Should Local Summer Festivals Go Negative?

It’s summer, which means that street fairs are happening all over. They’re popular, family-friendly events that keep dollars circulating locally, and hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But I also wonder whether they might try adding some more revolutionary spirit to their messaging. Like, take “Support Local Merchants” and tack “Fight Oligarchy” onto the end. Use graphics that contrast the happy street fair with images of in-store surveillance, screens, puppetmasters, and datacenters that look like prisons.

With political campaigns, social scientists note that when one candidate goes negative, they’re all incentivized to go negative, like in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Maybe the same would be true in the fight between local and remote retailers for consumer dollars— but I think that, message-wise, localism is an asymmetric threat. What are online retailers going to say— “Don’t shop local”?

People like to be a part of something big that makes the world a better place. What if, on top of all the regular fun and activities that a street fair provides, the experience of visiting one included a psychic overlay of revolution, a co-conspiratorial fellowship and common cause with all of the other attendees? What if shopping local were promoted as a way to “stick it to the Man,” adding an aggressive edge to the Kumbaya positivity?

Reality check: I learned some surprising things about street fairs from Allen Cain, Executive Director of the Solano Avenue Association, the nonprofit business district association that puts on the annual Solano Stroll event near me, in Albany and Berkeley, CA. Until recently, the event had always roughly broken even. But a few years ago, local police and fire departments began requring metal barriers from Meridian, a Pasadena company that developed them for the Rose Bowl parade, to block vehicles at all cross-streets.

Renting these barriers means hiring their crew of 30 with multiple trucks to transport and temporarily install them along the one-mile span, putting the crew up at a local hotel the night before the event. Meridian has been raising their prices, and this year, the cost for the barriers alone dwarfs the total cost of all other event expenses. And because the city of Berkeley is in the red, laying off teachers and firefighters and ill-equipped to subsidize higher street fair costs, the Solano Avenue Association had to take out a loan to cover their outlay for this year’s event.

Cain sees Solano Stroll as a way for Solano Ave businesses to project soft power, to encourage people to visit and enjoy the area rather than to make money from event traffic itself. Any increased sales for the resident businesses behind the temporary booths on the street, he says, can happen organically. But fair organizers still keep money local. All the artisans and makers who apply for booths to sell things like jewelry, oils and perfumes, and repurposed clothing, need to submit photos with their application that show them making the items themselves, so that no booths go to posers who resell cheap imports as their own handiwork. Meanwhile, local school bands and dance troupes perform for their largest audiences all year, nonprofits raise awareness and solicit volunteers and ideas, and food vendors serve surprises like Chinese Burritos.

But shopping local vs. remote doesn’t have to be either/or. As Cain says, “We don’t expect the public to change their shopping behavior— an older person isn’t going to get their cat food from a local store and lug it back home. That stuff is heavy. Amazon has its place.” Personally, I’m blessed with basement space and buy commodity household staples like toilet paper at Costco to save money. But with discretionary spending, I think there’s room to shift tastes, consumer desire, and status signaling away from Madison Avenue’s corporate clients and towards things like local street fairs. Besides, if a local retailer beats Amazon’s prices, even just for some things, how would Amazon even know?

Following a train of thought, local music festivals that I’ve been to already voice opposition to global promoters like LiveNation, but what if this tactic were dialed up and codified into an opposition handbook? As noted here previously, big concerts can be powerful, quasi-religious group experiences, and their feeling of connection, drug enhanced or not, is currently commodified around manufactured stardom. Their only reference to your location is the obligatory and oft-parodied ritual when the lead performer says, “It’s great to be here in <current_tour_location>” and then maybe makes a couple more local references before politely pausing, smiling, and nodding, as the crowd roars with proud appreciation that such a deity should praise their earthly realm.

What if, instead, a local music festival with comparable performer talent and audiovisual production quality, and with tickets much cheaper than for big-name tours, pursued the same communal-experience appeal, but instead of focusing it on belief in stardom, swapped in locality— not in a nativist, Nazi way, but as in local community, appreciating local talent, paying attention to local issues, keeping money local. A comedian could warm up the crowd by mocking LiveNation, laying low the exalted, and raising consciousness about keeping money local and supporting local journalism before introducing the amazing bands. Can such a dream come true?

As with retail, going on the attack would be asymmetric. What would global music companies say in response— don’t see local musicians, see famous musicians instead? That wouldn’t play in an industry that banks on authenticity, so they’d just have to ignore the threat. And the events themselves would hopefully bring the same sense of excitement, revolutionary possibility, belonging, and (yes) anger that have animated other successful populist rallies we’ve seen in recent history.

Image Credit: IIP Photo Archive via Wikimedia Commons

COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP

• How a Community Land Trust Brought an Indie Bookstore to Fresno’s Tower District, Next City (August 4)

  • Residents of Fresno’s Tower district turned the site of an old police station into a city park, then formed a community land trust that has acquired and developed affordable residences and influenced local city planning. The land trust now owns a commercial property that hosts its first business, an independent bookstore.

FOOD

• Uniting Health Care & Agriculture for Community, Healthcare Anchor Network (July 30)

  • Recognizing that food is a central part of health, Barnabas Hospital in Newark, NJ opened Harvest, a “Farm to Community Center” that includes a teaching/demonstration kitchen, a commercial kitchen business incubator, and local produce distribution and packing facility.

• Beacons of Hope: Women Defending the Coast Through Data and Collective Care, Global Alliance for the Future of Food (July 21)

  • A new multimedia story series shows how six coastal communities around the world have fought to defend their fishing rights and restore the health, safety, and productivity of themselves and their local environments.

CLIMATE

• After a Civil Rights Complaint, Chicago Built the Nation’s Largest Air Monitoring Network, Grist (June 25)

  • To honor a civil rights case settlement over an industrial facility’s relocation to a polluted neighborhood, Chicago installed a dense network of solar-powered air quality monitors throughout the city. Now live, the project provides real-time, fine-grained air quality information, to support public health and help city officials with permitting, urban planning, and air quality control.

PRODUCTS

• Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse, The Guardian (August 10)

  • As conglomerates have bought many formerly-trusted product brands and reduced their quality, news outlets have ignored these changes. But the Worse On Purpose site and Buy’r app track them. Consumers who seek high quality should buy products made by independent companies.

MEDIA

• FCC scraps limit on local TV ownership in win for media conglomerates, The Guardian (August 6)

  • In repealing a restriction set in 2003, the FCC now allows broadcasting conglomerates to own television stations that collectively reach more than 39% of households. Such station groups license content from producers and rightsholders, including national news networks.

THEORY

• Market Humanism: A New Paradigm for a New Era, Democracy Journal (Summer 2026)

  • The goal of economic practice should be to enable human flourishing. Let’s grow the economy by making it fairer and supportive of the middle class, gauge its success by measuring things that make people’s lives better, and apply state power entrepreneurially to make markets succeed.

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