BRC

[gfish]

I went to Burning Man for the spectacle and the survival challenge, which I now realize are all the wrong reasons. It certainly is an amazing spectacle. Is that a guy driving by on a unicorn zebra, wearing a big indian headdress? Okay, sure. And it's also a fairly serious survival challenge. It's probably the most hostile environment I've ever spent much time in. You get very Fremin in your attitude towards water. It's simply everything out there.

The truth was, I was fairly cynical about a lot of Burning Man. The spectacle was great, but so much of it is only a centimeter deep. Yet more faux steampunk with meaningless gears hotglued on, ugh. And all this talk about community and family and home -- well, we've all heard that before, right? But I still thought it would be fun or at least interesting, so I went.

I was greeted as I arrived Monday by a dust storm bad enough that they shut down the entrance gate for several hours. I just missed that, but it still took me 4 hours to get from the highway to my final campsite. When I finally saw the playa, all I could see was a tower of dust rising hundreds of feet into the air. It was either Burning Man or god was smiting Reno. It was a daunting introduction. Walking to the nearby portapotties took me about 30 minutes of carefully moving along the road, making sure I didn't lose sight of landmarks I knew. I didn't even know my address yet, so getting lost would have been very serious. When I finally got back and started removing my layers of protective gear, I felt pretty seriously badass. Burning Man was like Woodstock once, but then Ceti Alpha VI blew up and it was knocked out of its orbit, leaving this wasteland of dust, brain parasites and ravers.

After hooking up with people I knew (ilmarinen and ionan, later dymaxion, sorry I never found you niac) I felt a bit better. And the weather improved, at least until Saturday. I met some new people, generally had a pretty good time. (If hot and dusty.) But I still felt removed from the experience, not quite getting into it properly. So Friday night I got nicely messed up and spent the night enjoying the spectacle in a completely non-ironic fashion. I accepted it as a party at the end of the world. I accepted the mindset that I simply lived in a city in the desert where everyone attended raves every night and drove around in plush pirate ships playing disco. This was reality because that was the reality 50k people around me wanted.

And afterwords, when I was sober again, it all made so much more sense. The glory of BRC isn't all the crazy stuff that happens, it's that it exists at all. This is a literal city built in the desert for a week because people want it to exist. This is supported by the money in the tickets, yes, but by far the vast majority of everything there exists because people care about it and donate their time and effort to bringing it into existence. No corporate sponsorship, no advertising, no vending. Not even any real law enforcement presence. It really is a Temporary Autonomous Zone, much more so than I would have thought possible. None of the tools we normally think of as required infrastructure for something of that scope.

You see a lot of talk about the gift economy at the event, but I think that's a poor term. It makes you focus on trading trinkets, which while fun is not the point. It's a reputation economy, people doing crazy cool things to stand out and be popular/respected. It's a potlatch, where what is really burning is the time and effort spent planning/building/running an installation. For those of us lucky enough to live a life that approximates post-scarcity, time and effort are the ultimate commodities. It's still conspicuous consumption, but it's a form that gets amazing stuff done. Instead of inspiring jealousy, it wants to inspire friendship and encourage people do their own crazy cool things.

Black Rock City is an open source city, built through some of the purest adhocracy I've ever seen in the physical world. It reminds me of a take I saw long ago on the tired information superhighway metaphor. Those descriptions could almost literally be about Burning Man art cars! And that's the real beauty of the event -- it's the Internet made real. Everything I love about the Internet is there on the playa. All the craziness, the impracticality, the extreme customization, the senseless duplication of effort, the mindblowing creativity. So, yeah, there is a lot of superficial stuff going on. There are a lot of crap blogs about boy bands. So what? They don't hurt anything by being there.

If you want to see what the future looks like, go to the playa. I don't know if we'll ever switch completely to a reputation economy like Doctorow's wuffies, but I think we'll move closer and closer as communication and instant fab manufacturing get better and better. Burning Man shows just how much is possible even now. It is the promise of a very, very weird future.

With that epiphany, that realization of just what was going on and why it was so special, I fell completely and utterly in love with BRC. I loved the dust and heat, the ravers and the shirtcockers, the bad mysticism. I walked around barefoot, I sat out during the dust storm, I volunteered at an ice station. I was massively sleep-deprived and manic and it was glorious.

On the drive home, I found that I felt profoundly uneasy dealing with a monetary economy again. People kept smiling at me -- and I couldn't trust that they meant it! Did they really want me to like them, or did they just want my money? Motives in a reputation economy are simple and direct. If someone smiles at you, they're trying to be nice. People want you to like/respect them, that's pretty much it. How they go about achieving it is all different, but the goals are the same. It's a lot easier to trick someone out of their money than it is tricking them into liking you.

I now understand why people call it home. I've drunk the koolaid. I miss it already.

Comments

[caladri.livejournal.com]

I think you do a good job of tapping into the imagery of a party at the end of the world. It's very '90s cyberpunk movie, and that's great. Thanks for posting!

[entelein.livejournal.com]

Sensory transformation is fun. A lot of the stuff you describe is stuff I often feel while playing ARGS (and also when making them, although it's not as complete and intense for me on that side of things).

[koruja.livejournal.com]

I understand, I am very very very homesick right now... and I miss Rob even more. Happy your experience was a valid (for lack of a better word) one.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

I had to look up "shirtcockers," and within 30 seconds of finding a definition, I found reports of a group building a "pantzooka" to shoot pants at them. People are neat.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I hear some people talk about New York in the way I feel about Black Rock. It inspires me and breaks my heart in equal measure. I don't think I'll ever get the playa dust out of my system, but it won't be an every year thing for me either.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

I now understand why people call it home. I've drunk the koolaid. I miss it already.

Gabba gabba! We accept you! One of us!

I guess the difference in economies didn't seem as shocking to me because even in BRC there are exchanges going on, but they're often exchanges of effort, or stuff you really need. Nobody has anything in particular to gain by doing everything they can - advertising, product or service dilution - to maximize the volume of exchange, so it doesn't all get turned to crap.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah: wuffies?

[spinnerin-ftw.livejournal.com]

Whuffie is from Cry Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The idea is that in a post-scarcity economy, reputation points (whuffie) become the token of commerce. Tara Hunt has been pushing it in her (non-fictional) work: http://www.horsepigcow.com/book-the-whuffie-factor/

[boizane.livejournal.com]

Many of those around me have expressed opinions about burning man, and none have really inspired a good understanding of *why* to expose oneself to the elements and pay an absurd amount of money for the priveledge.

Once niac announced he was going, I figured that mayhaps someday I might want to as well... but I never had a good understanding, no matter what description, of what it was.

Thank you for your frank retelling of what it was like for you. It feels very close to my perspective, and inspires me to listen to the stories others tell from Burning Man with a more enlightened ear.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

One of the hard things, talking about it to people, is that all the stuff that's retellable, the stuff that makes good stories, doesn't matter. The little stuff, the stuff that does matter, is almost impossible to fit into words.

[niac.livejournal.com]

Dymaxion is quite right. It's not the stories about the crazy thing that happened that one time, it's about the small kindnesses we do. It's about the smile I got when volunteering for Camp Arctica when I gave people what they needed.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- that's what I find myself missing, this week. All the little things, the little interactions.

[solarbird]

I'm pretty sure the climate would kill me ded. ;_;

[maida-mac.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's my biggest worry, as well. :-/

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I think I may check it out next year. Although I have a deep fear of situations involving rending people for their water.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Luckily I didn't actually see any death-stills. Though if I ran a Dune themed camp, we'd have to give out death-still cocktails.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

A urine recycler would be totally doable...

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

Last time I went, I talked to a guy who was perfectly serious about recycling urine. (next year, of course.) To be fair, I don't think he wanted to do anything more ambitious than evaporative cooling with the result, but I was still impressed with the ambition.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Last I looked into it, the problem was ammonia removal -- it just stays with the water through the evaporative cycle, and all of the industrial processes are spectacularly expensive if you need to get to the level of purity required for drinking. Invent a cheap way to remove ammonia from water, and you've got yourself a lot more than a urine recycler for burning man, you've got an industrial gold mine ready for plundering.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

So, now I'm suddenly curious about the chemistry: surely you could get the ammonia to combine with something that makes it less noxious? Although I imagine if that were possible to do cheaply, animals would be doing it already.

The greywater recycle systems I saw were pretty slick. They put flocculants in the water to settle out the worst of the solids, and then used the result for evaporative cooling.

.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Hrm. It sounds like it may actually be doable in the small, but not in a scale large enough to be industrially viable, which may be what I found last time. Here's an article from the aquarium world which seems relevant: http://www.pwgazette.com/chloramines&ammonia.htm.

For grey water, life is pretty easy, by comparison -- as long as all you're dealing with is biological scraps and no human waste, you're in good shape. Of course, using bleach for odor control in a grey water evap pond would cause problems, but if you've got a closed still, that's less relevant.

That said, I'd be unwilling to rely on a technology like that, until very well proven, for survival -- what happens if a carport lands on your still in a dirt devil? That given, I'd want to have at least 1gal/person/day around no matter what, at which point the additional half gallon seems less important. If you were keeping drinking water separate and only using this to process shower water, though, that might be an entirely different story. With a bug sprayer shower, of course, this wouldn't matter, but if you're using solar shower bags and actually heating them up and running through a full 3 gallon bag a person, this would make things much more feasible. At that point, it's really a luxury -- two cups of water a day for a bug sprayer shower, and another two quarts every other day for washing my hair was doing me fine.

Then again, if we were being practical, we wouldn't be there. :-)

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Preferably a big showy one full of tubes and so forth.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Hehe, that would be really amusing. I wonder if it'd actually be possible to have something that looked reasonably like a still suit without being deathly uncomfortable to wear during the day.

Personally, I'd really love to do some Tuareg robes, ignoring the whole cultural appropriation morass for a minute.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I was trying to think of a non-deadly still suit design. Maybe based around a spandex jumpsuit -- I was surprised how little wearing black mattered. As long as you can sweat, the playa isn't THAT horrible. Just as important would be making a nice thumper and maker hook, of course.

The real bummer with the idea is that I can't think of a good way to get spice blue eyes. Full scleral contacts are 1) quite expensive and 2) a really damned good way to get corneal abrasions in a high dust environment.

[niac.livejournal.com]

*hugs* Welcome Home, Matt. Come to Critical Massive with us next year.

Burning Man is sometimes called a Self-Service cult. Wash your own damn brain. ;)

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Oh man, thanks. I needed that laugh. :)

[ionan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, whatever you fuckin' hippie. I fuckin' built this city! Gimme a beer!

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I was waiting for that. :)

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

Hmm. In a reputation economy, does survival/thriving rely on extroversion? What would burningman be like for a complete introvert?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm pretty introverted, but part of the reason I went was to be more extroverted. I don't see any basic contradiction, though. Introverted != antisocial. And even antisocial people can get by if they do something impressive enough. As ionan referenced above, the Department of Public Works is easily stereotyped for that exact quality. :)