Seventeen years ago I ended up in Vancouver via Perth (Australia), Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Pakistan. I was writing a book and didn’t really care what happened to me or where I was, I had to finish the book.
It took 349 days, I wrote it in ink with a Mont Blanc pen, I spent all my money and more, then I found myself sleeping rough in a cinema in Vancouver’s Granville district. All for literature, man, and the ghosts of Jack Kerouac, Dylan… and Leadbelly too.
Fortunately, I got some work labouring and managed to type up the book in a library that opened late. I also spent all my time in bars, had a gun pulled on me at the Cambie and read the newspaper all the time.
The Vancouver Sun is a good newspaper and was festooned every day with CCTV pictures of miscreants who had rioted after the local ice hockey team had lost the final of the Stanley Cup. They ran those pictures for years.
But what a crap riot. As the Englishman in the bar who had an exotic value and had seen a few tear-ups in his time from 1970s football matches to Battles of various Beanfields, I used to bang on about how poncy Vancouver was and how they couldn’t even do a riot properly.
How wrong I was. Last night, they lost the Stanley Cup again and their fans went mental. Bonkers. Smashed the place up, pissed out of their brains. Or as the Huffington Post put it: ‘Women rampaged through the make-up department, tossing each other products and squealing in delight’.
And the rioting prowess of Vancouverians (?) isn’t the only thing that has changed in 17 years. No mobile phones or social networks in 1993. This time everybody was taking pictures and posting them on Twitter and Facebook. Vancouver was #trending, dude.
So the City of Vancouver that showed such diligence in prosecuting people after the previous ‘riot’ now have much more powerful weapons than CCTV to come down on these bad boys and girls.
The Vancouver Sun is now digital and so are we all. The Vancouver Canucks lost again, downtown Vancouver got bash-up again, but if I was a silly rioter I would be very worried, very worried indeed.
You may finally know how to throw a riot, but you’re going to jail, the proof is in your pocket and for all the world to see.
Monty Munford has more than 15 years' experience in mobile, digital media, web and journalism. He is the founder of Mob76, a company that helps tech companies raise money and exit. He speaks regularly at global media events with a focus on Africa, writes a weekly column for The Telegraph, is a regular contributor to The Economist, Wired, Mashable and speaks regularly on the BBC World Service.
