Quadcopter Light Show

Oh no! Yet again, no big corporate donor is stepping up to sponsor a big 4th of July fireworks show in Seattle! It just hasn’t been the same since the collapse of WaMu — the last big company in Seattle that seemed to care about traditional civic beneficence.

My hunch is it ain’t coming back. Gone is the era of corporate executives who fought in World War II, attended college on the GI Bill, and threw ticker-tape parades down Main Street. Today’s business leaders are global tycoons or grassroots entrepreneurs (or both).

Yes, there have been calls to crowdfund it. But do enough people really LOVE this enough to save it. I don’t even go to big fireworks shows anymore because of the crowds. Yeah, it’s impressive to watch. For 15 minutes. But is it worth hordes of people descending on Wallingford (looking for a place to poop) or a floating traffic jam on Lake Union?

I wouldn’t mind going to smaller neighborhood displays. But of course they are illegal, and with good reason because you don’t want people shooting explosives in the air next to your house.

What we need is some new safer way to put on a jaw-dropping light show. Something like this:

I mean, fireworks are so 18th century. Crowdfunding a big show feels like crowdfunding horses and buggy whips. If there’s going to be a grassroots crowdsourced solution, I say let it be Quad-Copter Fourth.

Tap the maker + performance artist spirit that infuses so many crowd-sourced phenomena. Bring low-cost, programmable, safe-yet-jaw-dropping light shows to every neighborhood. Open-source the programming interface so that anyone in the community can create, rehearse and vote on the choreography.

Seeing hundreds of such displays across a whole city would be no less impressive — no less patriotic — than one big boom show. Maybe even more so. And what better way to update Independence Day than to trade rocket’s red glare for aerial drones.

P.S. it’s not that I don’t appreciate the spectacle of real fireworks. But something like Vancouver’s Festival of Lights, an international fireworks competition, feels like a way better model for ensuring not one but many really impressive fireworks displays every year.