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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 (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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