The Reno-Gazette Journal pretends to answer this question, by point to a “new announcement today” from BMOrg analyzing this very topic. How was this announced, and to whom? It seems it only made it to their Facebook page. I can’t see it in the last “Jackrabbit Speaks”, it is not mentioned on the official Burning Man blog, and there is no link to it from the “What is Burning Man” section it is filed in. There is nothing on the burningman.com web site, and it doesn’t come up in a search there for “where does ticket money go”. The page seems to be an orphan on their site, and for some reason is immune to any form of public comment on it.

From the Reno Gazette Journal:

Burning Man announced today where ticket sales money goes to shed light on why tickets cost what they do.

…According to the announcement, the majority the cost of ticket sales goes to fees, equipment rental (including portable toilets), medical services and building the large wooden man structure.

The full report can be found here.

The following are some of the costs Burning Man said it incurred in 2013:

• Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages the land the event is held on: 2013 fees totaled $4,522,952;

If you want the full report, you should actually read our coverage: Profit Grows, Donations Shrink: 2013 Afterburn Analysis; and Art World Rocked which shows the distributions of grants based on IRS filings. You can also check out this Google Docs spreadsheet that Burner Kevin put together from the Afterburn numbers (which don’t even add correctly in their 2011 and 2012 reports).

What is interesting here is the subtle use of language to mask truth. The carefully chosen words “BLM and Other Usage Fees” are repeated and slightly distorted, through a technique sometimes called “Chinese whispers”, to become “BLM manages the event…2013 fees”.

The misinformation has already been picked up by Ron’s Log and echoed as if it were fact “$4.5 million…that’s what Burning Man paid the Bureau of Land Management in fees”.

Following the links to the “full report” actually takes you to the new discussion using numbers taken from the Afterburn report. This says:

The Black Rock Desert is public land, but we don’t get to use it for free. It also takes a lot of equipment and hours of labor to put things together out there. The following are just a few highlights of costs we incurred in 2013:

• The space we use is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and our 2013 fees to them totaled $4,522,952.
• Our 2013 cost for Rental Equipment (heavy machinery, portable buildings, staff radio gear, cars and trucks) came to $1,166,307.
• Port-o-potties are crucial for our fair city and those related costs alone racked up to $970,836.
• To offset the impact that our temporary population has on emergency services in the local area, we pay $301,660 to local agencies such as county law enforcement, Paiute Nation, and Nevada Highway Patrol.
• We still take care of our own though, and our on-playa medical services costs came to $455,024.
• Getting tickets printed and shipped is also a nice chunk of change, coming in at $479,741 last year.
• Building our iconic center piece, The Man, isn’t cheap either. Last year we spent $407,055 to bring it to life and share the ritual of burning it down.
• The other “Man” — the government — likes his cut as well and we paid $1,021,851 last year in taxes and other licensing fees.

Seems innocuous enough, right? Well the reason that the word “other” is significant in the original report is that in 2013, this category jumped from $1.8m to $4.5m – with no explanation given for the gigantic leap ($2,654,919 gain). “Taxes and Licenses” jumped from $154,994 to $1,021,851, also without explanation ($866,857 gain). At the same time, “Decommodification LLC owns the rights to everything” (or words to that effect) is now on all the tickets. Coincidence? Well the fact that BMOrg is trying to gloss over it by using increasingly vague language makes that seem even less likely.

From Burners.Me:

The most significant thing in the 2013 financials is the spectacular leap in usage fees – up about 250%, from $1,868,033 to $4,522,952. We know that the BLM did not increase their permit fees – in fact, some of their costs are now shared with Pershing County. We also know that the BMOrg founders created a secretive, privately held company called Decommodification LLC, which receives royalties from the Burning Man event for trademarks and images (it owns the commercial rights to every photo and movie shot by anyone at Burning Man). It’s not clear which expense category these payments fall under in the unaudited Afterburn “accounts”, but it seems like “BLM and other usage fees” would cover it. The difference between this expense item for 2013 and 2012 is $2.6 million, so I think a fair estimate for the size of this royalty payment is $2.5 million

Now, perhaps the BLM did almost triple their rates, and Decommodification gets next to nothing. Strangely, it’s not mentioned in this year’s permit – which says BLM gets 3% of gross revenue, same as every other year. This would be $900,000 according to Marian’s $30 million figure from her recent speech in Tokyo. Page 8 of the Permit Stipulations says they have to pay a “cost recovery fee” to reimburse the BLM’s costs, which have been offset by integrating their activities with Pershing County cops. This probably doesn’t change much from 2012 (56,141 tickets) to 2014 (61,000 tickets), so if we assume it is the same we can ignore it. That leaves $3.5 million of “other” fee hikes to account for: let’s call those “mystery royalties”.

Does some of your ticket money go to Decommodification, LLC? Yes – look at your ticket terms. Is this payment covered by “Mystery Royalties”? Well, we can’t find it anywhere else in their books, so probably. Does most of the Mystery Royalties go to the BLM? I doubt that, but I’m open to the possibility. I invite BMOrg to open their books and share with the community the details of the “BLM and Other Usage Fees” payments, to clear the air and ensure that everyone is speaking from a position of truth and openness. If all of that money goes to the BLM, why would BMOrg even write the words “and Other Usage Fees” on their Afterburn Report? Why not just say “BLM”?

This is what you’ve agreed to in the Ticket Terms and Conditions:

I acknowledge that the name “Burning Man” is a trademark owned by Decommodification LLC and licensed to BRC, and that BRC LLC has been given the sole right to license and enforce that trademark, and that all of Burning Man’s logos, trademarks or other intellectual property are owned by Decommodification LLC and licensed to BRC, and I understand that these two organizations control all rights regarding the licensing and reproduction of any imagery recorded at the Event. I agree that I will not use the mark “Burning Man,” the logos of Decommodification LLC or BRC LLC, or the likeness, drawings or representations of the Man or of the Black Rock City map, or any other trademark of Decommodification LLR or BRC, on any website (except for Personal Use, as described in Paragraph 5) or in any other manner, commercial or otherwise, except for nominative or classic fair use

The Reno-Gazette Journal might be fooled by your magic words, BMOrg, but not Burners.Me! We ask: “where’s the proof?”

Burning Man’s announcement compares their price to commercial festivals:

 The group said Burning Man ticket prices are comparable to other events, including the four-day Bonnaroo ($260, plus fees) and Coachella ($349, plus $85 car camping) festivals and the five-day Glastonbury event ($333.19, plus $40 car parking).

Good – they might keep the ticket prices where they are for next year, then. Those festivals generally pay for the entertainment they provide to their customers, who can buy food and drinks; and they have to pay for security and site use, just like Burning Man does.

Where does your ticket money go? $13.60 of it went to art in 2013. Compared to $52 to profit and $103 to taxes, fees, medical, cops, and royalties (lumped together). The mystery royalties component works out to more than half the latter: $57 a ticket.

We help artists, too. In 2013, we distributed $800,000 in grants to artists. For 2014, we increased that figure to $1 million in art grants and support

Art Grants in 2013 were $12,500 per project, down from $14,894 per project in 2012. $825,000 was the officially announced amount of grants in 2013, which was upped to $830,000 in the Afterburn report. Their claim of $1 million on Art Grants this year now includes “support” as well as cash, which as we’ve already pointed out has a large component of BMOrg personnel costs.  This year there are 60 winners who will share $16,666.66 each (including support) from BMOrg. If this was measured in cash, it would be a meteoric surge towards the artists, an increase of 33.3% on average each. Still a very small share of the cost to get big art projects on the Playa, and off without a trace.

When someone tells you “BLM charges $4.5 million a year for the permit”, ask them to prove it. Don’t believe something just because it’s in the newspapers. And always ask what “other” means.

The Atlantic has a long story “The Wonderful, Weird Economy of Burning Man”. They highlight the annual event’s impact on the surrounding area.

In recent years, the airport has taken to displaying Burning Man-style art and offering a welcome table to festival attendees. Once, the airport held a celebratory parade throughout the terminals, complete with small art cars and performers.

“Every single seat we have coming into this airport the weekend before will be filled and every single seat we have leaving on the departure weekend will be filled,” Kulpin says. He estimates that the airport reaps $10 million a year from Burning Man-bound flyers.

…Similarly lively scenes unfold elsewhere in Reno, and everywhere along the route to Burning Man’s ephemeral “Black Rock City”: lines of filled-to-the-brim cars tangle around gas stations, grocery stores are emptied of their bottled water, and parking lot marketplaces pop up to hawk duct tape, hats, and other gear in high demand.

These pit stops, hotel stays and last-minute purchases equal $35 million spent by Burning Man participants—“Burners,” for the uninitiated—in Nevada each year. Sixty-six percent of respondents in the 2013 Burning Man census (yes, it has a census) reported spending more than $250 in the state on their way to and from the event. Eighteen percent spent more than $1,000…“This event has a huge, month-long, positive impact on our local economy,” says John Slaughter, county manager for Washoe, which includes everything from Reno to the closest towns to the event, the 200-person-each desert settlements of Gerlach and Empire. “Our stores, restaurants, gas stations, and car washes see an incredible influx of traffic, providing a great boost to the Northern Nevada economy.”

Larry Harvey, CPO (Chief Philosophy Officer) says:

Burning Man is like a big family picnic. Would you sell things to one another at a family picnic? No, you’d share things…

The curious fact that a lot of money goes into creating a week that is free of money is not lost on Harvey. But those who peg this as a contradiction, he says, misunderstand the intent of the experiment.

“People get confused sometimes,” says Harvey, who unleashed Burning Man on the world with a foretelling bonfire at San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986. “They say that because we have a principle of decommodification, that we’re against money. But no, it’s not really about money. It would be absurd if we said we repudiated money. In order to assemble a city, we have to use market economics.” 

So, what IS the intent of the experiment? To learn more about market economics? Or to use market economics, like crowd-sourcing, and peoples’ innate desire to contribute to their community, in order to redistribute money from the Burners to the owners?

“People give because they identify with Burning Man, with our city, with our civic life,” he says. “The idea of giving something to the citizens of Black Rock City has enormous appeal to them because it enhances their sense of who they are, and magnifies their sense of being. That’s a spiritual reward.”

He says gifting—defined as the act of giving without the expectation of anything in return—alters the notion of value.  

“What counts is the connection, not the commodity,” Harvey says.

If it’s an experiment in giving, you’d think after 30 years BMOrg would have learned to be better at giving. In fact the new Burning Man Project appears to be worse at that (6% giving), than their previously very disappointing Black Rock Arts Foundation (25% giving).

If spiritual reward is the intent of the experiment, then why have the ticketing system? Why not just sell tickets, and make participation the spiritual reward? Making people wait in STEP for months, then at the last minute deciding to sell thousands of tickets in a lottery instead of to the queue, is not nurturing to peoples’ spirits.

Is it an experiment in morality?

painting by Todd Berman

As Burning Man culture and ethos seep out into what the community refers to as the “default world,” can a gifting economy survive the transfer?

“The term ‘gift economy’ is and isn’t an oxymoron. Certainly, the world couldn’t be run through a gift economy,” Harvey says.

“It doesn’t actually generate wealth, the vast majority of which comes from outside Burning Man in the form of campers, tents, generators, and loin cloths,” he writes.

“Nobody makes it to and from Burning Man without either a day job or the [labors] of people who have day jobs,” he goes on. “We’re nowhere close to describing, exhibiting, or participating in an ‘economy’ that truly relies on gifting. … What we do have is a compelling gift ‘culture’—and it matters.”

It matters, says Harvey, because it has potential to provide a meaningful counterpoint to the “default world’s” system.

“That spirit, if spread in the world and widely adopted, would condition how people, as consumers in the marketplace, behave,” Harvey says. “Whereas if all of your self worth and esteem is invested in how much you consume, how many likes you get, or other quantifiable measures, the desire to simply possess things trumps our ability or capability to make moral connections with people around us. There should be room in the world for both systems to flourish. If they did, they would inform one another.”

Perhaps someone should inform the Nevada authorities who think Burning Man is not a suitable event for children, that actually this is a moral experiment. We’re making room in the world for more authentic moral connections: with nudity, drugs, polyamory, and dubstep. We give more to art, than your local church gives to the needy. Therefore our experiment proves the superior morality of our shirt-cockers and Critical Tits.

The Atlantic featured the Generator in Reno, which is funded to the tune of $330,000 a year – we understand, almost entirely by a wealthy private donor.

Crowdsourcing effectively removes the power from large money groups to decide what gets made and what doesn’t,” says Matt Schultz, the artist behind several behemoth Burning Man pieces, of the crowd-funding phenomenon. “It enables the power of individuals to decide. It allows us to find the resources we need to make something amazing. It democratizes the act of production.”

Schultz and his team, the Pier Group, first made waves at Burning Man with a 300-foot-long wooden pier-to-nowhere in 2011 that cost $12,500 to build. They returned with the pier in 2012—this time with a life-size, $64,000 Spanish galleon sinking at the end of it. They outdid themselves once again this year, both in size, scope, budget and fundraising abilities: The group’s 72-foot-tall wooden sculpture, called Embrace, has been, perhaps, the most buzzed-about piece in the lead-up to this year’s festival. Picture two entwined figures proportional to the Statue of Liberty bursting, mid-waist from the ground.

The sculpture, which took shape in a Sparks, Nevada, warehouse with the help of around 200 volunteers, had a budget of $210,000. Its 140,000 pounds of wood, alone, required more than $70,000, says Schultz.

…The hope at The Generator is, Schultz says, at “to refine the economic principles of what a gift economy is and what a decommodified, year-round space is.”

There are various challenges with this. Everything is easier when there’s an expiration date, for example.  

“At Burning Man, your social interactions are for a week and you go home and reset,” he says. “There aren’t as many social repercussions. If you make your camp neighbor mad, they are only mad for a week. That’s been a challenge in bringing the principles to the real world.”

Unattainable as a true gifting economy might be, Schultz, like Harvey, believes it’s a custom worth incorporating into existing practices.

“We’re trying to find a way to make capitalism more equitable,” Schultz says. “Instead of saying one system is bad, or another is bad, we’re finding ways to make it function for more people.”

Burning Man’s economic system makes capitalism function for more people. Umm, how, exactly? By burning statues in the desert? By sending threatening legal letters to anyone trying to make money off the Burner ecosystem? By telling people who spend their own money on art cars, that their vehicle is now a “public conveyance” and they must drive randoms around or they risk being deported? By putting all the rights to monetize photos and videos in the hands of a small, secretive private company, that shares not a single cent with the artists?

There must be something I am missing about this “new” economy. Either that or the artists involved are missing the point: they exist purely on the largesse of people so wealthy that they can just give their money away for the sake of week-long temporary art. Even if the extent of your giving for the entire week was only $20, that’s more than 99% of society are handing out to people sleeping in the streets or giving to wildlife habitat preservation. The cause you are supporting with a gift at Burning Man is decadence and self-indulgence, not alleviating the suffering of others.

Larry reveals some of their “plan for a century” thinking:

“Right now we’re thinking we could go to 100,000 if logistics pan out”, Harvey says. “When people say ‘What if we get too big?’ I ask them, ‘[Too big] for what?’ They are worried we’ll become inauthentic. Because in their experience, when something gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it is alienated from its audience. But that’s if it’s just an item for consumption. They’re afraid it will be denatured by size. But it’s not about size. It’s not a quantitative problem. It’s a qualitative question.”

“I hope that I can leave this world knowing that the event in the desert isn’t the lynchpin and that, if it were removed, it would falter,” Harvey says. “My biggest fear is that [the event] would be the be all and end all. We are racing to make it otherwise. It is going to be Rome to the empire, as it were—the great capital city for some time to come. But we can already see [a life outside of it] in these larger regional events.”

It is through this dissemination that Burning Man’s economic principles could take root.

“We don’t think the world can be Woodstock,” he says. “Who’d think the world could be a perpetual carnival? But we do think that the world could rediscover values that used to be automatically produced by culture but aren’t anymore because culture is subject to the commodification in our world. Everything is sold back to us, targeted to demographics. What we have to do is make progress in the quality of connection between people, not the quantity of consumption.” 

That’s why BMOrg has to make the party bigger. To improve the quality of connection between the 40% Virgins their bizarre and convoluted ticketing system seems to throw up every year, and the 30% of their crowd who’ve been more than twice. Because everybody says “Burning Man sucked when it was smaller”.

Gift me your money, and I’ll tell you that you’re making the world a better place.

[Update: 8/18/14] The Reno-Gazette Journal has also done some number crunching on what Burning Man means to the local economy.

Last year, nearly 70,000 people traveled into Nevada for Burning Man. Throughout Reno and Fernley, burners could be found shopping in grocery and retail stores, frequenting restaurants and buying supplies before their weeklong stay in the Black Rock Desert.

According to the Burning Man organization, the annual event brings in tens of thousands of people and millions of dollars to Northern Nevada, with 52,000 people and an estimated $44 million in economic impact in 2012, and more than 68,000 people and an estimated $55 million in 2013.

The organization says it spends more than $5 million annually in Nevada on production and planning, law enforcement, emergency services, construction materials, toilets, labor and supplies, and on business trips throughout the year.

Burning Man also reports the organization donated more than $585,000 from ice sales to charities and organizations in Northern Nevada, including nearly $66,000 in 2012 to Pershing County charities, including Pershing General Hospital, Marzen House Museum, Lovelock Food Bank, Safe Haven Rescue Zoo and the Chamber of Commerce.

…Bonnenfant said the center has taken the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitor Authority figures on visitors and their spending and estimated what Burning Man participants’ spending would average.

If the RSCVA estimates a visitor spends $85 per day in food and drink, he said he would estimate Burning Man participants are spending $50 a day based on the remote desert location of the event.

He said it is unknown how many Burning Man attendees stay at commercial lodging, or for how long, after the event.

It’s these gaps in the data that make it hard to calculate what that total impact is on the region, he said.

Bonnenfant reports that one slice of usable data within the 2011 Burning Man survey is that 21 percent of attendees arrived by airplane.

He said 21 percent of 2011’s population of 53,963 would equal 11,332 visitors to the area. Multiply that by an estimated $400 spent in food and drink, and that would equal $4.5 million in impact just for that slice of burners.

There are caveats to the estimated spending because not all participants stop in Nevada to buy food or lodging. And while many are buying gas within the state, most of the return to Nevada is via gas taxes which are applied to state roads and road construction and the rest of the profits would go to corporate owners.

…”Our community went from, ‘What is that going on in the desert?’ to embracing the concept of being the base camp of Burning Man — where people stop, shop, eat and play — and incorporating it as part of what we are,” Kazmierski said. “It’s a fundamental change as Burning Man has more and more of an influence on our community.”

Kazmierski said people are noticing a change in Reno when they visit. He has had executives tell him they are amazed at the differences in Reno’s culture and growth. The traffic that migrates through Reno during Burning Man gives business leaders a chance to see where Reno is heading and what the city has to offer.

…Fernley Mayor LeRoy Goodman said that throughout the years, Fernley has watched Burning Man grow from a few thousand to 60,000 people and with it a major economic spike in the community’s restaurants and stores two weeks before and after.

“It’s about a month that our community is benefiting economically,” he said. “My view is positive. They spend money here — Indian taco and water stands — I think people in the community look forward to it. The week after Labor Day, they look forward to seeing people. They stop in the same places, eat here and get cleaned up, and I think that’s neat.”

He said the influx of tens of thousands of burners through Reno and Fernley is not only good for the economy, it’s good exposure to what the region’s business and communities have to offer.

“When you’re coming from all over the world to Reno, you can take advantage of the eclectic businesses. Burner week is becoming like the Kentucky Derby and party for a few days in Reno — even if people aren’t going to Burning Man,” he said. “We are getting more and more traffic through here — spending the night in our hotels and shopping and participating in things — and it’s good for Fernley and all of Western Nevada.”

The details of the charity donation from the ice sales is an update from previous reports. If true, the $585,000 cash paid to Nevada charities is up substantially from $159,850 in 2010 which was split with many California based charities. It confirms our calculation that ice sales were above $1 million.

Today’s headline in the SF Bay Guardian:

Burning Man jumps the shark

How a high-minded countercultural experiment ended up on everyone’s bucket list

08.19.14  | Steven T. Jones

Steven Jones (Scribe) wrote an excellent book in 2011 called the Tribes of Burning Man. He’s a veteran Burner, and has also covered the event for a long time at the SF Bay Guardian.

Burning Man is the cover story of their latest issue, and like San Francisco Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Salon before them, they have declared that it is official: what three years ago Scribe described as “the premier counter-cultural event of modern times”, has now jumped the shark and become a caricature of its former self.

It’s not all bad:

let me be clear that Burning Man is still one of the greatest parties on the planet. The Black Rock Desert is a spectacular setting, much of the art created for Burning Man each year is innovative and mind-blowing, and the experience of spending a week in a commerce-free, open-minded temporary city can truly be transformative, especially for those doing it for the first time

He sees shark-jumping as perhaps a philosophical question, which is interesting since Larry Harvey is now Burning Man’s CPO – Chief Philosophy Officer.

The question of when Burning Man jumped the shark is a matter of perspective, or perhaps it’s a philosophical question, but these are waters worth wading into as burners pack up this week for their annual pilgrimage to the playa.

The meme that Burning Man has jumped the shark — that is, that it’s gotten ridiculous or strayed from its original ethos — circulated more strongly this year than most after conservative firebrand Grover Norquist last month tweeted that he was “off to ‘Burning Man’ this year. Scratch one off the bucket list.”

But burners and media commentators have been saying it for years, sparked by developments ranging from the increasingly top-down control over a temporary city built with volunteer labor from the bottom-up to the sheer scale and inertia of an event that is now pushing 70,000 participants.

True. I first went to Burning Man in 1998, and already people were saying “it was better last year”. To me, I think Malcolm in the Middle was a shark-jumping moment for the party, as funny as the episode was. South Park’s epsiode with Cartman and Satanic god Cthulhu burning all the hippies at Burning Man was the pinnacle of Burning Man’s cool factor. After that, we had the ever increasing media blitz, where the Vogue photo shoot was followed closely by the Krug dinner and the Spark Movie. Spark will be screening on Showtime this Thursday night – just to get Burners super-excited for their trip(py) home.

Burning Man Founder John Law was over the whole thing by 1996:

John Law, who co-founded the artsy Nevada desert bacchanal, walked away from Burning Man after the deadly and chaotic 1996 event, believing that the commercial and regulatory structure that followed was antithetical to the countercultural, DIY values on which burner culture was based.

The population of Black Rock City then doubled in size within two years, and doubled again within four more, prompting some burners to say 30,000 people — including a growing number of straight-laced newbies drawn by mainstream media coverage — was just too many.

At the end of 2004, dozens of the event’s marquee artists and performers launched a high-profile revolt against how Black Rock City LLC was running the event (see “State of the art,” 12/20/04). “The fix must address many issues, but the core issue for the fix is the art,” they wrote in a petition that ran as a full-page ad in the Guardian. “Art, art, art: that is what this is all about.”

But little changed. Burning Man had caught fire and the LLC was more interested in stoking the flames than controlling the conflagration. It promoted more regional burns around the world, created new offshoot organizations to spread the burner art and ethos, consolidated control of the brand and trademarks, and spelled out the “Ten Principles” that all Burning Man events would live by.

The burner backlash against that trend took many forms, but the most fiery dissent came on Monday night during the 2007 Burning Man when Paul Addis torched the eponymous Man to bring the chaos back to an event that he felt had grown too staid and scripted.

Burner officialdom responded by simply building a new Man and helping secure a four-year federal prison sentence for Addis — both decisions made without soliciting any input from the larger burner community. Coming after some corporate-style chicanery earlier that year involving control of the event’s trademark and logo, that’s when Burning Man seemed to peak, like the ramp that launched Fonzie over the sharks.

We’ve covered some of the John Law and Paul Addis legal run-ins with BMOrg in:

The Laws of the Desert

Monday is the New Saturday

Getting The Last Word: A Year After His Death, a Burner Speaks

Now Scribe gets into the crux of the matter: why say now that it has jumped the shark, when a Giant Man is being built and the event is nearly 30 years old?

if jumping the shark is an idiom based on when things get really ridiculous, a point at which self-awareness withers and something becomes a caricature of what it once was, then the events of 2007 were just warm-up laps for the spectacle to come.

when an organization asserts a set of high-minded utopian values, it’s only fair to judge it by those standards. And when it claims the economic value of the labors of tens of thousands of voluntary participants as its own company assets, questions of accountability and commodification naturally arise.

Exactly. They tell us we’re making the world a better place, OK then…some of us want to know how. We want to see some evidence, not just hear appeal-to-the-masses rhetoric.

For example, Burning Man has always asserted the value of “Decommodification,” which is one of its Ten Principles: “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation.”

Yet the LLC has closely guarded its control over the Burning Man name, logo, images, and associated brands, resisting efforts to place them in the public domain and even waging legal battles against longtime burners who try to use them, including a current conflict with Canadian burners over how much the company can control a culture there that it didn’t actually create.

Licensing of the Burning Man brand and images has been a secret source of income for the company, which doesn’t publicly disclose its revenues, only its expenditures. In recent years, those brands and commodities have been transferred to a new entity controlled by the original six LLC board members, ironically named Decommodification LLC.

We’re not sure that all expenditures are completely disclosed in the Afterburn reports. The non-profit entities must file public documents, and from them we can see the charities all have substantial annual expenses for accounting, legal, rent, and travel – all areas that are also large numbers in Burning Man’s Afterburn financial charts. It’s not clear if the expenses of their charitable subsidiaries are lumped together with BMOrg costs in the Afterburn expenses. The various charities charge other members of the group for consulting, and claim consulting costs as program services. Decommodification, LLC’s payments are not disclosed, and neither are the cash-out amounts to the founders. They have effectively sold Black Rock City, LLC to themselves, operating from a tax-free non-profit called the Burning Man Project. We have covered this here:

Where Does Your Ticket Money Go

The Great Cash Out (guest post from reader A Balanced Perspective)

The value of these transactions is potentially in the tens of millions of dollars. No wonder Larry and Anti-Tax campaigner Grover Norquist are such good buddies.

Next, Scribe turns his attention to the Tin Principles. Tin in the sense that they are very malleable, and can be bent in whatever direction suits the upper echelon of this organizational structure. We’re told “it’s the dynamic tension between conflicting principles that makes them so good”, or some such waffle.

Some of the other Burning Man principles can seem just as farcical, including Radical Inclusion (“No prerequisites exist for participation in our community,” except the $380 ticket), Communal Effort (but “cooperation and collaboration” apparently don’t apply to decisions about how the event is managed or how large it gets), and Civic Responsibility (“We value civil society,” says the organization that eschews democratic debate about its direction and governance structure).

Meanwhile, Harvey and company have promised greater transparency and accountability at some future point, through The Burning Man Project, a nonprofit organization formed a few years ago ostensibly to take over running the event from BRC LLC

But it hasn’t exactly rolled out that way. As I’ve reported, the original six board members have maintained tight control over all aspects of the event, appointing new nonprofit board members mostly for their fundraising ability and willingness to toe the company line, rather than seeking representation from the various constituent burner communities.

Even then, with a board hand-picked for its loyalty (which apparently goes both ways, given how the LLC has supported hagiographic Burning Man film and book projects by two of its new nonprofit board members), Harvey still remains wary of “undue meddling” by the new board, as he put it to me.

That’s the nature of this machine they’ve created inside our event. Not even its self-appointed Board can meddle with it.

On top of that sundae, add the cherry that is Harvey’s public admission that all six board members have, as part of this transition, awarded themselves large financial settlements in amounts that will never be disclosed, and one might expect burners to revolt.

But they haven’t. Most just don’t care about these internal company dynamics (except for a few brave souls at the excellent Burners.me blog), no matter how questionable, as long as their beloved Burning Man still happens on schedule. And that’s why I think Burning Man has truly jumped the shark, launching from the ramp of a high-minded experiment and splashing down into the tepid waters of mass-consumed hedonism.

Hey, that’s us! Aw, shucks. Right back atcha, mate.

Scribe voices something that I think is on the mind of many Veterans:

Today, almost every bucket list on the Internet — those things that everyone is advised to do before they die — includes Burning Man. It has become the ultimate commodity, a product that everyone, from all walks of life, is encouraged to consume. Doing so is easier than ever these days.

After tickets sold out for the first time ever in 2011 — and a flawed new ticketing system unilaterally created by the LLC in 2012 triggered widespread criticism and anxiety — the company opted to just increase the population of Black Rock City by more than 20 percent, peaking at 69,613 last year.

Everyone felt the difference. Popular spots like the dance parties at Distrikt on Friday afternoon or Robot Heart at dawn on Saturday reached shit show proportions, with just way too many people. And this year will be more of the same.

In the old days, going to Burning Man was difficult, requiring months of preparation with one’s chosen campmates to create internal infrastructure (shade, showers, kitchen, etc.) and something to gift the community (an art car, a bar, a stage and performances to fill it, etc.).

But with the rise of plug-and-play camps in recent years, those with money can fly into Black Rock City and buy their way into camps that set up their RVs, cook their meals, stock their costumes and intoxicants, decorate their bikes, and clean it all up at the end. Such camps have become a source of employment for entrepreneurial veteran burners, but they cut against the stated principles of Participation and Radial Self-Reliance.

And what of the Founders? They’re not planning on going anywhere. They seem to be sitting in the same chairs and performing the same roles within BMOrg, and are building that up as a new organization with a new strategic objective. Their focus seems not so much on this party that they’ve thrown quite a few times already, as it is on all the other parties they now want to go to and link into it (and own under the one brand).

While LLC board member Marian Goodell told me that “we’re big into listening mode at the moment” as they decide what’s next for Burning Man, she also claims to have heard no concerns from burners about the event’s current size or direction, and she denies the nonprofit transition was ever about loosening their grip on the event.

“We’ve never talked about turning Burning Man back to the community,” Goodell told me last week, accusing me of misinterpreting comments by Harvey when he announced the transition, such as, “We want to get out of running Burning Man. We want to move on.”

Marian’s statements hark back to the time before all these LLC’s and legal fees, when Burning Man was very much in the hands of the community. The 6 people who are cashing out of it now – but remaining seated at the table  – were the ones who turned it away from the community after about ten years, and into their own hands via a corporate structure. They sold this LLC at the start of this year. To themselves. Creating a non-profit foundation which they completely control is just like Bill Gates and the Rockefellers did before them. Their table for the “next generation of The Project” now includes billlionaires, Hollywood heavyweights, husbands and wives taking a seat each, and representatives of the highest levels of wealth and power in the world.

In my opinion, good on them – it’s the American way, they created a popular thing and we live in a capitalist society. They’re entitled to their cash out, and best of luck to them with their plans for the future.

But I’m a corporate guy. I like deals, I like good business. I like innovation and commerce and the entire Burner ecosystem being able to make money off this movement. Not just Burning Man’s owners. I like plug and play camping and people spending $100,000 on fireworks just to shoot out the ass of a Trojan horse. Make it rain! I like art cars where the door alone cost $25,000, or the sound system cost $600,000 and requires a busful of amplifiers to run a wall of speakers that can play to 20,000 people. These things don’t happen at poor hippy parties.

I know a lot of Burners see things a bit differently. They see that this party used to be about freedom, and getting away from the world of money and authority. In an all too typical Silicon Valley tale, the corporate interests turned it away from that beautiful initial vision and gave the power and money to themselves.

First they started selling tickets. Next they formed corporations and registered trademarks, and then they came up with unique photo policies where they had to own the rights to everything “so they could protect us”; and then a few years later, they started monetizing those IP rights. Movies, soundtracks, photo shoots, gasoline, scarves. Ticket prices kept going up and up and up, the event got bigger and bigger, there was an insatiable thirst by BMOrg to find new blood to attend. The more the dollars went up, the more the rules came in. Lately it seems that their main event is sliding down a slippery slope of commercialization. Decommodification, the LLC is not helping reinforce the idea of Decommodification, the Principle.

I see it this way: BMOrg can own all the trademarks they want, and sell as many tickets as they want, but they don’t make this party. They provide the infrastructure and the context and take care of the paperwork. Most of the work is outsourced, in particular to DPW who operate much more like a conventional organization, and appear to be skilled and efficient at what they do. The cops do security. Volunteers do almost everything else. It’s the major camps and art cars that make this party, and if a large enough group of them went somewhere else, plenty of Burners would too. Like they already do, at Coachella and EDC and LIB and Ultra and Glastonbury and the hundreds of other festivals that Burning Man Director Chip Conley is tracking and promoting at his Fest300 site. Of course, Burning Man is on the list, and always will be.

Yes, kiddies, the shark has been jumped. But I hope all my burner friends still have a great week in the desert.

As Scribe says, many Burners couldn’t care less and just want to go and get fucked up at this killer party next week. So what are you waiting for? Get up there! Tickets are still available on Stubhub, you’ll have to fork out more than $1000 though. Vehicle passes are now available for less than the original $40.

Read Scribe’s full article and the rest of SFBG’s Burning Man coverage here.

Filed under: News Tagged: 2014, bmorg, city, commerce, event, festival, future, playa, press, regionals, scandal

Caveat Magister has written a long piece at SF Weekly entitled “Out of the Wilderness. The future of Burning Man isn’t in the desert. It’s everywhere else”. You’ll have to read through more than 5500 words to find his disclaimer that he’s affiliated with BMOrg, having worked as a volunteer for 6 years. This is not a conflict of interest, he’s not directly on their payroll and merely has log-in credentials to their blog. Caveat told us that he was asked to write the cover story by SF Weekly because they know he is involved with Burning Man. He seems to have taken a fair and balanced approach to this story.

He starts out exploring how Burning Man is not about the Playa any more, it’s about all the great things they’re doing everywhere else in the world to spread Burner culture. Grover Norquist is welcome, Sarah Palin is not. 360 journalists will be there this year, but they turned down CNN.

Unfortunately, he runs into the same problems as everyone else who tries to dig below the surface of this: the Burning Man Project really aren’t doing much. Towards the end of his article, he starts to consider the reality:

with that growth has come institutionalization, bureaucracy, and hierarchy, making Burning Man a kind of paradox: The world’s biggest symbol of radical self-expression, self-reliance, and decommodification also has a human resources department and a team of intellectual-property lawyers.

This paradox has been pointed out and vigorously criticized at every stage of the organization’s development. Its most recent change, into a nonprofit entity called “The Burning Man Project,” is no exception.

This implies that “BMOrg has always been self-contradictory, so it doesn’t matter”. I disagree. That’s like saying “people have always killed each other, so there’s no point campaigning for peace”.

They can keep espousing Utopian values and preaching adherence to the Tin Principles, but actions speak louder than words. Sooner or later they will actually have to do something. You can’t call yourselves a do-ocracy when you only achieve a couple of things per year out of $30 million supplied to you by Burners.

‘One prominent member of the Burning Man community, who asked not to be named, was witheringly critical of the new organization. The change has served, this person with knowledge of the organization says, only to confuse and frustrate the people looking to it for leadership.

“Nobody knows what the fuck is going on,” the person says. “With the Black Rock Arts Foundation, until recently, or with Burners Without Borders, if you contributed, you knew what you were getting — it’s going to go to this. This is what they do. This is how they make the world better. Nobody has any idea what contributing to The Burning Man Project accomplishes. What do they do with it? How do they help?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what The Burning Man Project is,” says Miriam Fathalla, an academic studying new cultural movements who was inspired by Burning Man to start an arts-based economic development effort in Jelong Geelong, Australia. “I read the website, I read the mission statement, but I don’t know what they’re doing — and it’s been three years! I’m not loyal to Burning Man, I’ve been inspired by it. And that distinction really seems to be an issue right now.”

Indeed, outside of people directly involved in some way with The Burning Man Project, not one person contacted for this article said they understood what The Burning Man Project does, or how it’s supposed to advance the culture. Many admit to being demoralized, and fear that this confusion hurts Burning Man’s ability to inspire others.

Thank goodness for that! I was starting to wonder if it was just me.

It seems that the owners of Burning Man admit they don’t know what they’re doing either. Send more money, to help them figure it out.

Told this, Burning Man Project leadership admit they have a problem.

“I’m not exactly surprised,” says Goodell.

“There’s a lot of gray,” says DuBois. “The vision is clear to myself and a handful of other people, but no one has ever done this before, so it’s difficult.“

Done what? Started a non-profit? Tried to export something from one location to another?

Here is their vision for The Burning Man Project: In addition to producing the Burning Man event, it will serve as a facilitator for the activities that Burner communities and Burning Man-inspired movements undertake. It will offer everything from expertise and promotion to resources and networking for emerging projects and communities around the world.

But how does that function on a nuts-and-bolts level? They don’t actually know. Where other Burners say “It’s already been three years, how can you not have a plan?” leaders of The Burning Man Project say “It’s only been three years, how can we have a clear plan?”

Says Dubois: “We’re still learning as we go. There are a lot of best practices that we have to learn. How contracts should be designed, how we can work with other groups in such a way that everyone keeps their autonomy, when to partner with and when to share resources and when to just offer advice. Every time we take a step, we learn more.”

The idea that the Burning Man organization has hypocritically crossed a line and alienated the population is one they’ve heard before: When Burning Man added roads, when firearms were banned, when a speed limit was imposed … each time, people screamed that the Man was falling, and each time the culture only grew bigger.

So bigger is better? I think many Burners would argue that the culture is actually under threat from this “expand at all costs” mentality, driving population towards 100,000 while somehow maintaining 40% Virgins. When only 29% of people at the party have been more than twice, how can you claim that the culture is improving? You think these newbies even know anything about the culture?

When you’ve been doing something for 30 years, and the latest aspect of it for at least 3, how can you say “we’re still learning as we go” with a straight face? Seriously, how much more could there be to learn? How much more time do they need? Do they think they’re going to figure it out with even more think tanks and discussion groups?

What about actually spending the money, actually supporting 100+ projects, and reporting honestly about the highs and lows they experience?

Claiming credit for work that Burners do around the world is more likely to spread resentment than respect. Putting the founders on various panel discussions is not an adequate use of our funding contributions for the purposes of spreading Burner culture. If you’re going to promote an organization as a shining example of your non-profit achieving its mission, then how about your non-profit slush fund writes a check to that organization? Shouldn’t that be a given? Who are BMP writing checks to? We know that Burners Without Borders is one, but isn’t that just moving money from one company in the group to another?

critics say this time is different: The Burning Man Project’s goals are less concrete than simply building roads.

Meanwhile, the organization has made several decisions that have been especially controversial. Offering Burning Man-branded scarves as premiums to $150 donors and offering Burning Man tickets to high-level donors strike a sour note among people who have long defended the principle of decommodification.

Critics warn that, if this keeps up, a substantial number of Burners might form their own organizations, inspired by what Burning Man was rather than what it is, and try to change the world on their own.

Burning Man’s leadership has consistently responded: “That would be great! How can we help? Do you need support from our new nonprofit?”

What support is available? Whatever it is, it seems a legal contract is a pre-requisite. Will they give their non-profit donation money to these new ideas that they claim to be so supportive of? Or are they only going to support regional events that sign a contract with BMOrg?

the truth is that they haven’t yet figured out how, outside of San Francisco, ordinary people can fully live their lives as Burners. But they fully believe it’s possible. Their idea, their hope, is that someone out on the frontier of Burning Man will figure out ways to make this culture sustainable and scaleable that they haven’t thought of yet. They believe that the next generation of big ideas in Burning Man culture that are most relevant to people in Arkansas and Lithuania and China are most likely to come from Arkansas, Lithuania, and China, not San Francisco.

They say that what looks like a lack of leadership is, in fact, an attempt to make San Francisco less dominant and more supportive. And if they actually can help — if they have the organizational clout, know-how, and resources to offer support that people in Indianapolis, Japan, and New Zealand need — then they’ll be right.

But they have yet to demonstrate it to much of their community’s satisfaction.

Can BMOrg do anything meaningful to help people in other countries? Well, they sent two people to Israel for ranger training. Which Midburn had to pay for. Has that spread Burner culture in the Middle East? We didn’t get so much as a report on the event at the Burning Man blog.

As usual in the world of BMOrg, there are all kinds of numbers flying around that don’t hold up to a cursory fact check:

where Burners are from, 2012

In total, Burning Man has 248 official representatives, known as “Regional Contacts” (RCs), in 123 different locations. In addition to the kind of efforts listed above, the regional groups put on about 56-60 officially sanctioned Burning Man events (the parties) each year across 13 different countries. As of this year, about 30 percent of “Burning Man” events are held outside the United States.

According to Burning Man’s own web site, there are 20 official regional events in 4 different countries. 7 are outside the United States, 4 of those are in Canada.

But hey, don’t ever let truth get in the way of a good story – right, BMOrg?

Spreading the values of Burning Man to an uninitiated world is not easy. People struggle to understand why they should change their behavior locally, because of a remote desert rave in Nevada.

Miriam Fathalla agrees. The hardest part of her economic development work, she says, was the first year, when she was the only person in the local community who had been to Burning Man or a regional event. “The essence of this culture is experiential. It was very challenging to get people who hadn’t had that experience to understand the vision.”

If the essence of the culture is experiential, shouldn’t more emphasis be put on spreading the experience? Just promoting the Principles does not seem to be actually extending the culture, instead it is just extending the rules and the confusion.

Burning Man is trying to become an incubator for its own culture, rather than its center. If Burning Man is to continue to grow, to continue to be relevant, its center of gravity will have to move to its frontier.

“The frontier for Burning Man is to help people get more connected to their communities,” Goodell says. “Not ‘our community,’ but their communities: their neighborhoods and their towns and their organizations. The idea is that people will say ‘I feel inspired, I feel connected, I feel empowered. Now I want to go and do something in my community.’ We know that if people are inspired, they can replicate what happens in the desert out in the world.”

And what, exactly, should they be replicating? Art cars? Effigy burns? Gifting? Nudity? Orgies? Psychedelic culture? Dust storms?

BMOrg say “here are Ten Principles, these are the essence of what it means to be a Burner, if you want to spread our values in your community then your event has to comply with these”. But do they really capture what is great and inspiring about Burning Man? What about creativity? Whimsy? Decadence? What about the music? Art? To me all of those are very important elements of the Burning Man experience.

Many Burners don’t care. Some say “if you don’t like it, don’t go”. But the problem is I do like it. I really like this city built by Burners. And I care that the suits have been messing with the culture for three years in the name of altruism, and still don’t know what it is they want to do.

It is possible to think that America is great, but disagree with the President’s policies. Similarly, it is possible to think that Burning Man is great, but disagree with BMOrg.

What do you think, Burners?

The New York Times published a story by Nick Bilton today (it will be in the print edition Thursday) about Burning Man. They referenced our story about Private Concierge services.

A few different perspectives are presented in this story – by no means all of them. It’s very interesting. He talks of $25,000/head camps where “models” get to go for free. By definition a modelling gig at Burning Man makes you a fetish model, right? At least. It’s a great place to get a week long job if you’re a dancer too. He also tells of camps with “sherpas”, where 12 people had 30 volunteers running around for them.

From the New York Times:

A Line Is Drawn in the Desert – At Burning Man the Tech Elite One-Up each other:

There are two disciplines in which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs excel above almost everyone else. The first is making exorbitant amounts of money. The second is pretending they don’t care about that money.

To understand this, let’s enter into evidence Exhibit A: the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nev.

If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air.

A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct. But now things are a little different. Over the last two years, Burning Man, which this year runs from Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, has been the annual getaway for a new crop of millionaire and billionaire technology moguls, many of whom are one-upping one another in a secret game of I-can-spend-more-money-than-you-can and, some say, ruining it for everyone else.

…“We used to have R.V.s and precooked meals,” said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. (He asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize those relationships.) “Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning.” He added with a sense of amazement, “Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!”

His camp includes about 100 people from the Valley and Hollywood start-ups, as well as several venture capital firms. And while dues for most non-tech camps run about $300 a person, he said his camp’s fees this year were $25,000 a person. A few people, mostly female models flown in from New York, get to go free, but when all is told, the weekend accommodations will collectively cost the partygoers over $2 million.

“Anyone who has been going to Burning Man for the last five years is now seeing things on a level of expense or flash that didn’t exist before,” said Brian Doherty, author of the book “This Is Burning Man.” “It does have this feeling that, ‘Oh, look, the rich people have moved into my neighborhood.’ It’s gentrifying.”

For those with even more money to squander, there are camps that come with “Sherpas,” who are essentially paid help.

Photo

 

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Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps. He described the experience this way: Lavish R.V.s are driven in and connected together to create a private forted area, ensuring that no outsiders can get in. The rich are flown in on private planes, then picked up at the Burning Man airport, driven to their camp and served like kings and queens for a week. (Their meals are prepared by teams of chefs, which can include sushi, lobster boils and steak tartare — yes, in the middle of 110-degree heat.)

“Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,” Mr. Hanson said. “In the camp where I was working, there were about 30 Sherpas for 12 attendees.”

Mr. Hanson said he won’t be going back to Burning Man anytime soon. The Sherpas, the money, the blockaded camps and the tech elite were too much for him. “The tech start-ups now go to Burning Man and eat drugs in search of the next greatest app,” he said. “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society.”

…When the website Burners.me, which blogs about the festival, posted a link to the Key’s site, the Burning Man community seemed generally confused as to whether such extravagance was actually real or if someone was playing a joke. When it turned out to be quite real, people railed against the service, and the Key removed the Burning Man concierge option from its site.

Of course, you won’t likely see pictures on Instagram or Facebook of the $2 million camps, chef-cooked meals, the Sherpa helpers and concierge services, or private and pristine toilets. That would mean that the tech elite actually cared about money

[Read the full article here]

So there you go, trollers. It’s right there in the New York Times: private concierges at Burning Man are real, and there are more companies offering the service than just the Key group. Billionaires and millionaires have always been part of Burning Man. Big Art and Big Sound costs big bucks.

From the most recent Census data, 21% of Burners made US$100,000 per year or more. 2.4% made more than US$300,000 per year. More than half made US$50,000 or more, which in many countries on earth would be considered a fortune. Roughly a quarter were from overseas.

The Huffington Post has responded to the New York Times article about Burning Man yesterday. It’s amusing to see Huffington Post pretending that they are on the side of the “counter culture”. They must think they’re still a blogger site, forgetting that mainstream media heavyweight AOL Time Warner bought them out for $315 million in 2011.

HuffPo says:

Bilton breaks the news that uber-rich people go to Burning Man, and some of them pay to have a more comfortable, less gritty experience. How shocking! And how timely – this has only been going on since 2005!

…judging from the responses of some (though clearly not all) of the 1%ers who visit the playa, Burning Man still has the capacity to transform and inspire. No, not by doing drugs and running around naked – the twenty-year old cliché which Bilton repeats without the slightest gesture toward actual journalism. But by interacting with new, creative people in intimate ways; by experiencing new forms of art, spirituality, culture, and music; and by celebrating with an ecstasy that would make Nick Bilton cower in his stylish boots.

And no, not necessarily the MDMA kind, Nick. There are several sober camps at Burning Man, many families with kids, and many of us whose idea of a peak experience no longer necessitates chemical enhancement. We have had experiences that you cannot even imagine. And many of them have indeed been in Black Rock City.

Quite a personal attack on Mr Bilton. I found his article to be well written and really on the money, so to speak.

I don’t see drugs and nudity as a cliche, they are a fundamental part of the Burning Man experience. Even if you keep your clothes on and only drink water, you can’t go to Burning Man without seeing nudity and a population where the majority are on mind-altering drugs. I make no distinction between chemicals, mushrooms, weed, or booze – they’re all drugs, let’s not split hairs. The idea that because there are sober camps and a kids area, most Burners don’t do drugs, is ludicrous. What would the “actual journalists” at HuffPo prefer Mr Bilton had written? Perhaps “people used to think Burners do drugs and get naked, but they don’t any more”? 10% of the population goes to the Orgy Dome, FFS.

I’m not sure where “actual journalist” Jay Michaelson gets his information from – quite possibly, his ass. Uber-rich people, the 1% of the 1%, were going to Burning Man way before 2004.

According to the main Black Rock Census, in 2013 more than 50% of Burners earned US$50,000 a year or more. That is enough to put them in the top 0.3% of wealth globally. So it’s fair to say that the majority of Burners are in the 1%.

Next, the Huffington Post gets all Burnier-than-thou on us:

Burning Man is not a “festival.” Festivals are basically big parties, put on (usually for profit) by organizers, which customers come to visit. Burning Man is a participant-created community experience, coordinated by a non-profit, that is about radical self-expression in all its forms. Spectators are scorned.

Er, so Burning Man is not a festival because it’s co-ordinated by a non-profit? Tell that to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

They rent a remote location, sell tickets, you have to piss in a portaloo, there’s many different famous musicians playing – looks like a festival to me. It also looks like a festival to Decommodification, LLC, the private for-profit corporation that now owns the royalties and rights to the Burning Man trademarks. What trademarks are they? You know, the ones in the category of “festivals”:

The description provided to the USPTO for BURNING MAN is ORGANIZING COMMUNITY FESTIVALS FEATURING A VARIETY OF ACTIVITIES, NAMELY, LIVE MUSIC, ART DISPLAYS, AND PARTICIPATORY GAMES; CONDUCTING ENTERTAINMENT EXHIBITIONS IN THE NATURE OF ART FESTIVALS; AND ENTERTAINMENT IN THE NATURE OF ART FESTIVALS.

Time for some more “actual journalism”:

It’s no surprise to me that great ideas come out of Burning Man, because some of mine did as well

The people diluting Burning Man aren’t the techies, as irritating as they are. They are the frat boys, douchebag EDM-party people, and others who come because they hear accounts like Bilton’s, and want to get in on the action. (And of course, the scalpers who feed them.) They are the people who think “strange clothing,” rather than self-expression, is the point – and so they all tend to look alike. I wonder if Bilton looked like them.

And your data here is based on what, Jay? Did you interview 70,000 people? “They all look alike” sounds like racism to me.

Scalping is not a problem at Burning Man, according to its founder Larry Harvey. Neither are New York Times readers. The EDM party people have been there for 20 years, and guess what: most of them aren’t douchebags. Most of them are Burners! For every family not doing any drugs except sugar and coffee in Kidsville, there are 30 Burners on the dance floor of a major sound camp flying off their face.  Have a look at Robot Heart on any given sunrise – and that is just one art car. However much the BTT’s want to think people go to Burning Man for TEDx talks and Polyamory workshops and networking and saving the world – the reality is, most of the people are there to RAGE for a week.

Here’s some real journalism for you. Cold, hard, facts. The people diluting Burning Man are its owners. The way they dilute it is deciding to up the population cap from 50,000 to 70,000, and possibly even further. The magical distribution of tickets that leads to 40% Virgins – either cunningly planned, or a coincidence that has mysteriously repeated every year since the lottery – is responsible for a large influx of “not cool enough to be a real Burner” types. The media blitz that lures the limousine liberals is due to BMOrg’s many full-time PR people, not the New York Times.

Face facts, Burners. Gifting free booze and free international DJs to 70,000 people costs money. A lot of it. None of it is BMOrg’s, and most of it is from rich people. Thank you, rich people – you’re welcome.

San Francisco’s KGO news radio interviewed me today about the anti-rich, anti-tech, and dare we say, anti-Burning Man sentiment that seems to be sweeping the media this week. I should have recorded the interview myself, because I said more than what they used here. Next time.

Zos interview with KGO Radio SF August 22, 2014

Go Niners! And Raiders.

That’s

SF Bay Guardian

New York Times

KGO

…a pretty nice couple of days worth of recognition for us.

Here is the WIRED magazine article from 1996 that I referred to. It’s written by famed cyber-guru Bruce Sterling. Being on the cover of WIRED back then, in the fledgling days of the commercial Internet, was like being on the cover of TIME or Fortune today. Bigger, maybe.

Their community was about 8000 people strong back then. Other online communities of the time were in the millions, like S.O.S.

Although I’m not going to Burning Man next week, I am going to be full time on this blog for the week. Stay tuned – if you can, and if you dare.

Chris Taylor at Mashable has responded to this week’s press that Burning Man has jumped the shark and rich people are one-upping each other with $25,000/head camps and sherpas. In Chris’s opinion, Burning Man is run by punks, and always has been.

From Mashable.com:

DPW Crew. Photo: Jessica Reeder

…Every time I read one of those articles — they are legion at this time of year and invariably seem to miss the point — I feel a bile rising, a furious urge to defend the festival I’ve attended, on and off, since 1999. This week’s New York Times style section story is a case in point. The author, Nick Bilton, is a smart guy, and he’s been to the event. He should know. But here he is telling one of many old and cliched untruths about the place:

If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air. A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct.

Poppycock. That assumption has never been even close to correct…It is, and always has been, ruled by all kinds of techno-smart futuristic punks rather than nostalgic hippies or dippy ravers.

Consider: this is a week-long art party in a handmade city in an environment that is doing its level best to kill you. Either the sun is baking dry ground that is blinding white, leeching water from your body, or the wind is blasting mile-high storms of dust across this enormous barren plain at ninety miles an hour, or a starry desert night is damn-near freezing you to death…

Who thrives in that environment? People who are a little bit crazy, quite a bit determined, and a whole lot of wiry and smart. People with an Iggy Pop-style lust for life. Here are punks of all stripes: cyberpunks, steampunks, biker punks, punk punks. People who do what it says on the ticket — voluntarily assume the risk of death. People who are brought roaringly to life in this killer of a desert, and fight fiercely to build an all-inclusive volunteer-driven civilization that lasts for as long as a mayfly.

…Burning Man is crawling with law enforcement and officialdom; they’ve just gotten very good at blending in. The notion that you have complete freedom to openly flout federal or Nevada state law is a dangerous myth. The idea that, as Bilton suggests, “drugs are easier to find than candy on Halloween” is what leads the guy carrying the “I Need Drugs” sign to his inevitable arrest on the city’s main drag, the Esplanade.

…Leading the charge is the Department of Public Works, or DPW — the roughest, toughest, hardest-working punks of all. These are the men and women who come out to this hostile environment literally months in advance to drive the golden spike in the ground that marks the dead center of vast concentric horseshoe-shaped boulevards, to construct the vast public spaces of Center Camp and the (completely nondenominational) Temple, to build the Man just so you can watch him burn. It’s no wonder the DPW is famous for roaming the streets during the event demanding beer from unsuspecting strangers because “we built this city” (to which the only appropriate response, if you’re daring enough, is “on rock and roll.”)

…But what about the plates of sushi, the ridiculously decadent desert food the billionaires are bringing with them? Hundreds of camps do exactly the same thing — ridiculously overspend, beyond their means, on ridiculously decadent food that they keep in a series of coolers just so they can be ridiculously generous to friends at unexpected moments.

I have attended fabulous and random four-course dinner parties during sunset on the playa. I’ve seen camps bring tanks of liquid nitrogen just so they can make ice cream for anyone who stops by. One year I had the ridiculous notion to take Chinese food delivery orders from my camp long before the event. For those who took me seriously, I ordered, vacuum-packed and froze their meals the day I drove out, then heated and delivered the results to their tent doors in their original containers the next day. That sort of thing happens all the time. Bilton’s notion that nearly all Burners are eating ramen noodles is the column’s other tired cliche.

…The ultimate misconception about Burning Man, though, is that it’ll be around forever. The whole idea is that it won’t. The event is a celebration of impermanence and change — the clue is in the title, and in the vanishing city that gets packed in and packed out.

Larry Harvey, Burning Man co-founder, has long said he’s preparing for the day when it will be no more. Eventually the crush of extra people at an event that’s adding up to 10,000 new attendees each year will get too much, the culture will collapse, it really will jump the shark. It doesn’t matter, Harvey insists — the spirit of Burning Man burns brightly in dozens of what are known as regional Burns, held around the year.

For many grizzled veterans who no longer go, that day has already come. It doesn’t matter. People are always on the edge of phasing out of Burning Man; that’s why “it was better last year” is one of the most common memes on the playa, right up there with “leave no trace.”

So far, however, Black Rock City has absorbed far more immigrants than it has spat out emigrants. There’s healthy stream of new attendees (and yes, new tech billionaires) to replace the old. For all its sham, drudgery and imperfect visions, Burning Man the event, not just the spirit, is still gaining strength.

It’s high time we started seeing it for the phenomenal jerry-rigged punk-built human achievement it is — rather than the oft-ruined hippy fest of media legend — before it leaves no trace one last time.

Fred Fox Jr, who wrote that episode, told the LA Times:

What’s the difference between Happy Days and Burning Man? Happy Days never claimed to be changing the world. It was just something fun, for the purpose of entertainment.

Black Rock City’s daily paper used to be called Piss Clear, with new editions coming out daily on Playa (you could pick them up at Center Camp). It’s now known as the BRC Weekly. The 2014 issue is now out. Read it in the long line to get in the Gate, if it opens again.

BRCWeekly2014 oustide pages

BRCWeekly2014_inside pages

Piss Clear BRC Weekly is not the only news-sheet on the Playa. There’s also the Black Rock Bacon Beacon:

From blackrockbeacon.org

Tom Anderson at Cosmopolitan brings us a “deep behind the scenes” look at what goes on at Burning Man’s Slut Garden camp.

From Cosmopolitan:

“The first boner to rise gets the prize,” says Brad McCray at the start of the event.

McCray is a beast of a man who leads the Burning Man theme camp Slut Garden with his wife of 10 years, Tammy. In front of him, five men stand exposed from the waist down with their scantily clad female partners dancing around them, encircled by a cheering, dust-covered crowd of hundreds. Every man is trying to produce an erection as fast as he can without touching himself. Their partners can encourage the sexletes but not by using their hands.

This is the Speed Boner challenge, the finale to McCray’s fourth annual Slut Olympics. Other events include Deep Throat (a pretty self-explanatory contest that involves a 13-inch dildo), Guess-A-Willy (a blindfolded woman has to identify her partner’s penis out of a lineup of naked men), and a Best Balls beauty contest. Speed Boner is still the biggest draw.

Mike Sweeten

 

 …Slut Gardeners are strictly swingers, married couples who range from their late twenties to early forties and want to experiment. Of the 54 campers staying at the garden, women slightly outnumber men. “There is a lot of cross pollination,” McCray says, but to be clear, they are not polyamorous. “Swingers are looking for sex, and the polyamorous are looking for a relationship.” One year, Burning Man organizers put Slut Garden next to a polyamorous camp. They did not get along. Slut Garden campers were looking to hook up while the polys were working out the complicated geometry of triads, quads, and other romantic shapes.

….McCray made a new rule that contestants “cannot come to Speed Boner with a boner.” 

…Since its inception, the Speed Boner competition has been plagued with difficulties. The first year, no sexlete got an erection. So the second year, McCray decided to let the contestants use their hands. The competition quickly turned into an ejaculation blast, which McCray describes as “grotesque.” Last year, a man came to Speed Boner packing wood. McCray made a new rule that contestants “cannot come to Speed Boner with a boner.”…”it ain’t a bone if it doesn’t stand on its own.” McCray explains the rules to the contestants from Slut Garden’s DJ sound booth: No touching your penis with your hands. Partners can rub on each other but no touching with the hands. And no “insertion,” he adds.

…The dancing turns to grinding as the crowd grows impatient. The women rub their breasts on their partners’ penises to move things along. Perhaps out of frustration, perhaps misunderstanding of what McCray meant by “insertion,” or maybe because they were carried away in the heat of the moment, four of the five women start fellating their partners. A referee disqualifies all of them as Graham taunts them for breaking the rules. The last man standing by default is “Shylar,” a porn producer from Los Angeles. He gets a gold medal for his partial stiffy.

…machismo aside, the pressure of a large stage may make the difficult task even harder, and fewer boners is the last thing Slut Garden needs in 2015.

Mike Sweeten

Read the full story here. Congratulations to Shylar for his boner accomplishments.

The Black Rock Beacon has published this history:

Compiled by Mitch, Rockstar and Brandon

Before this year, there were at least six deaths in Black Rock City. An additional number of Burners passed away after being evacuated.

The known deaths, reported by the Black Rock Beacon and other media or the Burning Man organization:

• 2011 – Erika Kupfersberger, cerebral hemorrhage.
• 2007 – Jermaine “Jerm” Barley, suicide by hanging.
• 2006 – Adam Goldstone, a DJ with a known heart condition, died in RV after fainting.
• 2005 – Sam Rich, a member of the fire-dancing group Controlled Burn, heart attack. Rich had sustained a head injury for which he was given stitches on Wednesday, the day before he died.
• 2003 – Katherine Lampman, run over by art car she was exiting.
• 2001 – A participant chose to run into a fire, according to the Afterburn probably the burning of Amazing Larry’s Lucky Seven Ages, the casino built into two large dice in the Deep Playa.

Among other event-related fatalities, an unidentified 52-year-old female Burner died in a Reno hospital after being transported from the Playa in 2010 because of an “unknown” medical condition, according to the Afterburn.

In 2005, a second Burner suffered cardiac arrest on the Playa and died that October after slipping into a coma in the hospital.

One fatality occurred from one of the two aircraft crashes in 2003. Barry Jacobs, the pilot of one of the planes, died after being hospitalized.

Two additional deaths in 2001 associated with the event included a Department of Public Works volunteer who died in a motor vehicle accident on the highway before the event and a second traffic fatality on Highway 447 during Exodus.

Michael Furey died in a motorcycle accident as the event was being set up in 1996.

The last edition of their newspaper was published on Thursday:

They say bad luck comes in threes. This year Burning Man faced an unprecedented closure on Monday and Tuesday, followed by an unfortunately fatal art car accident on Thursday.

It seemed like Burning Man might have sneaked home past the nasty Third Fate. The Diplo/Skrillex incident picked up a lot of press attention worldwide, but it was hardly a headache for BMOrg. Just more free publicity, and maybe even further justification for Larry Harvey’s ban on music guides. Exodus was one of the smoothest ever, with almost no significant delays reported by Burners.  More than 10,000 people left the festival before the Man burned, and the official population cap was down from the previous year, keeping the BLM happy.

Alas, ’twas not to be. The mainstream media is reporting on the danger of a potential outbreak of the lethal West Nile Virus, which yesterday killed a man in Long Beach. Officials say anyone who attended Burning Man this year could have been exposed to the virus.

From the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Mosquito traps set near Gerlach just before the annual Burning Man counter-cultural festival have tested positive for West Nile Virus, the Washoe District Health Department reports.

The traps were checked Aug. 22 and were sent to the state lab on Aug. 25 and they got the state results on Tuesday, said health department spokesman Phil Ulibarri.

On Aug. 6, the health department announced it found the West Nile Virus in the Kiley Ranch area of Spanish Springs, the first West Nile Virus case this year in Washoe County.

The Gerlach General Improvement District will take measures this week to kill the mosquitoes, Ulibarri said.

“We decided to help them with surveillance this year,” Ulibarri said. “We didn’t have the funding to go out there and do abatement.”

A person has tested positive for West Nile Virus in Clark County this summer. Nevada health officials have identified positive mosquito pools in Clark, Washoe, Elko and Mineral County, the county health department said. With so many pools with the virus, the state said other West Nile Virus cases are expected in humans.

From MyNews4:

RENO, Nev. (MyNews4.com & KRNV) — For the second time this year, mosquito samples in the Washoe County area have tested positive for the West Nile virus.

The Washoe County Health District says mosquitos caught in nine traps that were set in the Gerlach area tested positive for the virus.

The health district says this is the first time they’ve set mosquito traps in the Gerlach area. As a precaution, officials say anyone who attended the Burning Man Festival could have been exposed to the virus.

Gerlach does border the Black Rock Desert, but officials say the chances of mosquitoes traveling from Gerlach onto the playa is minimal.

The first human case of the West Nile virus in Nevada this year was reported in Clark County Wednesday afternoon — but officials say it’s not a very common virus.

“West Nile virus is very serious, but people need to know only about one percent of those people bitten by mosquiotes that carry West Nile Nirus will become seriously ill. Seventy to eighty precent of people bitten by mosquito with West Nile will show no signs … or any symptoms,” said Washoe County Health District, Communications Manager Phillip Ulibarr

From EliteDaily:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 70 to 80 percent of victims do not show the usual symptoms of fever, headache, vomiting or rash, but no one from the festival has tested positive just yet.

Nine people have died from West Nile in Nevada this year, with 129 total cases confirmed.

There is no known cure for the infection.

The Gerlach General Improvement District is seeking to eliminate the virus by hunting down all infected mosquito traps beginning this week.

Mosquito traps in three other Nevada counties have also tested positive for the virus, and more human cases are expected to emerge.

Normally the Playa is not a place where you need to worry about mosquitos, but the large amount of rain this year may have encouraged their spread. The world is on heightened alert for bio-disasters as international health authorities scramble to contain an outbreak of another deadly virus, Ebola.

Maya Zuckerman, “cultural hacker”, has shared 13 Life Lessons from 13 Years at Burning Man.

From Huffington Post:

The dust has finally settled after my thirteenth year at TTITD, “That Thing In the Desert”, the ephemeral psychedelic experience that is often referred to as Burning Man.

Burning Man celebrates the simple notion that “people have permission to be whoever they want to be. It is such a powerful ideal that people will go to the most inhospitable places in the world in order to get a little taste of it.” To explain what the event is or isn’t would take a few blog posts, so I will not attempt that here. More reading about the event can be done here!

Every year, participants drive hundreds of miles in the scorching heat in search of Black Rock City, Nevada; a barren desert in the middle of nowhere which we call the playa. They come for different reasons. One perhaps is to find nirvana in a sea of mesmerizing music and sense-blinding electronica. It is a place where people can learn through participation, revelry, and inquiry, how to truly connect and experience what it means to be human.

Here are 13 life lessons from my 13 year journey:

1. Do-ocracy – a thought construct that celebrates the empowering notion of taking individual responsibility. In a harsh desert environment, resources are limited. As a result, most everyone choose to work together to achieve community goals (there are those to choose to pay for a “vacation”, a controversy being debated in the community at present). This proactive mentality imbues a sense of personal responsibility where actions are motivated not only by self-preservation, but by a desire to make a difference and affect change through actions.

2. Cultivation of Awe – If you can imagine standing in a crowd of hundreds and peering up at art installations/sculptures up to 100 feet high as they burst into flames in symbolic offerings, you would come away with feelings of awe, veneration, wonder and even dread. That feeling of ‘awe’ challenges our sense of mortality and teaches us to cultivate tolerance, patience and humility. It gives us new perspectives.

The beautiful art installation Hybycozo

3, Respect and Accountability – Survival instincts kick in when you are in the desert surrounded by over 65,000 other attendees. One realizes that in order for the festival to work, one cannot coexist peacefully without mutual respect from each member of the ‘tribe’. Respect is an essential theme that forces one to look at the whole ecosystem of one’s life: respect for self, body, health, nature and others. Accountability enshrines one’s individual right to exist, to make decisions, to practice responsibility and to realize that one is held accountable to both self and others.

4. Service to Others – “Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving that celebrates the philosophy of unconditional servitude. “Gifting” does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.” Essentially, being of service teaches and encourages us to be of service to community, friends, city and ultimately planet.

5. Listen to Your Body – In an overstimulated environment with temperatures rising above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, blocking everything out and listening to one’s own instincts can be a challenge. Many times I would find myself especially in the earlier years ignoring my inner voice and over-exerting myself – pushing harder, partying harder. What I learned later on is that your body has its own intelligence and the ability to listen and honor its messages helps you to achieve mental and physical peace.

6. The Playa Gives You What You Need, Not What You Want – What we want is not always what we get and oftentimes we react by attempting to control everything and everyone. Burning Man is like a ‘wise mentor’ expressing the notion that all things happen according to a universal plan. It is that sort of understanding that has given me grace and tolerance in the face of difficulties.

Read the rest here.

Distrikt Camp day party

The temple of Grace – By David Best

The New York Times has a story by Julia Allison on The Progeny of Burning Man. There are other ways to get a transformational experience than going to Black Rock City, and not every EDM festival is like Coachella.

Re-blogged from the New York Times:

It was 3 a.m. in Bradley, Calif., in the middle of a dusty dry lake bed, and Carl Weiseth, 33, was shoeless, shirtless and regaling a gathering crowd about last night’s escapade. “I didn’t make it back from the dance floor until the sun was starting to rise,” he told his audience, adding that he “passed out to the gentle vibrations of thumping electronic music for three to four hours.”

A 1960s Volkswagen van was painted with the words “Give Peace a Chance,” surrounded by fresh-faced bohemians sporting flower crowns, acid-washed jean shorts, seapunk teal-dyed hair and psychedelic leggings. “It’s the feather-and-leather crew,” one festivalgoer said.

To the casual observer, this post-New Age convergence of monumental art, all-night dancing and “Kumbaya” spirituality could be mistaken for Burning Man, the weeklong arts festival in the Nevada desert. But unlike Burning Man, which marked its 28th year last month, this festival called Lightning in a Bottle offers paid lecturers, headlining music acts like Moby, and V.I.P. packages with deluxe tents and fresh linens for $2,500.

“L.I.B. is one of the pinnacle festivals of West Coast conscious culture,” said Mr. Weiseth, using shorthand for Lightning in a Bottle, among a new type of gathering called “transformational festivals.” They could be described as the slightly smaller, psychedelic-art-and-electronic-dance-music-centered, commercialized progeny of Burning Man.

“It is the ultimate convergence of visionary art, electronic music, yoga, spirituality, nutrition, fashion and dance-culture, where people gather who appreciate both nature and spiritual consciousness, and who want to co-create an unpretentious dance party in celebration of sacred art and community,”…Held over four days in May and billed as a “heart and mind expanding oasis,” Lightning in a Bottle, in its ninth year, drew 15,000 participants, one of the largest and more influential of these festivals.

Such festivals have spread beyond their West Coast stronghold and now take place year-round throughout the United States, as well as Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America. They are an amalgamation of several cultural forces: the rise of electronic dance music, the maturing of the rave culture, the popularity of TED-like talks, the mainstreaming of yoga, and the YOLO spirit of festivalgoers who spread the word on social media.

Unlike more mainstream music gatherings like Coachella and Lollapalooza(with their focus on pop music, celebrities, alcohol and fashion brands), transformational festivals embrace feel-good values like ecological sustainability, organic food, community building and wisdom sharing. With names like Beloved and Wanderlust, Envision and Lucidity, these festivals seem like bastions of the nouveau hippie, grandchildren-of-the-Woodstock generation. And, to a certain extent, they are.

…“This is a safe space — a space free of judgment, criticism, punishment,” said the effervescent Dream Rockwell, a festival founder, who was standing backstage while a man played a didgeridoo, an ancient Australian instrument. “Creativity is accepted in all forms. ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service’ obviously does not apply here.”

…Maura Malini Hoffman, 49, a former Procter & Gamble executive who now gives spiritual talks at festivals, put it this way: “Transformation is about realizing there’s more to life than making money, having a good job, fame and fortune. People go to these and they’re never the same. 

…This year, organizers offered a luxury EZ Camping option. The $2,500 packages, which included a prefab tent, plush bed, cooler, private restrooms, power outlets and a “skinny mirror,” were sold out.

One of the luxury tents went to Misty Meeler, 29, an interior design assistant from Houston, who came with her 37-year-old sister. Ms. Meeler wore a gold headdress, rainbow bikini, a leather utility belt and purple leg warmers. Speaking through a heart-shaped dust mask, she explained that Coachella was too “Hollywood see-and-be-seen” for her taste. This festival, she said, “has a hippie scene that makes the whole experience better, whether you’re looking to eat healthy, live clean, meditate, yoga or want to party the whole four days with no sleep.”

…The crowd included James Oroc, a writer from New Orleans, who was waxing philosophical. Best known for his psychedelic tome, “Tryptamine Palace,” he is an outspoken and sometimes cantankerous critic of festival culture…His verdict? The crowd was “very hip, very beautiful,” he said, though he was concerned that the festival had become too “fashion” and “very L.A.”

“You get a lot of Burners who haven’t actually been to Burning Man,” he said. “They just have the clothes.”

Read the full story here.

Random Rab at Envision Festival, Costa Rica 2014. photo: Flickr

“Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes” – Karl Marx

If there’s one thing Burning Man founder Larry Harvey can do, it’s wax lyrical. The New Yorker brings us a tale of how he went there and did exactly that, along with new Burning Man Director (and QVC Home Shopping exec) Matt Goldberg, a pharmaceutical ad salesman, a tree physiologist, and a chemical mind control researcher…all giving advice to the Prez on how he should run the country. Self-Reliance goes hand in hand with Obamacare, according to one Burner who believes Burning Man even has the power to heal the sick.

re-blogged from the New Yorker (emphasis ours):

Image: Tom Bachtell, New Yorker

Idea Lab JANUARY 13, 2014 ISSUE

Principled

BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE

As 2013 wound to a close and dismal year-end assessments poured in on the performance of the Obama Administration—the N.S.A. surveillance scandal, the botched Obamacare rollout—the President was looking for idea men. His move was to fly in a cadre of brainy Silicon Valley types. But he might have also dropped by Harlem, where a fund-raiser for the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit spinoff of the annual arts festival and bacchanal in the Nevada desert, had taken on a chin-stroking air. “You know what I’m really interested in?” Larry Harvey, the festival’s founder, said, in his remarks onstage. “Governance.”

Burning Man is no Model U.N., but as a congregation of self-appointed outliers in silly hats it was a forerunner of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The festival began in 1986, when Harvey and friends burned a generic human-shaped effigy on a beach in San Francisco, but in recent years it has acquired an establishment vibe, in part because of its role as a laboratory for social organization. This year, it attracted sixty-eight thousand people, who lived for a week in a tent-trailer-and-motor-home civilization, which has its own gift-based economy (there is no money allowed, except for buying coffee and ice), airport, law enforcement, emergency services, and electrical grid.

Harvey spoke about the festival’s global ambitions. Burning Man is guided by what initiates call the Ten Principles: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. These ideas, Harvey suggested, might one day form the basis of a new world order: Burners have helped revitalize downtown Las Vegas and met with members of the Australian government. “We’re planning for a hundred years,” Harvey told the crowd. “If we can govern the way we want, then what we’ve all experienced”—at Burning Man—“will be a very common experience.” He concluded that “when the world comes to a crisis—and we know it’s coming”—that’s when the Burner knowledge will come in handy.

But what wisdom could our government take from Burning Man right now? The fund-raiser was held at a swanky converted church owned by a man named Michel Madie. “I’m a healer,” said Madie, who had a white goatee and wore a top hat with a peacock feather. “My work is soul boxing.” He is also a successful real-estate broker, whose firm handles hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales. Madie said that he would not advise the federal government to adopt a gift economy. “The idea that Burning Man is anti-capitalist is totally incorrect,” he said. “You have to have a pretty hefty amount of money to go there and enjoy it. I think capitalism is promotion of self, and so is Burning Man.”

Marceau Guérin, a Ph.D. student researching tree physiology at Columbia, said, “To Obama, I would say, ‘Come have a look.’ It’s about the crazy hidden part of people.” Matt Goldberg, the former C.E.O. of Lonely Planet, said, “It’s about change. I first went out in 2003”—he was working in corporate development at the Wall Street Journal. “I came back with renewed energy about how to innovate.” A man named Earth offered Obama revelations he’d picked up on the playa: “Talk to more strangers. Truly think that anything is possible.” He explained that Earth is his given name—Earth Bennett—and that by day he’s a pharmaceutical-ad salesman. When it came to Obamacare, the writer Julia Allison offered a bit of advice: “If people took self-reliance”—one of the Ten Principles—“as a central tenet of health, we’d have people taking really good care of themselves. Since I’ve been to Burning Man, I haven’t gotten sick.”

Nina Urban, a psychiatrist at Columbia, does brain experiments on what she called “party drugs.” She said, “I divide the Burning Man population into five subgroups: hippies, raver kids, true artists who want to build something they could not build otherwise, and the technologists who roll in for a few days from the Bay Area. The last group is the one I belong to: the costumers, who want to express themselves by dressing up.” Her boyfriend, Jim Glaser, who goes by the name Costume Jim, is the head of Kostume Kult, a group that is a leading participant in SantaCon—the annual parade of drunk people in Santa outfits. Costume Jim shook his head and said, “It grew beyond what we could control.”

This served as a reminder: Burning Man doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to social organization. The festival is plagued by the same problems that plague American society. In recent years, regulars have complained about the influx of rich celebrities—Sean (Diddy) Combs—and tech-world fat cats: the Winklevoss twins attended, and Mark Zuckerberg choppered in for a day.

An artist named Eric (Knuckles) Forman said that he was over Burning Man. “I’m someone who goes and loves it and then hates it,” he said. “And every time I think I’m done with it, it pulls me back.” ♦

Source: the New Yorker  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/principled

Self is God. Burning Man shall become the Secular Selfie Destination of the New World, and the Regionals shall be its colonies, founded on Principles.

Yes, it seems The Burning Man Project’s vision is for the Ten Principles to form the basis of a New World Order. This explains why everyone from Presidential Candidates, Armed Forces Commanders, Billionaire Burners, Tech Titans, Political Dream Teams,  real princes and Fresh Princes and Hollywood Royalty to P.Diddy and his daddy, have now been brought in to BMOrg’s global PR blitz.

The New World Order needs a religion that Radically Includes, unlike the mass population control systems of the past which have been based on difference and exclusion. Divide and Conquer will now be replaced with “hug it out”. Transhumanism is here, we can all merge with the Internet and put nano-bots in our body and genetically and socially re-engineer ourselves. We can become gods, living forever in The Matrix, worshipping at the AltUr of The Man.

The System of The Man, the Google and Facebook and NSA Artificial Intelligence network, the Web that connects us all together in a big Net, needs its blinking, pulsing, phat beating robot heart.

We’re building an artificial god. A digitally constructed consciousness simulator, with sensors absorbing all the world’s data, monitoring and tracking our every move, connected to hundreds of acres of powerful computer farms running Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Ask Siri “are you listening?”, and see what she says. She’s listening alright, in fact she’s completely fascinated. Siri got her name from SRI, Stanford Research Institute, the top secret Bay Area military contractor that developed the technology before spinning it out to Apple to pump out to the masses.

Understanding speech in most languages is now easy for these giant server farms that have the power to listen to every conversation in the world at once. The words themselves don’t even matter as much as the metadata which logs where you go and who you interact with. The capabilities of this system now include facial and voiceprint analysis. They can recognize who you really are, even if you’re disguised; they can tell if you’re lying or afraid. Are you happy and ready to buy something, or vulnerable and could use a kind word from someone who seems to care? They read our emails to sell us products. They control our news feeds, and the talking points in our media, feeding us a steady diet of information specially chosen for us by The Machine.

The new model for electronic organization of the masses is a hive, where we all connect to and work for the Queen Bee, even if we never get to interact with her. We’re just all happy swarming around in our digital hive together, oblivious to life away from our swarm of like-minded groupthink collaborators, popping pills and dropping tabs and smoking blunts and being entranced by the spectacle and the carnival and the electronic assault of sound waves and flashing lights, hot fire and bare flesh.

Those who are engineering this new digital god to be our Master also believe in transhumanism, the idea that humans will merge with machines and become a new, superior species. This species will be the apex predator on the planet, meaning that humans without the resources to merge with SkyNet The Matrix will become more like animals, livestock to be milked in virtual electronic tax farms, drones to be exploited for the good of The Collective.

Who is building this Artificial Cyber-god? Google, Facebook, and the Military/Intelligence conglomerate, if you understand history. Or, if you don’t: Burning Man. Burning Man is behind it all, the brains and power of Silicon Valley.

Well, that’s the argument of cyber philosopher Alexander Bard, who has a book coming out in a couple of weeks called Syntheism – Creating God In The Digital Age.

from The Huffington Post (emphasis and editing ours):

Basically, what he’s saying is: “Your future depends on going to Burning Man. Your only chance to survive. The digital world is primary, if you are not Liked on social media then you are irrelevant and will die. To get power and influence over the world, you must go to Burning Man. Burning Man is the fastest growing and most important online community in the world.”

Poppycock.

Our only chance to survive as humans is to NOT let them build these digital hives to entrap us in their swarms and commodify our souls for advertisers; NOT let them build pop-up civilizations built on propaganda and the idle few benefitting from the sincere efforts of the many.

The claim that Burning Man is the physical manifestation of cyberspace/virtual reality has been made since the mid-90’s – about the time John Perry Barlow got involved. He is credited with first using the word cyberspace to describe the modern Internet. In this interview he did with Larry Harvey last year, they claimed that Burning Man was intertwined with tech/acid culture, and that BM was responsible for the tech industry’s move from Silicon Valley to the city.

Many of the key components of the Internet were built by Burners, and before that by acid-dropping Deadheads. The inspiration for the name Apple came from the orchards where Jobs first took acid, something he called “one of the three most important experiences of my life”

Wash your own brain, Burners. Whether the power player behind the scenes of Silicon Valley really is BMOrg, or some other group that pulls the strings of all the puppets, don’t let them do the thinking for you, and don’t believe everything you’re told.

Think for yourself. Question authority…said the guy who wrote the CIA entrance exam.

[Update 9/27/14 4:55pm]

Alexander Bard gave a TED talk, “What If The Internet Is God?”. It’s eye-popping. I would say the #1 worst TED talk I have ever seen.

Note the God-trashing at the opening, as if eliminating religion is somehow necessary for the invention of technology. It continues for the whole 18 minutes. Personally, my Radical Inclusion filters were severely challenged by the dude’s outfit. YMMV.

Cyber-philosopher Alexander Bard. “It is said, Percy, that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God” – Black Adder

“I was one of those guys you wanted to be, sure. But I suffered from religion envy…then I went to Burning Man…Americans haven’t actually understood how profound it is...I was there with a neuro-scientist who was using me as his guinea pig…I wasn’t sober for 8 days…I was in this couch somewhere being put on these drugs giving me a female orgasm for over 6 hours…to make sure I didn’t die, the neuroscientist…had placed a gorgeous naked woman in high heels next to me doing cocaine all night long…all of a sudden she goes ‘You know what? Burning Man is Mecca. We’re doing our hajj’…we’re 60,000 people in the desert in Nevada, and we’re really practising a religion. Even with the burning of The Man on Saturday night…it really is a religion: for Atheists. They’re not even New Age at Burning Man, there’s no crystal healing going on, if it is it’s ironic.

Crystal healing, for those not neo-hippie enough to know anything about it, is white magick. Not surprising that it isn’t going on inside Burning Man’s fire magick pentagram. You want white magick to be clean and pure and free from negative energies that could interfere.

“…god is a concept far too important to leave to the religious…We live in a world without Utopia, which is incredibly dangerous. We need to get hold of a new Utopia, otherwise we cannot save the planet…we need to create god”.

If, like the majority of people on this planet, you do believe in God, you might see “We should create God” as the words of Satan, trying to implement an Evil agenda through this “cyber-philosopher” in the name of Religious Envy. The terms “False Idol” and “False Prophet” spring to mind.

“What could be a bigger, better thing to create than to create god”?

Man cannot create God. But he can create the instruments of the Devil that will be used to bind him.

“Don’t be evil”, says Google – or, at least, they used to. So they can’t be…right? Because if they were, they’d tell us. Evil doesn’t lie, they’d be really honest. Right? Sell your soul to Satan, says BMOrg. Ironically, of course.

Although the Bard doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Quantum Physics. He thinks “physics is just another word for playing hide and seek with God” Make up your mind, buddy.

“Atheos – the god who does not exist”. This is Luciferian doctrine. Satanists worship the absence of god, more so than the devil as an anthropomorphized figure. When you worship “The Void” as a god, you worship destruction.

They say Burning Man is the cycle of death and rebirth, but where is the birth part? We arrive each year to find The Man fully formed, ready to erupt in flames and fireworks after we’ve worshipped him in his magical circle for a week, guided by him with our sense of time and space juxtaposed. Wanton destruction and mayhem in the name of the fire god, and in the name of the New World Order Digital God that many Burners are involved in creating. Don’t be fooled by the Louis XIV powdered wigs.

If you say your god is Nothing, but you need to take drugs to connect with the Void – well, maybe you should consider if the drugs are taking over your life, if it’s actually them you are worshipping, not Nothing. When he finally names his Satanic god of the Void at the end of the presentation, its name is Sin. Sin the OS. Sinternet.

“You know perfectly well that you don’t exist. You know that, and yet you behave as if you exist, and your friends behave as if you exist”

- ah, Philosophers. Can’t live with ‘em…pass that dutch.

[9/28/14 00:19am]

Robotic theorist Hugo de Garis sums it up pretty well:

Amazing 2014 documentary:

Afrika Burn 2014. Photo: Jonx Pillemer

The UK’s Telegraph has an article comparing Burning Man with the rise of the social media network Ello (I’m @zos). It seems social media has become full of squares and obsessed with monetization; so the cool kids are looking for something new.

Source: the Telegraph (emphasis ours):

Aerial view of Afrika Burn, 2013

Of course they were entitled to do so, but my first thoughts were that if people like that were going, then Burning Man was over as a out-there festival. Not only was it time to turn to the infinitely more interesting AfrikaBurn in South Africa’s Tankwa Karoo, but it also minded me of other people’s adoption of social media, especially Twitter.