“Crowds are not fun. Claustrophobia is not fun. I want to go home, have a proper shower, and a poo.” In the forthcoming British film comedy The Festival (made by the team behind The Inbetweeners), the lead character, Nick, isn’t really enjoying his first big festival experience.

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That is, until he wakes up in the back of a stranger’s car, with a raw pierced nipple and wearing spandex pants, after a night of sex with a blue-painted Smurf girl. The road of excess, for suburban Nick, leads to some rueful, mud-caked wisdom.

But that’s the oldest story – indeed, going back millennia – about the effect of a festival. It’s a moment in space and time when humans come together to throw off their regular cares and duties, and actively seek personal transformation and renewal.

Festivals are supposed to turn you upside down. The great philosopher of festivity and carnival, the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, called them “second worlds”. In the medieval “feasts of fools” that he studied, traditional authorities and hierarchies were toyed with, inverted and toppled, through performance, costume and ritual – if only for a few days a year.

That’s certainly the mythic story about music festivals that overhangs every buzzing summer season. They are all still largely following the template set down in the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, by events such as Woodstock and Monterey (the biennial Glastonbury, taking a rest this year, is part of this tradition).

Nomads come with their tents and create a temporary city on a rural plain. Hedonism, personal experimentation and gluttony become the norm rather than the exception. At the centre of it all, the shamans – nowadays standing on giant digitally enhanced stages, brandishing guitars and microphones – summon up the collective emotions of vast crowds.

Yes, there’s something ancient and elemental about even the most modern and cutting-edge of festivals. But, as someone who organises and enjoys them, I think the form is ready for another new stage in its long evolution.

Festivals are becoming the places where we can experiment with the kind of societies we want to be – at a time when those destinations aren’t at all clear to us. A few festive weekends last month alerted me to this potential. At the beginning of July, I curated FutureFest, devised by the innovation foundation Nesta, which aims to celebrate the possibilities of tech, culture and politics. In the glass-and-iron mini-city of London’s Tobacco Dock, we had Nicola Sturgeon vaunting a progressive Scotland. The rapper Akala and author Paul Mason evoked a post-British and post-capitalist future, while the musician Imogen Heap pulled sounds out of the air with her techno-gloves.

The next day, I found myself conducting a “collaboratory” at Noisily, a psychedelic dance festival in the depths of the Coney Woods in Leicestershire. A few yards away, the woods heaved with trance music, yet our talks, on topics such as automation, basic income, localisationand the feminisation of politics, had been full of attentive souls.

And a fortnight later, I was presenting at Macclesfield’s Bluedot – a science and art-rock festival under the vast bowl of the old Jodrell Bank radio telescope. (No festival wishing to connect with its ancient traditions could wish for a more monumental and cosmic object.)

There I found full tents of people willing to enthusiastically explore scenarios about northern coastal cities facing water levels rising by two metres, 80 years from now.

I’ve been hearing many other stories from the festival circuit about topical debate and future visioning in this year’s programming. For example, the just-concluded Lunar Festival in Warwickshire (with Goldfrapp and the Stranglers headlining) ran a new strand called Journey to Nutopia. This was inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “conceptual country” (“Nutopia has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people”). The speakers included engineers planning to make houses energy-independent, scientists exploring how LSD can be used therapeutically, and ex-Occupy veterans on the next wave of activism.

And if we’re looking at festivals that evoke possible futures, desirable and undesirable, we have to mention Boomtown Fair – a vast science fiction-like stage set built on a Hampshire estate. Each year, 60,000 revellers are invited to play their part in its dystopian narratives.

There’s a sceptical note to be struck about how much engagement with harsh reality there is (or even should be) in festivals. Historians would say that festivity is often a societal safety valve – a way to let off collective steam in a contained and occasional way, lest the whole system blow up from its internal pressures. Festivals might well be “second worlds” – but do we really bring anything of their idealisms and revelations back to our daily lives?

Perhaps it’s less about the content and more about the overall experience. (Which, even in terms of raw statistics, is becoming considerable. The industry body UK Music notes that, in 2016, there were more than 500 events and 3.9 million people attending, sustaining 40,000 jobs; in 2016, there was a direct and indirect spend of £1.7bn.)

My hunch is that one of the things festivals may be doing really well is preparing us for a fully automated future. Artificial intelligence and robotics are starting to absorb the more routine tasks of our jobs, mental and physical. So what activities will we start to turn towards and value next?

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The festival (or festivity in general) could be one answer. Bringing people together joyfully in a real space – to explore their dreams, pleasures and ambitions, in a friendly and sensual atmosphere – feels like something uniquely human that we can still do particularly well.

Even the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, spoke a few months ago about automation compelling a shift to an economy that is more entrepreneurial, bespoke, creative and empathetic. That sounds to me like the essential characteristics of the best festival experience – whether you’re making them, or just shaking your tail feathers at them.

Call it engagism rather than escapism. Festivals are about more than just summer fun.

• Pat Kane is the lead curator of FutureFest, and co-initiator of The Alternative UK