, spend money, and risk disappointment when you could stay home, watch something you know you’ll like, and text people you know will respond?
This is the gamification of social life. Every interaction becomes a transaction with an expected return. Time becomes a resource to be allocated efficiently. Risk becomes something to be minimised rather than embraced. Algorithms and platforms have trained us to be that way. Every swipe delivers a face. Every scroll delivers content. Every click does something. Nightlife is incompatible with this mindset. It asks you to spend money and time for maybe magic, and an entire generation has been trained to believe that “maybe” is irrational when you could be getting “definitely something” right now, even if it’s mediocre. It requires a tolerance for boredom, for awkwardness, for the possibility that you’ll show up and nothing will happen. It requires faith that the unpredictability is itself the value.
The result is a paradox: beautiful venues full of beautiful people generating beautiful content about how much fun they’re supposedly having, while the thing they’re documenting (genuine, unselfconscious aliveness) evaporates the moment they try to capture it.
Conclusion
I’m not just mourning nightlife as I remember it. I’m mourning the ability to live life unsupervised. We have fundamentally changed our behaviour as we become aware of being watched. We live with and in an invisible panopticon.
Clubbing used to offer the unsupervised living experience. Not hedonism exactly, though there was plenty of that. Privacy. Not just in nightlife, but everywhere.
We have traded presence for proof. We go out not to have fun, but to generate evidence that we are the kind of people who have fun. The chaos and uncertainty of the past have ceased to exist. The moment you start performing presence, you’ve already lost it.
Till spaces offer privacy, the nightlife I remember will exist only as a memory.