The New Gods

The public display of sympathy for a company like Wirecard by a man is a logical end point for a capitalist society based on the destructive myth of endless growth. A society that targets especially men with invasive YouTube ads promising easy ways to turn 3.000,- € into 30.000,- € proclaims the perverse logic of the market. The means become irrelevant as long as, in the end, you become an achiever – just as the guy in the ad.

The truth is: Everybody can buy an expensive cashmere shirt and rent a villa for a few hours of shooting. And everybody can sell a useless coaching as a life altering financial consulting. That is, if you have “the balls” for it.

The elaborate design of the stages is widely acclaimed. However, there’s little commentary about its cyberpunk look and the industrial dystopian design of the stages. The elaborate, centralized position of the performer puts emphasis on (mainly his) the authority. Uncanny.

In this line of thought, Wirecard may not necessarily be seen as a company that caused numerous people to lose their life savings and that lied, cheated and manipulated their way to the top; but as a capitalist business concept that took balls to undertake (imagine the common hand gesture indicating to hold a big, well, ball) and which ultimately rewarded its COO Jan Marsalek with wealth, women and access to some of the most powerful people on this planet (including Russian and Chinese officials). A business, that was “this close” to achievement by ultimately concealing its 1.9 billion fraud within an inscrutable maze of shell companies and money laundering (now imagine that other common gesture with two fingers – which, ironically, can also used to describe the size of a small penis).

When I saw this Wirecard cap at ParookaVille and the aggressive ease with which its owner carried his message into the festival atmosphere, I was initially stunned. But then it clicked. Seeing this lined up with a bunch of other confusing impressions I’d made that far: My (female) friend’s attractiveness was rated by a fat man proudly lifting a handmade sign (if you’re wondering: She was a “10”). Later, I saw a plastic phallus being swung through the air while the only explicit reference to its female counterpart (apart from the numerous sex dolls hanging from poles) I found on a sticker attached on a woman’s panties which prompted to spit on female sex organs (I phrased it nicely since I do not want to translate that derogatory word). Looking down, I later found that same sticker on the ground while the larger-than-life projection of (yet another) white male performer loomed above the festival crowd, creating a disturbing impression of a modernized Big Brother scenario (the autocracy of fun).

While the festival, with its homogenous line-up of ^[1]Only about 12% of the 2023 line-up consisted of female, or mixed-gender acts, none of them were main acts. A list of the line-up of the current edition the festival can be found here: … Continue reading and its only focus on Electronic Dance Music (EDM)^[2]The development of this genre has been criticized for years for creating “push-button DJs” and for focusing on spectacle rather than spontaneous skilled DJ performances. See for example: … Continue reading represents the ultimate commercialization of pleasure and (electronic) music; its audience, for some reason, willingly filled the place with symbols of sexism, demonstrating its identification with well-practiced structures of power.

At best, the sight of this cap merely represents the common disturbance of men, mistaking dominance (cheating and lying in the case of Jan Marsalek) for masculinity. Or, it could stand for the wicked ways in which capitalism and patriarchy work hand in hand.

In any case, this festival was not as innocent as it may have seemed.