BREAKING: Tomorrowland’s Main Stage Turns to Ash

No injuries. No deaths. Just a 60-meter inferno swallowing the "Orbyz" stage whole, like a final exclamation point on two decades of choreographed hedonism. For once, the pyrotechnics were honest.

Let’s not pretend shock. The Beers brothers, Manu and Michel, spent years converting a Belgian meadow into a gated cash funnel: €400 "Full Madness" bracelets, €12 Heineken tokens, €3,000 "DreamVille" cardboard shacks with linen service. Tomorrowland 2025 was already slated to be the most profitable yet; until the flames ate the rigging at 02:17 a.m. and the livestream cut to a looping Tomorrowland logo. Somewhere, the universe hit mute on the big-room drop.

Old-school heads are DM’ing us, furious that we called the festival “a three-to-five-star circus of clownery”. Save the crocodile tears. You paid for the branded locker key, you paid for the VIP tent with its own wristband colour, you paid to stand under a dragon head while a lesbian DJ named Bitch, literally just Bitch, pressed play on the same white-noise riser 400,000 people pretended was culture. You’re not ravers; you’re revenue line items.

Meanwhile, the world burns—literally and politically. Gaza is still being levelled, the West is teetering into World War III, and the only political statement tolerated on the main stage is Bob Vylan screaming "Free Palestine" to a crowd more interested in Instagram angles than intifada. Keith Flint’s ghost must be laughing—The Prodigy’s "Firestarter" lyric finally made flesh, except the fire started itself. "Timebomb", indeed.

Cue Rammstein’s "Feuer Frei". Let the guitars crunch while the rigging collapses. Let the flames lick the corporate fairy lights. Let the fireworks that were meant to distract from genocide instead illuminate it. The symbolism is perfect: a hollow empire of LED panels and confetti cannons reduced to carbon and twisted steel. No casualties, just a monument to vacancy.

Tomorrowland will rebuild; slicker stages, higher ticket tiers, more rainbow capitalism. They’ll slap "Resilience" on next year’s theme and sell it back to you at 20% markup. But the spell is broken. The rave is dead; the market buried it in a coffin of LED bracelets and branded glitter. All that’s left is the echo of a drop that never came.

Keep your refund. Buy Bitcoin. Read ELEKTRO BITCOIN via https://daoly.art/books. Reclaim the underground.

Big, flashy masses
Belgium's Tomorrowland festival is considered the biggest and most spectacular in the world. It's renowned for its fairytale settings, gigantic stages and eclectic line-up, ranging from trance to house to hardstyle. The distressing images from the 2024 edition showed that it is in fact a three to five star experience complete with overpriced cardboard box for access sent home, luxury bungalows and a debauchery of clownery. On TikTok, it's ven worse: kids doing a kind of technotronic 'duck dance'. The brothers Manu and Michiel Beers were the true gravediggers of rave culture.

From utopia to the abyss

Rave culture, initially synonymous with freedom and experimentation, has gradually been transformed into a veritable market. The return in force of sex, drugs and rock and roll in an exacerbated form, dehumanisation with the advent of soulless machines and the proliferation of mega-events have profoundly altered the nature of this movement. While this commercialisation has enabled electronic music to become more democratic and generate significant revenue, it has also contributed to homogenising sounds, trivialising experiences and creating a culture of spectacle often disconnected from its underground roots.

Extract from "Electro Bitcoin"