The Festival of Giving

Dirty apartment and personal residence. Written via smartphone browser 4:21 PM (GMT). Sunday, 18 February 2018. Minneapolis.

Hey, look, I decided to write this post right after smoking cannabis at 4:20 GMT. Funny.

Anyway, I wanted to give you all a break from what would only become yet-more-hardcore philosophy--specifically, the complex relationship between politics, aesthetics, semiotics, and ontology--so, yeah, I think it's a good idea for us all to just take a breath and talk about "the Festival of Giving."

Reference Photo of the Holi Festival, which will occur March 2nd in 2018
(Source)

The Festival of Giving is an idea I'm about to ruin, because this post will introduce it to the internet, and anyone who looks it up will know all the details. That said, there are synonyms for "Giving" that would make this idea entirely operational.

Regardless, please read (in scare quotes, so you know that I didn't necessarily write this) the essence of an idea I pitched to @utopiaboy, who I personally doubt has the criminal connections required to arrange the Festival of Giving anyway:

"We both know about those tourist locations where tons of fraudsters, con artists, whatever you want to call them, they hang out and sell tourists knock-off designer bags that spell 'Gucci' with a K, or something like that.

"Although I have a sense of personal ethics and moral principles, I really don't fucking care at all if some probably-neoliberal bourgeois tourist gets conned while visiting India because they watched Sex & the City 2 or read almost all of Eat Pray Love. So, here's what someone should do: talk to all those fraudsters, shysters, and con artists, and together organize a 'Festival of Giving ' to 'honor the generosity of the divine.'

"Here's what the Festival of Giving is: a give-us-money festival that milks white guilt. Explain to the shysters that this 'Festival of Giving' will require some initial capital. Sort of like if you just got your product on store shelves and want to impress the store owner, you give your friends money to go buy out the supply, you know? Enough to get the Festival in motion.

"Alright, now the Festival begins: Western tourists watch as a dozen or more Indians offer money to each other in prostration; like, they take a knee, bow their head, and offer rupees with a pair of open palms to one of their partner-shysters, or whatever 'prostration' might imply in the interpretation I've tried to offer.

"The point is, social proof: holding Festivals of Giving at tourist spots where all the Indians give to other Indians with excessive and entertaining shows of humility will encourage the Western tourists to get involved, treating the excessive shows of humility like some kind of theme park attraction they suddenly want to ride too, but not realizing they're always receiving fewer rupees than they last gave.

"Now, your shysters' ideal marks are tour groups--like, I don't know, a youth group from Kansas who are all visiting India together for one reason or another. With tour groups, they can get comfortable performing the Festival of Giving among themselves. You can start this process if one of the shysters offers the prostrated offering to whomever looks like the most approachable member of the tour group, and then amicably explains the Festival's outward purpose and customs to the likely bewildered and slightly flattered tourist. Then, when ('in accordance with local custom') that tourist has returned the gift to a different shyster, the rest of the group will feel unconsciously obligated to leave that circle where they got comfortable with the 'customs of the "Festival,"' and their money starts flowing out of their group and into the hands of the shysters, who then just trade the 'Festival offering' among themselves.

"Anyway, after money has changed hands in prostration between shysters and conned tourists at least four or five times, the Indians all end up giving all the money to children: likely their own, but it will work best if they look like street urchins who would otherwise just beg in the area anyway regardless of the Festival, and perhaps the shysters even mistreat a few times just for show.

"These children are the 'wallets' for the Festival, for lack of a better word. Their job is to collect the initial circulation to start the Festival plus the profit from the tourists.

"To reiterate the important details: the tourists will give a whole fucking lot more because the Festival of Giving will look like a real thing if you play up the religious prostration aspect. Like, one shyster makes a big show of religiously-themed appreciation to give the tourist a little spectacle. Then, after the exchanges between shysters and tourists has run enough times (with the tourists receiving diminishing returns in each of these high-speed transactions), the shyster then turns and gives the money to the nearest urchin-looking child with the same dramatic presentation--one of the children, of course, who serves as a 'Festival wallet.'

"BONUS, THOUGH: because of demonetization [a terrible idea to eliminate larger bills of their fiat that the Indian government executed so horribly people actually died while waiting in line at the bank], now, from the tourists' perspectives, they can do it over and over with the mindset of, 'these are just X rupees, that's like six cents to me, whatever,' without thinking much about how the small bills add up--especially while they're having fun, and meanwhile receiving from an entertainingly-prostrated shyster some amount of rupees (a comparatively tiny amount, because the tourist will not recognize rupee denominations on sight, so the shysters will have no trouble diminishing the tourists' returns in the 'cycle of giving') during one of those four or five transactions before the children receive the take, just so it's not obvious what the Festival is really about."

I think it's a damn good plan, but unfortunately, I just don't think it will reach execution within my existing network, so I figured I would share it with you all. Take it and modify it if you want: this is a con "licensed open-source as long as the victims are bourgeois neoliberals on vacation."

Best (as always),

@riotdog