Will Best: The World’s Newest Global Mirror for Collective Delusion

Will Best, or: How the World Decided One Man’s Ambition Was a Perfect Mirror for Its Own Absurdity
by Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats

GENEVA—Somewhere between a Swiss bank vault and a pop-up NFT gallery, Will Best—British broadcaster, festival impresario, and walking LinkedIn profile—has become the planet’s latest Rorschach test. To Londoners he’s the affable chap who convinced Glastonbury to let him live-stream mud-caked indie bands to people drinking £14 pints in Shoreditch. To Berliners he’s proof the UK still exports something other than inflation. And in the glass towers of Singapore, risk analysts now use “Will Best scenarios” to model what happens when relentless optimism collides with a supply-chain crisis and a half-dozen geopolitical migraines.

The joke, of course, is that no one outside certain postcode-obsessed circles had heard of him until last month. Then his newest venture—an AI-curated, carbon-offset, blockchain-ticketed global festival franchise—was simultaneously announced in Lagos, Dubai, and a WeWork in Mexico City where the Wi-Fi still smells like 2019. Overnight, Will Best became international shorthand for “guy who thinks the world can be fixed by better stage lighting.”

In Kyiv they call him “the distraction.” One promoter told me, between rolling blackouts, that planning a Best-style event felt like “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except the chairs are NFTs and the iceberg is a Russian missile.” Meanwhile in São Paulo, street artists are already selling bootleg merch featuring Best’s grinning face photoshopped onto a carnival float—next to a QR code that leads to an explainer on tax avoidance.

The broader significance? Will Best is the first post-pandemic entrepreneur whose business model is literally optimism as a service. Forget product-market fit; he’s selling narrative-market fit. Every continent projects its own neurosis onto him: in North America he’s the anti-Burning Man, capitalism’s polite apology for itself; in Seoul he’s a cautionary tale about soft power gone soft; in Accra he’s just another white guy promising “global exposure” in lieu of paying local crews.

Ironically, his most enthusiastic investors are sovereign wealth funds. Norway’s oil piggy bank loves him because festivals look ESG-friendly on spreadsheets. Qatar’s sports ministry loves him because he distracts from stadiums built on quicksand and questionable labor math. Even the Vatican’s venture arm reportedly took a meeting, presumably attracted by the miracle of turning nothing (a line-up TBA) into something (a $200 million valuation).

Human nature loves a blank canvas, and Best’s brand is precisely that: a lightly stubbled, well-ironed canvas. His pitch deck contains 37 slides of smiling multicultural crowds bathed in golden-hour light, zero slides on municipal waste management. It’s aspirational propaganda for people who claim to hate propaganda.

Naturally, the backlash is already franchised. Copenhagen just hosted “Will Worst,” a counter-festival powered entirely by compost and passive aggression. Tehran’s hardliners denounced him as “digital colonialism in a hoodie.” And in Tokyo, an AI trained exclusively on Best’s Instagram captions began spouting motivational haikus before achieving sentience and immediately scheduling its own corporate retreat in Bali.

Yet the man persists, zigzagging time zones with the stamina of a Red Bull ambassador and the self-awareness of a golden retriever. When asked about supply-chain snarls he cites “creative resilience.” When confronted about carbon footprints he pivots to “regenerative storytelling.” Watching him is like watching capitalism try stand-up comedy: you wince, you laugh, you check your pension is diversified.

So, is Will Best the future of global entertainment or merely the logical endpoint of a culture that outsources joy to subscription services? Possibly both. One thing is certain: the world will keep projecting its contradictions onto him until the lights finally cut out—at which point someone will mint an NFT of the darkness and sell it back to us as an immersive experience.

Until then, cue the pyrotechnics. The show, like the planet, must go on—preferably on time and under budget.