This changes everything

Video of Burning Man will never be the same.  It’s getting crowd-sourced.

Ladies and gentlemen, Burners of all ages, I am humbled to announce the new:  “Profiles in Dust,” a concept so amazing that, mid-way through the explanation of how it came to be, I’m going to try to steal credit for it.

In the meantime, here’s what you need to know to jump in with both feet:

Last year a team of trusted videographers took massive amounts of extraordinary footage of Burning Man.  Every day, everywhere, every CORE project.  They made sure all of it follows Burning Man’s standards for privacy and protection of participants.

Now they’ve put all that raw footage on the web, where it’s freely available for download, to be mixed into whatever presentations people want.  They’re developing tools for easy use, and are actively looking for videographers amateur and experienced to turn it into something all their own. Read more »

Do as he says, not as he does

This “adjusted” list of the 10 Principles of Burning Man was written by Melinda Green for the 2012 Boston-area regional, where I understand they were part of an art exhibit.

They’re funny enough to repeat.  So, with Melinda’s permission, I present (just in time for Burning Man’s Global Leadership Summit):  the 10 Principles – as we really live them.

Remind you of anybody you know?

Radical inclusion

We want to show you how welcoming and open we are as a community, how much we accept and love everyone. Oh crap. We don’t want all these people here.

Gifting

Only one letter separates gifting from grifting. R you in? Everyone loves getting things from others, so do as little as possible and take as much as you can at all times.

Decommodification

Sometimes, all of us want things manufactured and/or sold by corporations who offend our sensibilities. When this happens, just steal. And then remove or conceal any identifiable branding so none of your radically-inclusive friends will know you like new items with brand names. Read more »

Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel – paragons of academia?

About 60 comments deep into my post about why Burning Man and academic culture are at odds, I realized that what started out as a provocation and reaction had turned into a relevant conversation … and that the comments section on a blog is a terrible place to have a relevant conversation.

There are worse places, but they’re filled with toxic fish.

So I invited anyone (especially academics) who disagreed with me to send me short essays expressing their disagreement, and said I’d post some on the Burning Blog in order to give their ideas a better hearing.

So far only one has responded:  Lans Ellison.  (That’s a pseudonym:  he asked that his real name not be used.  I am hardly in a position to object.)  Much in the same way that my opinions in no way represent those of Burning Man, Lans is only speaking for himself, etc. etc. (boilerplate, boilerplate).

His essay is below, unaltered.  I’ll include my own response to his ideas in the comments section, after some other people have had a chance to speak (if they’re inclined to). Read more »

Looked at in the proper light, the Ivory Tower is a terrifying art project.

UPDATED AT BOTTOM

The academics have come to Burning Man.  They’re through the gates.

They’ve always been here, actually:  but now they’re getting organized.  I was at the very first meeting of “Burning Nerds,” a Burning Man staff initiated gathering of academics who attend Burning Man.  I helped carry snacks for the party into Ashram Galactica, then stood in the corner and listened as meteorologists in leather skins and topless sociologists and dramaturges in fuzzy boots introduced themselves and discussed their research.

That was, I think, in 2010, and since then Burning Nerds has had more meetings in the desert and established a thriving email list.  This year, they’re planning their first theme camp.

And good for them.  The more participation, and kinds of participation, the better.  But … lemme skip to the end here.  I’ve reluctantly concluded that academia per see is very, very, bad for Burning Man – and that we’d be better off if Burners engage in a campaign of civil disobedience against it.

Not, let me emphasize, against the academics themselves.  We’re all welcome at Burning Man, and the work they do just as legitimate as whatever other crazy project someone wants to put in the middle of the desert.  I read all of their studies avidly, which is more attention than I pay to your theme camp.

But while any given piece of individual research is likely harmless, the project of academia itself is kryptonite to the spirit of Burning Man.  Indeed, a case can be made that academia as an institution stands firmly opposed to the 10 Principles.  Outside of “prison,” if there was ever a practice that contradicted “immediacy,” “radical acceptance,” and “radical self-expression” it is academia.  This is true in theory, and especially in practice.

So much in the way bankers are welcome to attend Burning Man but we try to keep commercialization out, I think we’d be well advised to welcome academics but do our best to frustrate “academia” every chance we get. Read more »

A ceremony raising the John Frum flag on the island of Vanuatu

I belong to a large but informal group of Burners whose unofficial motto is:  “Fuck the theme.”

We came to Burning Man for Burning Man:  the theme added nothing to the experience.  All it did was give complete strangers license to tell us things we already knew about Evolution, or to go off on predictable rants about the American Dream.

If Burning Man was Santa Claus, we felt, the theme was an icicle on Blitzen’s ass.

Not this year, though.  This year’s theme is a mind-fuck.  Because … well … let’s talk “Cargo Cult” through.

What’s very likely to happen this year is that:

• tens of thousands of Burners
• in flashy costumes
• who are attending a ceremony where we burn a 40 foot tall wooden man and dance around him

are going to create camps and installations satirizing Cargo Cults because they:

• dress in costumes and
• build sculptures of air strips and bunkers
• to dance around.

There’s a kind of subversive genius here:  Burners who take “Cargo Cult” at its easiest, laziest interpretation – look at those crazy people who have bizarre beliefs and perform useless rituals – are inadvertently putting themselves in the cross hairs.  Judging strictly by the superficial, the difference between “Burning Man” and a “Cargo Cult” is the difference between ABC and CBS.  They’re not the same thing, but a casual observer might never notice. Read more »

Paul Addis was a few years older than me, and had been around Burning Man a lot longer. I bumped into him twice off-playa, made fun of him in print once, and know two long-time community members who at one point considered him a friend.

That was the extent of our connection – yet I find myself pushing his recent death before me wherever I go, a burden that does not belong to me but that I cannot lift alone.

Maybe this is because our community has lost several stars from its constellation this year, and while I didn’t know any of them, the sense of loss is cumulative, building up until those outside the funerals are in mourning too.

Or maybe it is because Paul, in his own troubled way, was trying to do exactly what we all are: he was trying to be an artist. He was trying to burn brightly. He was trying to act on the inspiration we all get from our common heritage in Burning Man and the Cacophony Society. The devil’s in the details, but from a thousand foot view he would be seen on the same path as all the rest of us.

I mean … we’re all crazy. Let us not forget that for most people in the world, the act of going out to the desert to build a giant man and burn him is itself far crazier than the decision to burn it on a Monday instead of a Saturday.

But I think what really troubles me is the way in which his leap reminds me of just how easy it is for any of us to fall through the cracks.

We like to think Burning Man can protect us.  Instead, I fear that Paul Addis represents the limits of radical inclusion. Read more »

Not one of the major contributors to Macro economics was a Burner.

A recent discussion I was having about the future of Burning Man raised the question:  “is it really part of Burning Man’s values to do end runs around scalpers?  Is that a key part of the mission?  What’s wrong with letting the Market decide who goes to Burning Man?”

Let me stop right here to say:  I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT HOW BURNING MAN WILL HANDLE TICKET SALES IN THE FUTURE – DON’T ASK ME.  LIKE MANY OF YOU, I OCCASIONALLY TALK ABOUT THINGS I HAVE NO INVOLVEMENT WITH.  THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS, FOR EXAMPLE … AND THE U.S. SPACE PROGRAM.  THIS WAS THAT KIND OF CONVERSATION, HAD WITH SOMEONE WHO WAS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE ORGANIZATION, AND HAS NO INVOLVEMENT IN BURNING MAN TICKET SALES.  HE WAS ALSO NOT AN ASTRONAUT. THANK YOU.

Most of you are turning a little red now – I was – but it’s a relevant question.  What is the appropriate relationship between Burning Man and market capitalism?  “Decommodification” is a key Burning Man principle … yet when Burning Man is critiqued from the political left, it’s generally for not being decomidified enough.  There are people who see the fact that we still sell tickets as proof that we are in league with Halliburton.

When it comes to capitalism, where’s the sweet spot for Burning Man between “Too Much” and “Oh, for God sake get a job you smelly hippie”?

Is “creative destruction” creative enough for us? Read more »

Okay, not these headlines.

The title of Adam Rothstein’s essay about the Burning Man experience is “Burning Man is Grey.”

You and I might disagree, but it’s a clear reference to his contention in the text that the one thing everyone who goes to Burning Man has in common is the fact that, after a week in the dust, we’re all the same color.

At least, that was the case when the essay appeared in “The New Inquiry.”

When the essay – the exact same essay – appeared in Salon, it was called “Burning Man on its last legs.”

Salon also gave it a subhead:  “With rising mainstream knowledge of the event, it’s lost almost all of its creative and subversive spark.”

Thank God they told us!

To get that conclusion out of Rothstein’s piece, you have to read between the lines, in French, wearing Groucho glasses.  The idea is barely touched on, and certainly not argued.

What likely happened here:  the relevant section editor in Salon, seeing an essay about Burning Man that s/he wanted to re-title, quickly decided that – based on the fact that some guy on Facebook said he was so over Burning Man – the essay must support the idea that Burning Man is “on its last legs.”  Which is also controversial, and therefore will generate clicks.

Is it just me, or does journalism resemble performance art more every year? Read more »