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.

This year, just before Burning Man, the New York Times published an expose on rich people trying to one-up each other at Burning Man with luxury camps and paid employees. They featured an interview with an insider, Tyler Hansen, who worked for a large luxury camp as a sherpa. Not a Big S Sherpa, one of the noble mountain people of Nepal; a small s sherpa, someone employed as a guide. Before this high-profile NYT article, I had never before heard the word sherpa in conjunction with Burning Man. Now it seems every Commodification Camp has a team of sherpas. How did this word enter Burning Man’s lexicon?

After Caravansiclery wrapped up, we heard from another sherpa who worked at the luxury plug-n-play camp created by mega-rich Burning Man Director Jim Tananbaum. According to documents from Megas Inc, camping spots cost $13,000 per head. According to the whistleblower, it was $17,000. What was the difference – tips? Or were some “products” provided that weren’t suitable to be listed in the contract?

This mountain of “ice cream” looks pretty big…where’s my sherpa?

The camp featured Mistresses of Merriment, some of whom claim “playmate“, “pasties”, and “no pants” in their profiles.

KBand published a list of people involved with Caravancicle, something we have decided not to re-post as it could be considered “doxing”, an online practice that is frowned upon. You can search out the list for yourself. We reference it because it contains a link that inspired this story – one that connects Commodification Camps, BMOrg, and Sherpas.

Burning Man’s Social Alchemist and Global Ambassador, Bear Kittay, is named in the list of Caravancicle associates. What was his role in the camp?

Despite being paid to be a Social Alchemist, Bear is not permitted by his employer to make an on the record statement to social media. He camped at First Camp, and doesn’t know why he is named in the Caravancicle list.

A silent ambassador? Sounds more like a secret agent to me. Why does BMOrg need secret agents to spread its culture, if it’s all for charity?

Bear’s mentor is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whom he brought out to the Playa to do deals. Shervin Pishevar,  formerly of Menlo Ventures, has now branched out on his own with a new $154 million startup. Its name? Drumroll please…

Sherpa Ventures. @Sherpa.

Is this merely yet another ironic coincidence, like BMOrg Directors selling luxury elite camps on K Street while brochures for the same type of amenity-laden retreat are being handed out in the Souk? How many more coincidences do there need to be, before all these connections seem like more than just random chance?

Here’s some of the back story. Who is Bear Kittay?

From About.Me:

Bear Kittay is a social alchemist who exists to activate human potential. As Burning Man’s Global Ambassador, Bear initiates global experiences with cultural pioneers from the realms of entrepreneurship, government, science, and art to accelerate innovation and cultural transformation. As an entrepreneur, he’s founded, discovered and currently advises several venture-backed Silicon Valley technology companies, including Shaker, Organizer, and Sponsorfied. He’s raised more than $20M in early stage venture funding from top tier firms including Founders Fund and Menlo Ventures. A singer and multi-instrumentalist, Bear’s secret sauce is his music. He’s studied and performed music in venues throughout the world and founded Music for Democracy, a PAC organizing musicians for progressive causes

From The Burning Man Project:

Bear Kittay serves as Social Alchemist and Ambassador for Burning Man Project, visiting burners around the world, capturing their stories and sharing information from other groups  creating positive change around the world. So far Bear has attended AfrikaBurn in South Africa, KiwiBurn in New Zealand, Nowhere in Spain, and visited burners in Australia, Maui and London. He has represented the Project at the SXSW premiere of Spark, at a festival on human rights in Croatia and at a social innovation festival in Oaxaca, Mexico. He’s just recently returned from a whirlwind trip that included KoreaBurn, Burning Japan and Burning Seed in Australia.

He was also sent this year to Midburn, a Burning Man event which humbly aims to bring peace to the Middle East.

In 2010 I brought two of my best friends to Burning Man for the first time, after trying for about a decade to convince them to go. They absolutely loved it, we camped with Villains and Vixens and Overkill. Bear was not so close a friend, but I had previously entertained him in my home in Australia and suggested he should go to Burning Man and experience for himself magic happening in real time. 2009 was his first burn. In 2010, he came to visit our camp in some sort of wetsuit with his dick hanging out of a flap in the front. Wetsuit cocking, a new one to me. Millenial innovation, no doubt. Luckily he brought a beautiful woman with him. She was immediately whisked into the fanciest RV on the Playa, while Bear remained with us drinking at our camp’s fully stocked bar. And yes, we too had top shelf vodka – $29 for a bottle of Grey Goose at Safeway, fancy. Show up, and we pour you a drink. Doesn’t get much more Radically Inclusive than that – although, if you want to use the bathroom in my RV, you’re gonna need a wristband.

Bear and Dr Molly – not a couple! Photo by Snorky

In 2011, Bear created a Burning Man camp called Kundavi. It was tied to a real estate venture in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I joined them and pitched in where I could, mainly contributing the sound system. This was the first year I’d brought my own RV, an old one I found for a steal off eBay, an economical alternative to the nicer vehicles I’d rented previously. Bear brought out his parents for their first Burn. Dr David Kittay, a lecturer on religion and technology at Columbia University, later would host the infamous “The Founders Speak” panel discussion in New York with Larry Harvey, John Perry Barlow, and Peter Hirshberg, the recordings of which mysteriously went missing despite BMOrg’s promise to share them with Burners.

Bear brought some friends to Camp Kundavi that he wanted to get together for business reasons. Earlier in the year, Bear had asked Shervin, his mentor, what he should do with his life. Shervin had said “go and travel the world, and if you find any interesting startups, bring them to me”. In Barcelona (or was it Tel Aviv?), Kittay randomly met some young Israeli entrepreneurs with a social media startup called Shaker.

Shervin was the guy who did the Uber deal for Menlo Ventures, which turned out to be such a stellar success that he can probably trade off that one deal for the rest of his life. He brought celebrities like Ed Norton and Burner Will Smith in as investors in their Series B round.

Bear saw an opportunity – here was a deal he could broker for Shervin, and maybe get a piece for himself. And it could all go down at Burning Man.

Shervin showed up fresh from Las Vegas. It was his first trip to the Playa, and not his natural environment, but he was an “out there” VC, prepared to do whatever it took to close on the next big deal. He would shave Uber into his hair if that was what it took. Before hopping on his Black Jet he had spent 3 hours in the hairdresser, getting his jet-black locks turned into a rainbow mohawk.

Shervin was frustrated because he was in the closing stages of an $800 million deal, and his Blackberry reception was patchy. I lent him my satellite phone but it wasn’t enough, he needed to get back to Vegas to close this deal. Time was limited. Bear seized his opportunity to bring his mentor and his protegés together.

Here’s SF Gate examining Burning Man’s new role as a deal destination for the captains of tech:

Burning Man founders are happy about the changes – even courting them. Those captains of tech also fund the enormous temporary art installations in the city center and support the Burning Man nonprofit efforts.

“What we’re seeing are many more of the Fortune 500 leadership, entrepreneurs and small startups bringing their whole team,” said Marian Goodell, Burning Man director of business and communications.

Like a corporate retreat?

“A little bit like a corporate retreat. The event is a crucible, a pressure cooker and, by design, a place to think of new ideas or make new connections.”

She said that, contrary to what people may think, she is not particularly liberal and, as a sign of her conservative cred, added that “my sister’s godfather is Antonin Scalia,” the staunchly conservative Supreme Court justice. “Burning Man on the outside has very liberal and socially strong principles, but I’ve been running it with very fiscally conservative policies.“

These new burners, she said, are to be celebrated.

“If you’re in the longtime Burning Man community, maybe it’s easy to frown on certain types of people coming. But the more we have a variety of influencers – folks from London and New York – the better off we will be and the better off the Burning Man Project.”

When Bear Kittay, 26, who runs a camp with an innovation theme, met five Israeli entrepreneurs in Barcelona, he told them to come to the desert. On the spur of the moment, the young men, founders of a virtual reality startup, took time off work and joined him.

On the playa, Kittay introduced them to Shervin Pishevar, managing partner of the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. And there, coated in desert dust, Pishevar agreed to lead the first round of funding – $15 million.

That company, Shaker, won the prestigious TechCrunch Disrupt conference award for best new startup in 2011.

“It’s a big testament to Burning Man,” Goodell said

Typical BMOrg, claiming credit for any thing any Burners do any where. We’ve gone from “commerce is banned at Burning Man” to “we never said we were against commerce” to “if commerce happens that’s a big testament to Burning Man”.

The Burning Man component of the Shaker deal was no more than 5 minutes of conversation. Here’s how it really happened.

Bear brought Shervin and the Shaker team together, in the shade provided by my RV. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the meeting went down right outside the window of the main early-stage tech investor in the camp, or perhaps this was all part of some master plan. Later, off Playa, I did offer to make a token investment into Shaker but by this stage I was small fry, they were on to bigger and better things after winning Tech Crunch Disrupt and a $15 million round led by Menlo Ventures. Like most of these Millenial-led tech companies that boast how they don’t need anyone’s advice or money, they haven’t amounted to much. They did a partnership deal with Live Nation, whose biggest shareholder owns QVC (Home Shopping Network), home of Burning Man Director Matt Goldberg. Last I heard Shaker had “pivoted”, and is now an online gaming play.

Shervin didn’t actually do the Shaker deal in Black Rock City, but he made plans to meet with the guys in San Francisco the next week. Tech Crunch Disrupt, which was featured in Mike Judge’s hilarious Silicon Valley show, occurs the week after Burning Man. As arranged on the Playa, Shervin met the guys in the morning before the competition and at the end of the meeting they shook hands on a deal. Later, when they presented and won, Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington said he wanted to invest also.

Here’s Shervin describing how it all came about to Uncrunched:

here’s the crazy story of how I met them. I was working on scouting a Jedi Council retreat in Cabo. I met these amazing guys from Mexico at Summit Series who are were working on an entrepreneurs resort. I began mentoring one of them, Bear. He wanted to learn how to become an investor and VC in the future. My advice was to go forth and travel around the world scouting for amazing startups and bring it back. I didn’t expect to hear from him for months. Instead, a mere 3 weeks later he had traveled to Egypt and Israel, and I flew into Burning Man. He said, “Shervin, I listened to you! Thank you! And I found this amazing startup, Shaker. And they are flying into the Playa tonight and they are competing in Techcrunch Disrupt!” That night I met them and was very impressed with them and their vision. But with no connection I had to wait until the following Tuesday to get the demo at a Samovar in San Francisco. Within a minute, I knew what I saw was the future. I had been looking for this for years. Their product execution was nearly flawless. A very hard feat to accomplish given the vision. The next day I brought them in to meet the rest of the Menlo partners. They agreed and we were off! Meanwhile, while we tried to come to an agreement on an investment, Shaker won Disrupt! I actually got the term sheet done and signed from the streets of Haiti the following weekend while I was volunteering in Haiti for jp/hro! Hopefully, there will be karma in that and all of the serendipity that brought us together.

Pre-planned serendipity and engineered karma: is this Social Alchemy in action?

This year, Shervin has launched his new venture, called Sherpa Ventures. From Business Week:

Here’s what happens when you set out to profile Silicon Valley venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar.

On Monday, July 7, Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber’s manager, calls at Pishevar’s request to attest that the Iranian-born entrepreneur has brought him several high-profile investment opportunities and had a hand in introducing him to his future wife. On Tuesday, DreamWorks Animation Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Katzenberg rings to praise Pishevar as “a great networker” and says, “There is nobody more loyal.”

On Wednesday, Elon Musk, founder of electric-car company Tesla Motors is on the phone recounting how the pair traveled to Cuba last year with Sean Penn and ended up negotiating (unsuccessfully) with the Castro government for the release of an American imprisoned there. On Thursday, it’s Edward Norton, who says Pishevar advised the actor and his wife on building their charitable-giving website, CrowdRise, and later persuaded Norton to make an investment in the booming ride-sharing startup Uber. Finally, on Friday, New Jersey junior Senator Cory Booker calls to explain how Pishevar has become a crucial link between Washington and Silicon Valley—bundling donations for President Obama’s reelection campaign and spearheading an effort to create a new kind of “startup visa” for foreign entrepreneurs. “There are guys that can write big checks, and there are guys that can bring people together to write checks,” Booker says. Pishevar “inspires people to give and does it in a way that is not icky.”

Pishevar, in case it’s not already clear, is one of the most excessively networked guys in Silicon Valley. The former tech-entrepreneur-turned-investor has backed Uber, e-tailer Fab.com, and eyeglass purveyor Warby Parker, among other startups. Now he’s running his own venture capital firm, SherpaVentures, which has raised $154 million from a group of investors that includes Condé Nast and the private equity firm TPG Capital. In the process, he has turned himself into one of the most visible members of the California technology and media scene, frequently showing up onstage at tech conferences and backstage at Hollywood awards shows. When Obama met with a select group of technology executives last December to discuss revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, Pishevar was at the White House, standing Zelig-like next to tech luminaries, including Tim Cook and Marissa Mayer.

Pishevar, 40, embodies a new kind of venture capitalist, bringing contacts and visibility to his startups in addition to—or perhaps instead of—operational or technical know-how. A tireless self-promoter who prefers a Los Angeles-style hug over a handshake, he’s based in fashionable San Francisco instead of the stuffy suburban enclave of Menlo Park, the traditional cradle of the VC industry. He’s also known for his public displays of enthusiasm: He once shaved the initials of several of his portfolio companies into his hair.

His exuberance and ubiquity have come at a price, though. The gossip website Valleywag once referred to him as a “humble-bragging, attention-grabbing startup financier” and suggested he’s obsessed with being liked and famous. Pishevar admits that a rival investor once called him “a clown” to his face.

A new kind of venture capitalist: the Burner capitalist. Burner Shervin even purchased a trip to space with famous pal Ashton Kutcher, who is also now a big-time tech investor in AirBnB and others.

The name TPG Capital has come up in this blog before. They recently invested $300 million in AirBnB, which now advertises rooms in Burning Man camps and boasts 2 of Burning Man’s 18 Directors as its full-time employees. So they’re backing both Sherpa, and AirBnB. A very powerful behind-the-scenes player.

What does Sherpa do? They’re “vague by design“. This slide from a recent presentation gives a clue to the opportunities they see:

From the Wall Street Journal:

Sherpa, in many ways, is representative of a new class of boutique firms: young, city-based, and striving to differentiate themselves from earlier generations.

Located in the heart of San Francisco’s downtown — many miles from the famed Sand Hill Road where many venture firms reside — Sherpa’s office of roughly a dozen employees is filled with plush Herman Miller chairs and black-and-white murals by local artists.

…Half of the group is an investment vehicle, SherpaVentures, and the other half is SherpaFoundry, a vehicle to incubate new companies and to connect their portfolio companies with larger, often public, companies.

“We felt like there was an opportunity to create a guild-like model,” says Stanford. “It’s our name. We like to be in the background making magic happen–hauling the bags up the mountain, enabling great success, the ones behind the camera at the summit.”

The Burner Capitalists are pouring in to the Playa – which is also by design. In 2012 Bear co-founded IDEATE, “Burning Man’s tech innovation camp”. Although the camp was conceived at the last minute, and chock full of virgins, they had no problem getting prime real estate next to First Camp, and all the tickets they wanted.

Here’s some recent coverage from Recode:

In yet another “cuddle puddle” — a sort of non-sexual group snuggling that seems to be the favored daytime activity at Burning Man — entrepreneur Tim West explained to me the mission of the 200-person tech and innovation camp, Ideate. (I’m also camping here at the annual Nevada desert festival this week.)

“It’s about bringing tech people to Burning Man, and helping them understand it,” said West, who was wearing an Air Force jumpsuit and carrying a headless Barbie in his pocket. “And then bringing Burning Man back to the default world.”

The special relationship between Burning Man and Silicon Valley is not an accident — it’s by design. A group of young tech entrepreneurs created Ideate three years ago, in collaboration with the Burning Man founders, to support the concept.

Its members are meant to serve as liaisons and teachers to the flood of new tech workers — and tech money — coming into the festival. In some ways, the camp was born out of an anxiety: The Burning Man founders are aging, and they needed to find a core next-generation troupe and ideas for the weeklong event’s next chapter.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that they chose a group of young people who are explicitly focused on entrepreneurship.

“The most important piece of why Silicon Valley exists in the first place is Burning Man — this is a place people go to confront problems and make solutions and prototype,” West said. “Why is innovation happening here in Silicon Valley more than anywhere else in the world? Burning Man.”

…”Ideate is where we can think of and test these ideas, and then bring them to the world. And people are ready for it.”

“Burning Man is not a sub culture anymore,” Delaune said.

“It’s the dom culture,” Hanusa added.

The Peninsula Press discussed Bear’s big role in Burning Man’s future:

While transitioning the project to nonprofit status, Burning Man’s directors are exploring ways to expand its culture globally, focus more on technology and innovation, and lean heavily on the ideas of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. “We’re at an absolutely critical time in our change and our morphing, and we’re going to be relying on others to help us,” said Marian Goodell, one of the six project owners since 1996.

Conversations about the future have been brewing for months. Bear Kittay, a 27-year-old entrepreneur and musician, has taken the lead in organizing meetings for up-and-coming Bay Area start-up types with Larry Harvey, the founder and director of Burning Man, and Goodell. Kittay is also helping figure out how to spread the project’s 10 principles to other parts of the world.

Goodell calls Kittay their “hyper-connector.” His resume includes being the co-founder of a company called Organizer, which created a clipboard-like mobile platform for use during political campaigns, and a partner (and designated “social alchemist”) in the Avalon Hot Springs eco-resort north of Napa Valley.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Kittay organized a retreat at Avalon. He invited Harvey, Goodell and about a dozen others…

There are longstanding cultural ties between Burning Man and Silicon Valley. It is no secret that Google’s founders are avid “burners,” with entire walls at the company’s Mountain View campus covered in photos from the festival…

But the Avalon retreat initiated an active conversation between the two cultures and two generations of burners — baby boomers and millennials.

Those talks continued and led to the formation of the IDEATE innovation camp, which participated in this summer’s festival. Each camp has a different focus, such as dance, meditation and clothing swaps. IDEATE differed from typical camps, as it operated with an unprecedented mission: to be “an [ideas] incubator in the center of Burning Man,” according to Kittay.

Kittay said IDEATE brought together bright minds to figure out how to offer the tools of Burning Man culture, including collaboration, sustainability and inclusion, to start-up projects around the world.

Burning Man founders paid special attention to IDEATE, which was given a block of tickets even though the idea emerged long after tickets were sold out. Goodell placed the camp close to First Camp, where the founders make their desert home each year.

Goodell said her thought was, “We should take all this brain power around us in San Francisco—dot-com and entrepreneurs…[who] care about Burning Man, and let’s get them all together…and see whether anything could come of it.”.

The majority of the 210 people who camped at IDEATE were new to Burning Man and were young entrepreneurs from companies such as TED, a nonprofit committed to spreading worthwhile ideas; Summit, which hosts an annual four-day event for 1,000 of the world’s leading change makers; and Singularity University, which seeks to educate a new generation of leaders in technologies that will exponentially advance human capability in years to come.

So did anything come out of it? Well, Shaker got funded, IDEATE is still going and people there still have ideas, and now we have sherpas, Sherpa Ventures, Caravancicle, ironic real estate sales, real hotels, ironic AirBnB sales, real AirBnB sales, real gasoline sales, and a dedicated Burning Man staffer to manage the booming new market segment of Commodification Camps.

It seems that the starry eyed young Millenials see Burning Man as the next breeding ground for their commercially questionable deals, while the Baby Boomers who back them provide the financial clout and ostensible gravitas to underpin their shenanigans.

I believe the children are our future. Teach them well, and let them lead the way. From Peninsula Press:

The need for collaboration with the younger generation of burners was clear to Goodell, especially as Burning Man moves from being for-profit to nonprofit. The work to become a nonprofit organization by 2013 has been ongoing for two years, according to Goodell.

Serving the public good in this age of digital technology and rapid communication, she said, requires the input of the millennials, who have what Goodell called an entrepreneurial spirit and a thirst for sharing ideas. They’re also the ones who are representing more and more of the Burning Man population each year. In 2011, almost half of Burning Man participants were under 30, according to the Black Rock City Census.

Larry Harvey is in his sixties; Goodell just turned 50. She said the founders should look to hire young people, and young people should step up and “infiltrate the organization and be ready to take things over…and change the world.”

Goodell described Kittay as “not unlike Larry.” She called them both “pied pipers,” saying that, although neither is likely to be “the first one to hammer up a tent stake,” they both “can get really enthusiastic around ideas, and then people want to gather around and help.” 

…Goodell issued a caveat concerning IDEATE and the millennial entrepreneurs as a group: They will be given more influence in the organization only if they do something with all their ideas. They need to maintain momentum and prove themselves as able to make it happen, rather than just talk about it, she said.

After the desert festival, which is held from late August to early September, Kittay traveled with Harvey and Goodell to Turkey, where they considered ancient history and its ties to modern life and talked about ways to make global expansion a reality.

There is talk of bringing Burning Man ambassadors to design projects and businesses across the world; holding urban and rural retreats in addition to the existing “regional burns,” or smaller-scale festivals; creating a social network for burners; crowd-funding design endeavors and sharing technologies that will help the world utilize some of Burning Man’s principles as tools, such as “radical inclusion” and “leave no trace behind.”

…Traditionally the project has been “below the radar,” said Kittay. But now is the time that Burning Man is ready to reveal itself as more than just “electronic, dubstep, naked—whatever associations that people have had superficially with it, and move into much more the space of what it truly is at its core,” he said. That core, according to Kittay, is built around “the philosophical principles of collaboration and of incubating human culture and community and experience.”

Although the organization as a whole supports change, some staff members have been a bit hesitant to make any big leaps, including Harvey himself…As the project expands globally into “a capitalist world,” Kittay cautioned, “it could so quickly lose its essence.”

…Goodell calls this moment pivotal. “There’s before IDEATE, and there’s after IDEATE, and then there’s 2013,” she said.

So, Burning Man’s Director starts a multi-million dollar Commodification Camp, employs sherpas, who are terribly mistreated. Burning Man’s Social Alchemist brings his VC mentor to Burning Man to do deals; after doing a big deal at Burning Man, the VC starts a venture called Sherpa. The big money behind Sherpa Ventures is also the big money behind AirBnB, who launched their product into Burning Man this year and directly employ two of BMOrg’s Board of Directors. Sherpa Ventures sees hospitality entrepreneurs as the new future trend to back.

The bottom line? Plug-n-Play is here to stay. Rather than being a fringe practice at Burning Man, it seems that this is BMOrg’s grand philosophical vision for the next century of Burns. Plug-n-play is what will attract all the New York and London moneyed set, who they need for The Project. Is it their money, their minds, or their souls that Hellco BMOrg are most interested in capturing?

Sherpa Ventures, Pied Piper, Tech Crunch Disrupt, Elon Musk…Burning Man IS Silicon Valley…the coincidences continue. The invisible guiding hand of Total Randomness strikes again. Just remember, sheeple, there’s no such thing as conspiracies, they’re merely theories made up on the Internet. No-one in history has ever been part of any kind of plot. No politician has ever lied. Eat your GMO food, drink your fluoride water, and jab yourselves with all the vaccines you can get your hands on, it’s great. The government really cares, that’s why it’s called the Affordable Care Act.

C’mon Millenials! Save Burning Man from losing its essence as it expands globally into a capitalist world. It’s a do-ocracy…so just fucking do it already.

Please.

CBS News did a video story on “Silicon Valley Elite Accused of Ruining Burning Man”. Larry insists that they’re not, that people have been saying “Burning Man is ruined” since the beginning, and in fact every demographic migration enriches the culture. So the culture should be awesome in the future, once politicians, Broners, and Safari tourists fill the spots formerly held by the artists and techies. It seems this Sherpa idea is a real drawcard for Virgins.

The Balinese-style Ohm Kar, from Laguna Beach, debuted at Caravansary. photo: Herald Sun

The Herald Sun is a daily tabloid newspaper in my old hometown of Melbourne, Australia. It’s the Aussie equivalent of the New York Post or the Daily Mail – funnily enough, all three publications are owned by Rupert Murdoch.

They’ve published a pretty comprehensive story “Behind the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada Desert“. Here are a few highlights:

You may think the logistical task of ordering that amount of people into a temporary city impossible and, it probably would be, were this not Burning Man.

This is where the event’s 10 principles kick in, drawn up by Harvey in 2004 as “a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it has organically developed since inception”. Or “to make sense of the s–tshow”, as one veteran volunteer told me.

…And it is like a dream. There are jaw-dropping moments, and then there’s the first night you walk out on to the playa. It’s a 360-degree assault on all the senses, a beautiful fusion of childlike wonder and adult ingenuity, a psychedelic playground for grown-ups. You can easily spot the “virgins”. They’re the ones staring in wonder at the bicycle perfectly customised to look like a wooly mammoth, jumping clear as a cupcake-shaped mutant vehicle whizzes past or expressing surprise as a passer by offers them a free mojito

…Those wishing to bring a mutant vehicle or art car must apply months in advance and only about half are approved.

A high level of mutation is encouraged and Tall Neil (his playa name), a Vancouver-based Burner and creative director of The Bleachers art car, said there were about 40 base principles to be met.

“It has to take 15,000 pounds of people jumping up and down and also drive comfortably at 5m/ph for extended periods, through the desert, in 40C or zero,” he said.

“I also think one of the specifications is, ‘if 20 monkeys on acid attacked it, it has to be somewhat acid-attack-by-monkey proof’.”

photo: Stuart Walmsley/Herald Sun

Tall Neil seemed to nail the juxtaposition with a comparison to another civilisation that went down in a blaze of glory 1500 years ago.

“I try to never forget that what we’re doing right now is arguably the most gluttonous party in the history of humanity, it’s like right before the fall of Rome,” he said. “I think when we look back on this in a couple of hundred years, they’re going to say what the hell? Are you sh–ing me? Climate change was doing what? There was a billion people every day that didn’t have access to fresh water? And I just shot fresh water out of an water gun on an art car that’s blowing diesel driving around the desert with strippers – virtually – on acid.”

But the natural high of making people laugh with his commentary and being able to release the “inner clown” he suppresses for 51 weeks of the year is what brought Tall Neil back for his eighth burn.

photo: Stuart Walmsley/Herald Sun

…events such as Burning Seed and Afrikaburn, which attracted 7000 participants to a location 300km north of Cape Town this year, is where Burning Man itself is devoting most of its resources.

“Expansion is the future,” said spokesman Jim Graham, better known on the playa as Ron John. “Burning Man has reorganised itself as a non-profit entity to be able to better support the growth around the world. We’ve got 220 representatives in 40 countries and they conduct at least 65 burn-type events every year.”

“The founders now are getting older and they’re looking at what the legacy is they’ll leave behind,” Graham said. “What they’re really focusing on now is this international growth. Can people take those 10 principles of building community, gifting, art and spread it?”

…in other ways Burning Man is a reflection of many problems we are failing to address as a society. This is more apparent late in the week, when everything seems to be on fire, including the giant man that cost about $460,000 to construct. Critics feel this flagrant display of excess reflects our failure to move away from a disposable economy and is hardly the action of a responsible and sustainable community. Burning Man can be beautiful, but it’s undoubtedly debaucherous, and some insist it has come to represent what is rotten in our culture.

“Burning Man doesn’t teach you how to live outside the box, it just shows you that there is a box” 

photo: Stuart Walmsley/Herald Sun

Read the full story at the Herald Sun.

Art’s in the 10 Principles? That’s news to me. Hey, if Burning Man’s official spokesman says it, it must be true…right?

[Update 10/13/14 6:20pm]

Stu Walmsley, the writer and photographer of this piece, has contacted us to point us to his blog, where you can find:

some reflections post-Burning Man (also a good read)

the unedited version of this story

I asked Stu if he captured any photos of the “Goon of Fortune” installation, but sadly he didn’t. If anyone managed to, please share.

Festpop has an article by Karli Jaenike about how Burning Man is changing the world. I’m re-blogging it here so we can then discuss it. Emphasis ours.

re-blogged from FestPop

It’s no secret that most festivals are a huge moneymaker for large corporations. North American companies are projected to spend $1.23 billion to sponsor music venues, festivals and tours in 2014. That’s a 4.4 percent increase from 2013, according to IEG, LLC. IEG also charted out the most active companies sponsoring music festivals in North America with Anheuser-Busch topping the list alongside PepsiCo, Inc. and Coca-Cola Company. Microsoft Corp. (in what’s said to be the company’s first deal with a non-endemic property) sponsored Coachella Music Festival on behalf of its OneDrive storage service, while Samsung and Honda are among the sponsors for the Austin City Limits Music Festival. These corporations will undoubtedly receive a huge return on investment given the growing popularity of music and arts festivals around the world.

Burning Man, an annual arts festival and temporary community based around radical art, radical self-expression and radical self-reliance, stands in stark contrast. Participants who attend this event provide everything they will need for their weeklong adventure except for the main infrastructure. Infrastructure includes necessities like port-o-potties, medical tents, the effigy (which is burnt to the ground at the end of the festival), center camp, land and insurance. Organizers and participants intentionally succeed in creating a setting where decommodification and gifting are part of the core principles of the event.

Decommodification means absolutely no corporate sponsorships of the event, no advertising allowed, and definitely no transactions. Commodification is viewed as exploitation of the Burning Man culture and is frowned upon by most people involved, while at the festival. Many burners (people in the Burning Man community) believe that in many developed countries commodification has gone too far, has reduced people to abstractions and is taking away part of what makes us simple and human. Members of the community are very protective of this principle and will try their best to wipe all corporate influence from the event. This includes covering any visible brand names on the side of box trucks, bicycles, and… well, anything. People at Burning Man want to forget about branding, business, money, and the greed that comes along with it… and just for one week create a space where our humanity is not divided into “quantifiable bits suitable for trading”. What do people do when they want to exchange goods or services? Enter “gifting”.

Gifting is the act of giving a gift out of the goodness of ones heart, and not expecting anything in return. The Principles Guidelines page of their website says that, “Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.” Gifting is such, such an important part of what makes Black Rock City (the city created during Burning Man) such a magical place. When gifting is the currency, rather than money or bartering, a strong sense of community evolves. Think about how you feel when you receive an unconditional gift. You feel an instant connection to that person, and a sense of gratitude. You feel loved, because you know that that person is giving you the gift because they appreciate you as a person, not because they are expecting anything in return. It also feels satisfying to give unconditional gifts. “’Gifting with nothing in return’ I feel, is impossible. Only those who have not felt the satisfaction in making someone’s day [with a gift] could say there is nothing given in return” said Domo Delacy, a veteran burner. Domo has received and seen people receive all sorts of amazing gifts on the playa. “I’ve been gifted tickets. I’ve also gifted a couple back to will call. You know someone loves you when they gift you a ticket” said Delacy. “My good friend Capt. Jim was gifted an art car! Under the Oasis was a 67 GMC with brand new running gear… is that a good one or what? Another friend got a naked plane ride.”

Playa gifts can come in many forms, which don’t necessarily have to be physical. “[I received] the gift of expansion and compassion from my fellow camp mates my virgin burn. They taught me what the 10 Principles were with love and compassion,” said Starfire Serendipity Jones, a 10-year burner. Other gifts have included, “bacon, grilled cheese, ice cold melon and fresh espresso from the coffee stand across from camp (fucking heaven), homemade absinthe and banana booze… YUMMMM!” Jones goes on to explain, “I loved & shared many things openly in love [on the Playa]. It was primarily things I could use on Playa or things I “needed”. The people that ‘get it’ are so free and in-flow that we share with out even thinking, it is just part of us. The most beautiful thing is that there is no “us and them”. No scarcity, just sharing… because it is truly a gift to the giver to learn that frame of mind. Giving something just to give it. Not because they expect something in return.” She says, “It breaks the old adage of ‘you can’t get something for nothing’. It also creates a new paradigm for being in the universe and here on terra firma. That off Playa we can live like that in our daily lives. There is enough for everyone to share.”

Another way gifting enhances the experience at Burning Man is that it acts as social lubricant. It gives you an excuse to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation when you otherwise wouldn’t. Walking through the streets of Black Rock City it’s common to be pulled aside and invited to partake in a cold adult beverage, a game, a tarot card reading, a meal, or a hug. That underlying fear of rejection that most of us unconsciously harbor isn’t a factor at Burning Man because it’s unlikely that anyone would reject a heartfelt gift. Burners feel safe and confident interacting and building connections with others through this system that serves to further strengthen the sense of community.

“The Burning Man Community is […] inspired to create, participate, and celebrate in the world without many of the conventional restrictions of the modern paradigm,” says Zac Cirivello, Burning Man Media Relations Coordinator. “Through exploring the values of our 10 Principles, the Burning Man Community has become a “do-ocracy” where the individual is empowered to directly participate in their surroundings to make the world the way that they want it to be, whether that world is our longtime home of Black Rock City, or the urban environment in which they live.”

This is where radical self-reliance plays an important part. While food, drink, shelter, and friendship are given freely in most cases at Burning Man, all participants are expected to also provide enough for themselves for the week (and maybe enough to share!) Those who show up expecting gifts, or expecting to be ‘taken care of’ are frowned upon. Buying or trading at Burning Man is also extremely taboo, and those who attempt to are reprimanded. “A critical part of the gift economy is how it differs from a barter economy. A barter is still a direct transaction: it assigns a value to an object or act and in turn commodifies it. A “thing” will still then have a “value”. At the core of bartering is the attempt to still create an exchange of equal value. This is the same as “default” world transactions but only with cash removed from the equation,” says Cirivello. “Gifting, on the other hand, is an unconditional offering – an offering with no expectation of return. This removes the assignment of traditional object value (or “price”) and instead puts the emphasis or value on the act of generosity itself. It becomes part of a circular abundance loop where Burners provide for others without the expectation of return because they know that others are there to support them in kind.”

In reality, the gifting economy at Burning Man is not an economy at all, and is somewhat of an oxymoron. Economies are generally self-sustaining and generate wealth for a population; this is not the goal at Black Rock City. The gifting economy at Burning Man is more of a “gift culture”. A gift culture that actually supports and depends on the economy outside of Burning Man. Zac Cirivello states, “While the culture of Burning Man puts a lot of emphasis on our principals of gifting and decommodification, that does not make it a world entirely free of commerce. We have some very real costs associated with the creation of Black Rock City each year including permitting fees, staff support, and a long list of resources required such as vehicles, porto potties, lumber, signage, fuel, etc.” The festival stimulates Nevada’s economy by contributing millions of dollars to rent the land and use the facilities for the festival. Additionally, visiting burners stimulate the economy from which they buy the food, drink, and materials to make their Playa gifts. They also support the economy of the cities surrounding Black Rock City when they purchase their last minute items, gas, and food before the burn.

This culture works at Burning Man because the community makes it so. All participants willingly take part in gifting because they understand it’s part of what makes Burning Man different from everywhere else. There is no need for organizers to enforce or police a gifting economy, because the people uphold these values on their own. “One of the great things about the Burning Man Community is that Burners are incredibly passionate about preserving the integrity of our culture. We, and BMORG, do not have to run around policing our values because they are ones that are strongly shared by a vast majority of citizens in Black Rock City,” says Zac Cirivello. “The gifting economy is a demonstration of a shift in conventional thinking away from a “scarcity mindset” towards an “abundance mindset” – where people recognize that they have enough and want to put their energy towards a betterment of the community as opposed to a betterment only of the self.”

While creating a temporary utopian community in which a gifting culture flourishes is an accomplishment in itself, Burning Man and it’s supporters are always looking for ways to share this abundance mindset with the masses. “There is certainly a lot of potential for the Gifting Economy to start impacting the ‘default’ world, and there have been a number of projects that are looking to spearhead that change,” says Cirivello. “One of those projects is [freespace], an experimental project looking to see what is possible with the gift of a physical space to a community, and [this] is also the recent recipient of a financial grant from Burning Man.” [freespace] began in June 2013, and started with a two-story building that was donated to San Francisco’s creative community for a dollar. Since it’s inception, [freespace] has hosted over 300 free events including free bike shares, maker classes for people in homeless shelters, and a community garden.

Nation wide corporations are catching onto the popularity of the gifting mindset, with Panera Bread launching “Panera Cares”. This campaign consists of opening “pay what you can” Panera Community Cafés in Saint Louis, Dearborn, Portland, Chicago, and Boston. These cafes offer dignified dining experiences, without judgment to customers who may not be able to pay. While companies like this are obviously getting publicity and public favor in return for their gifts, it’s definitely a start!

The Internet has made it easy to gift in modern society with online resources such as WikiLinks, Wikimedia Commons, and Creative Commons. People from around the world share their functional work, artwork, or other creative content with others. Participants can use and benefit from shared work, study this work, make and distribute shared content, or build upon shared content to create something new. On the Internet one can also find free and open-source software, free or donation based music, art, and collaborative works. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization founded by Lawrence Lessig, has released several copyright-licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights to their content they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators. Many times, the only stipulation involved with the use of this shared content is that works created from said content must also be shared freely.

Burning Man Organization spreads the message that a gift culture promotes through its many regional burns. “The Burning Man Regional Network is a global network of Burning Man inspired events that help to promote the values and ethos of Black Rock City throughout the world,” says Zac Cirivello. “One of the things required to be included as an Official Regional Event is having an event that embodies the 10 principles, including that of gifting. In much the same way that folks look out for and support each other in Black Rock City, the participants of these events have the opportunity to practice a decommodified existence for a few days at a time and participate in a world where generosity and unconditional gifting are core components.” More than 75 regional burns are held throughout the world at different times of the year. These events change the lives of people who may or may not have been to the “big burn” yet. Regional burns allow people to experience the selfless beauty of a Gifting Economy, and the freedom of decommodification if only for a long weekend. Many burners are inspired to attend the larger Burning Man in Nevada after years of experiencing the positive affects of these local burns on their communities. Zac Cirivello says that one goal of the regional events is to share the Principles with others “Through these events, as with Burning Man, folks are taking the spirit of gifting home with them and promote the global spread of the Gifting Economy.”

Would a Gifting Economy be sustainable in everyday culture? Society would need to experience a major shift in attitude. Many say humans are inherently competitive, egotistical, and even greedy. Problems could arise with determination of value: what may be valuable and a wonderful gift to one person may not be as valued by another. Humanity would have to get past their learned ideals of worth, value, and fairness in order to genuinely place others before themselves. While this kind of economy might seem idealistic to most, the idea is very real for many. The Internet is full of writings on the subject, many of which call for major change. However you stand on the subject, there is no denying that what the Burning Man Organization creates out in that Nevada desert is a beautiful thing.

Back to Burners.Me writing now.

I have no problem with the ideals of Gifting and Decommodification. They’re part of what makes Burning Man special. As the article says, it’s hardly a sustainable economy, it’s more of a culture.

What I do have a problem with, is BMOrg claiming credit for the effort and expenditure of others, and telling the media they’ve done something which they haven’t.

The mention of [freespace] here particularly rankles me.

Burning Man takes in $30 million a year from all the things it sells: tickets, vehicle passes, ice, coffee, scarves, bus rides, aircraft landing fees, gasoline, propane, calendars, photos, movies, soundtracks. They also accept donations, which they accumulate in the bank account of their tax-free non-profit subsidiaries. These 501(c)3 non-profits are required to file public financial statements, called IRS Form 990. You can view them at Guidestar.

From the most recent filings (2012):

Burning Man Project took in $591,672 of donations, kept $368,249, and paid $36,378 in grants. They spent $259,925 on overheads.

Black Rock Arts Foundation took $621,359 of donations, kept $560,917, and paid $114,449 in grants. They spent $477,525 on overheads.

The two organizations have now been merged, to create a tax-exempt powerhouse with about a million bucks in the bank.

How much has Burning Man actually given to [freespace]? $0.

I can’t speak to what Burning Man has done to support the Panera bakeries, but I bet that’s $0 too. The idea was shelved in mid-2013. I can definitely speak about [freespace], though.

[freespace] is not actually an organization you can donate to, it is a project of Reallocate – a registered 501(c)3 non-profit started by Burners. Reallocate is a great organization run on a shoestring budget. It’s a genuine charity, they definitely don’t hoard money from donors. When Dr Mike North founded Reallocate, I was the first person he asked to be on its Board of Directors. I am the largest financial contributor to Reallocate. I am also the second largest financial contributor to [freespace]. As well as a pretty significant amount of money, I have given both organizations time – my own, and that of my employees. I have provided expensive resources like decked out shipping containers to support their projects, and covered the related logistics costs. I have also promoted both charities on this web site.

ekovillages.com up-cycled art containers at [freespace]‘s Mission St location. Art by Ian Ross Gallery

Some of these containers have been to Burning Man too. After we deployed them here, [freespace] got a commendation letter from the San Francisco Mayor’s office, and a trip to the White House.

What did BMOrg do, in a year+ of [freespace]? Nothing. Nada. No checks. What little promotion they did, was of themselves first, and the charities they claim to support second. Here’s the entire extent of it:

Global [freespace] movement to hack the World Cup

How [freespace] challenges Burning Man’s emergent principles

Burnerhack at [freespace] SF?

Burners Discuss Community Building in San Mateo

Their story about “emergent principles” sums the situation up well:

In San Francisco Burner circles, close to the source, I often hear the Burner’s Dream expressed thusly: Our dream is to bring the principles we embody out on the playa back to the default world….Sounds like that Burner’s Dream come to life, right? Naturally, Burning Man got involved. But what does that even mean? Who is this “Burning Man?” Is it the Burning Man organization? is it the fledgling non-profit Burning Man Project? Is it Burning Man participants acting of their own accord?

Yes.

...[the BurnerHack] was organized by Micah Daigle, a Burner who travels in circles close to the Org, but who isn’t officially involved. He’s a participant. He’s also one of the creators of BurnerMap, a Facebook app that allows you to create and print maps of where your friends are camping, and arguably one of the most successful participant-driven Burning Man projects in the event’s history.

BurnerMap has tens of thousands of users. It’s a participant-driven project on the scale of the whole event itself. And yet the Org is not involved. That can make the relationship weird at times. That weirdness extends to physical events like BurnerHack, and even to independent cultural movements like [freespace] itself.

And as Burning Man tries to grow into a year-round culture, we have to figure it out.

…when BurnerMap has reached out to the Org for help, asking to pre-fill the map with official placement data, for instance, the efforts have fizzled out. Priorities are so different on either side of the bottom-up, top-down divide that it can hinder collaboration.

“We need the Org for Burning Man to exist,” Micah says, “but is it Burning Man? No. Burning Man is an emergent event.”

The challenge of figuring out how capital-B Burning Man can be productively involved with emergent events like BurnerHack and [freespace] is the domain of the Burning Man Project, the new, nonprofit side of the Org that aims to be the future of year-round Burning Man culture.

Its representative most involved with [freespace] is James Hanusa, who is responsible for the Project’s new initiatives. He knows the [freespace] organizers and believes in them, and he was Micah’s closest point of contact in the planning of BurnerHack. He knows the Project should support initiatives like these, but he says, “We’re still figuring out how.”

The will is there, but the way is not yet clear. The Burning Man Project is busy enough figuring out its own job, so working with spontaneously organized participants is yet another step ahead. 

Here we can see that even by their own admission, BMOrg don’t provide much, if any, help.

The above was written in June 2013. Since then, [freespace] extended its initial lease for 3 months – not for $1, and funded by us – then relocated from Mission St to Market St, where it ran for a further 6 months this year. It closed in August, before Burning Man. So what have BMOrg been doing? Still figuring it out, a year and a half later? How much time do they need to figure out how to write a check to a charity that they tell the media they’re supporting?

We provided a comprehensive overview of everything the Burning Man Project has done since it was announced in early 2011 in The Art of Giving: it’s pretty disappointing, especially given the amount of money they’ve raised in that time, and how much they’ve spent on lawyers and accountants.

It seems like one thing they did figure out, is how to take credit for [freespace] and Reallocate in the press and in their panel discussions.

Here’s some of Burners.Me’s promotion of [freespace]:

[Temporary Autonomous Zone] – Proof the Model Still Works

Bring Something New Out Into The World

Collaborative Coding in [freespace]: Burnerhack

Burners Collaborate to Bridge SF’s Homeless/Tech Divide

Civic Responsibility Hacks the White House

From Central Market to the White House: Taking Burner Values To The Top [freespace] live 7am PST

What’s missing from these stories, compared with Burning Man’s coverage? You won’t find any examples of me talking about how great I am for donating my time and money to these charities, or taking any credit for their efforts. Indeed, I’m only bringing it up now because I am sick and tired of Burning Man boasting to the media about things they haven’t done, while hoarding the cash that was genuinely given to them in good faith by their donors.

I used to drink the Burning Man flavored Kool-Aid, before I did the homework, crunched the numbers, and compared their statements with the truth. Calling their secretive, for-profit royalty company Decommodification LLC was the last straw for me – they’re laughing at us, all the way to the bank. It came as no great surprise to Burners.Me that some of BMOrg’s Board of Directors are now selling Commodification Camps and making commercial videos at Burning Man to promote their brands.

I asked [freespace] founder Mike Zuckerman for comment, but he couldn’t be bothered to respond. Probably because he owes me money. Reallocate’s CFO confirmed that neither they nor [freespace] have ever received any grant from Burning Man. He believes Zuckerman earned $2000 personally for working for the Burning Man Project, but the guy appears to have pocketed the money himself, since it has not gone through the charity’s books.

Please, Burning Man. These are charities. Non-profits, trying to help the world. They need our money and support, not just to be used for shameless self-promotion. If you want to use them as examples of how your culture is saving the world…then put your hands in your oh-so-deep pockets, and write a fucking check. Don’t keep the money piling up in your tax-free bank accounts, while telling us how great you are, how you’re all about Decommodification and Gifting. Decommodification doesn’t mean earning royalties, Gifting requires you to actually give more than you take, and Radical Self Expression shouldn’t mean suing other charities.

What else are you doing with that big pile of cash we all gave you? Sending your founders around the world for speaking engagements? Is that what the half a million dollars a year of travel expenses are for?

I know there’s nothing in the Ten Principles about honesty, integrity, conflicts of interest, or the truth. But there should be – some of us do care about these things, more than we care about the almighty dollar. Deceit is not cool, and justifying it in the name of charities that you only pretend to support is pathetic. The Burner community are amazingly talented, creative, and generous – we want to associate ourselves with positive, uplifting things. Lead by example, don’t let Burners take the lead and the risk and spend all the cash, while you try to claim the credit. Step up and put your money where your mouth is.

Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong, and Burning Man can produce some evidence of their financial contributions to [freespace], Reallocate, and Panera Bakeries. I’d happily eat my words. The ball’s in your court, BMOrg, and our money is in your pocket. Just Do It.

Just when you thought the Burning Man virus couldn’t infect any more mainstream vertical markets, we get World Series of Poker/World Poker Tour champion Antonio Esfandiari (aka @magicantonio) writing about it for Bluff magazine.

re-blogged from Bluff.com (emphasis ours):

Poker Like a Rockstar … Burning Man 2014

Antonio’s annual quest for dirty love

I’ve been a “burner” going on four years. It’s one week a year; one week that I that I can’t stop talking about for the remaining 51 weeks, each year outshining the last. This year was exceptional. I did it all: explored, loved, laughed loud, and best of all, cried. I cried hard, cried sad, cried happy and cried often. I went full throttle this year and got the full experience.

What is Burning Man? Burning Man is many things: it’s an idea, a city, a festival, a utopian community set to the backdrop of a psychedelic Daliesque desert nowhere. The Black Rock Desert, a perfect canvas for the myriad of mind-expanding artistic expressions that it houses. Burning Man is what the world would be like if we could start with a clean slate and create a society where all humans were treated as ends in themselves, free to take their creativity in every direction. Squeeze-in sublime sunrises and sunsets, gladiatorial Mad Max Thunderdome battles to lust-filled orgy domes, full-blown dance clubs with headliner DJs and jaw-dropping lasers and pyrotechnics, restaurants, monumental temples, bars, yoga classes, lectures, even civic institutions like hospitals and post offices to name a few. How is all this manifested? Ten simple principles oozed by all the attendees:

• Radical Inclusion
• Gifting
• Decommodification
• Radical Self-reliance
• Radical Self-expression
• Communal Effort
• Civic Responsibility
• Leaving No Trace
• Participation
• Immediacy

I could write a manifesto explaining them all, so I won’t spend time on them aside from the one I believe helps set the tone for the whole burn: Gifting.

Aside from RV servicing and ice/coffee at the main camp whose proceeds get donated, currency and capitalism is almost non-existent at Burning Man. It’s communal living in action; everything is provided FOR the community BY the community. Although this would have made Karl Marx proud, the impetus of this is not the rise of the working class, but the power of love. Objects were not worshiped but given freely, and strangely, the only thing that mattered was the happiness of others. Naturally, some give more than others. The first year I attended, I took more than gave. I was bitten by the love bug, and all I wanted to do was to give back to this rare, beautiful gem of human potential. Every following year, I didn’t make the same mistake: I gave much more than I took, and it felt great. I can’t imagine why someone would do otherwise. Burning Man is NOT a vacation. It’s hard work — a labor of love; people come back, year-after-year, enduring the sweltering desert heat, the freezing nights, inhaling and getting caked-on with that playa dust for what? To witness human potential, our potential. Kindness is everywhere, inspiring us to pass it forward.

Is it like this for the 70,000 that attend? Yes, with the standard deviation of only a handful of a few confused bad apples. Otherwise, what’s the point? If you want to just camp, go somewhere more hospitable; if you want to party, just go to Vegas. To many that are not in attendance, Burning Man is just a place to take drugs and get naked. But to those in attendance, it’s a place where you can be who you want to be and do what you want to do, without judgment, a beautiful opportunity for freedom. It has a habit of unleashing latent creativity, unlocking the love bottled-up in everyone. For example, our camp has grown from just four of us four years ago to 60+ this year. I believe that out of the 40 or so virgins we had this year that 37 of them said it was the best experience of their life. That is pretty strong.

You get Dirty

Burning Man is not for the anal retentive clean freak. You are going to get filthy. My advice: just let go. Some can’t handle it and can’t stay for more than a few days. I am a full eight day kinda guy. Every year, I fly into Reno with a few of my campmates on Saturday, and drive the RV 10 hours the following day, when the gates officially open. Waiting there in line every year, I wonder why I don’t just fly right in as I wait. Yes, you can fly RIGHT into the temporary Burning Man “airport.” And every year, after the burn is over, I realize why I endure the wait: the camaraderie.

You see, we all suffer together. It results in the kind of bond the Vietnam vets experienced as a result of their joint suffering. As with a soldier, you would never desert a fellow burner. It’s all for one, and one for all, all day, every day. One day the toilet got clogged in the RV resulting in a putrid stench permeating the air, day-in and day-out. To make things worse, the AC conked-out on us and, over the next few days, the carpet within the RV chemically bonded with the playa dust (the dirt in the desert that has a tendency of electroplating everything you own.) Our RV made a pig sty look antiseptic. It was miserable. At one point, in abject disgust and desperation, in front of my RV mates Jason Koon, Jeff Gross, and John Tabatabai, I got on all fours and started wiping the bathroom floor with a Clorox disinfecting wipe. John went apeshit and started cackling. Never in his in his wildest dreams would he have imagined seeing me scrubbing the floors of a shit-infested RV. The end of the burn turned our war stories into good memories.

With all that, it’s so fucking awesome. I can confidently say that this year’s Burning Man is the overall No. 1 experience I have ever had. Before that, last year’s. Take my advice — GET YOURSELF there, buy your tickets now, be open to it, let it go and be prepared to become a better person.

Not sure if it’s worth going into six figures of student loan debt, if this is the kind of education you’re going to get. They think “The Man” is a camp!

How can a non-profit festival based on Gifting and Decommodification, be an example for Business School students? The mainstream are bending over backwards to link themselves to Burning Man, now the shark has been jumped. I’m sure these students will have no problem paying $650 for tickets.

re-blogged from Wharton Magazine:

What Burning Man and B-School Have in Common

Though it’s November and fall is in full swing, I’m devoting today’s post to Burning Man, the late-summer ritual that draws over 60,000 participants to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada every year.

For the uninitiated, here’s how Burning Man works: Each year, participants build an entire city from scratch and live in it for a week. People work together to build elaborate camps and villages—their themes and functions varying widely. You can find open mic lounges, yoga and meditation spaces, collaborative art installations and just about anything else imaginable.

While Burning Man is unique on many levels—it is the self-described “annual art event and temporary community based on radical self-expression and self-reliance in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada”—one of its most fascinating rules is that nothing can be bought or sold, with the exceptions of ice and coffee. No one receives any financial compensation for his or her efforts.

Then, at the end of the week, all the camps are burned or completely dismantled. One of the rules of Burning Man is to leave the desert exactly as you found it.

On the surface, it would seem that there is very little overlap between the cultures of Burning Man and business school. The former’s participants are largely stereotyped as hippies and artists running off to escape the constraints of society for a week, while MBAs are seen as leaders of the types of industry and societal structures that Burning Man participants are trying to flee.

However, a closer look reveals that there is more in common between the two than one would think. In fact, aspiring MBAs can learn valuable lessons from the Burning Man community:

A camp at Burning Man. Photo credit: Jennifer Morrow, Wikimedia Commons.

1. Self-sufficiency is key.

Because Burning Man has no vendors (there’s no money, remember?), attendees must make sure they come in with ample provisions for the week—food, water, gear and clothing—enough for 100- degree days and near-freezing nights. Participants must be prepared for anything.

Similarly, many MBA grads describe the time they spent in B-school as the two most intense years of their lives. Admissions committees are well aware of this. When reviewing applications, they will look for candidates whose stories demonstrate resiliency. They will also want to ensure that you have a realistic understanding of the drive and dedication it will take to succeed in their program.

2. Your leadership skills will be tested.

Time and again, aspiring MBAs tell me that one of the main reasons they want to get in is so they can improve and refine their leadership skills. Burning Man is nothing if not a week-long leadership intensive.  Consider this: How can you get people to work for you when you can’t offer them the usual forms of compensation like money and promotions? How can you get them to build something that will be completely dismantled at the end of the week?

The camps and projects that succeed at Burning Man have one thing in common: leaders who clearly express their vision and create a positive shared experience for their fellow participants.

The Burning Man. Photo credit: Aaron Logan, Wikimedia Commons.

3. Teamwork is key.

At the same time, it’s important to know when to step away from leading and become part of the team. That’s essential to the Burning Man experience, where the point isn’t simply to build your own structure but to participate in others’ camps and villages as well. Understanding the importance of collaboration and teamwork is vital to growing and learning at B-school.  Make sure that your application contains examples of your ability to play both roles—leader and team member—effectively.

4. Creativity counts.

At Burning Man, people express their creativity through their appearance and by being problem solvers—for example, figuring out how to anchor installations against high desert winds. While you won’t have too many opportunities to wear tutus and animal costumes at B-school, you will be asked to apply creative thought to problems. The admission committee will look for evidence in your essays and your interview responses that show you have a unique perspective that will add something new to the classroom.

5. Be an individual but participate in the collective.

Every year, Burning Man has a theme. Participants can interpret these themes however they like, and part of the fun is seeing the variety of installations and spaces that spring up according to themes like “Rites of Passage” and “American Dream.”

Like Burning Man, all MBA programs have their own unique culture. The key for your application is to speak to the individual attributes that make you a great candidate, conveys your understanding of the school’s culture and reveals how you will be a great fit there.

The Simpsons broke burningman.com, just from its East Coast showing. It’s been down for at least 3 hours now: kind of surprising that BMOrg didn’t have someone working Sunday night in anticipation that something like this might happen.

The Simpsons has been rating very well this season, their recent Family Guy crossover was the #1 non-sports program on TV with 4.5% of households watching it.

The event is presented as a viable alternative for family camping on Labor Day weekend, and relatively easy to get to. $200 is mentioned as a ticket price for next year.

I think it’s fair to expect a massive increase in ticket demand for 2015, and a massive increase in the number of safari tourists who want to take selfies at Burning Man and cross it off their bucket list. “Oh you went to that thing on the Simpsons?”

I predict a ticket price increase, perhaps to $500 or more. The vehicle tax will stay, and may also be increased.

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that the 40%+ Virgins who will be encouraged by this mainstream advertising will all learn our values and read the 20-page Survival Guide before they show up. It’s time to consider some changes to the event, such as more recycling stations and paid clean-up crews. Otherwise, the DPW Restoration volunteer team are just going to get saddled with the MOOP, like they were this year from Caravancicle/Lost Hotel, Gypsy Flower Power, and other camps.

Another consideration would be selling blinky lights at Center Camp. This is a safety issue. Let’s forget about this “all commerce is banned” charade, there were 45 licensed vendors this year. Everything from gasoline to energy drinks is for sale – not to mention AirBnB rooms and merchandise. Let’s banish darkwads, if we can.

We’ve heard a rumor – currently unconfirmed – that next year’s theme will be Circus-related. The last rumor we heard was that 2013 would be aliens, we were asked not to repeat that and we respected our source’s request. It turned out to be true when the Cargo Cult Man base was a giant UFO.

Circus seems appropriate, because Burning Man will now be full of clowns, party animals, and frat boy monkeys.

Without giving away too many spoilers, those who feel that there’s more to Burning Man than drugs and nudity will be disappointed with the way Burning Man Blazing Guy was portrayed in the episode. Conservative Marge is initially hesitant about the free-spirited event, until she is dosed with magic tea and starts tripping balls – then she loves it all. The aging baby boomers who fondly remember dropping acid in the Sixties will probably be driven to make Burning Man their next family camping destination. It’s surprising to see The Simpsons glorifying drug use in this way; it will only serve to reinforce the negative associations with Burning Man held by many in Defaultia. Disappointingly, there was nothing about any of the Principles. There were no sound camps, and absolutely no untz untz (EDM).

Pranking, shooting guns, tents flying away, dust storms, art cars, funky bicycles, costumes, giant sculptures, a long road trip through the desert to get there, drum circles, even fake Facebook accounts are all referenced.

I found the episode amusing, but not as funny as the earlier Malcolm in the Middle and South Park ones. I give it a 7/10.

Good luck getting tickets next year, Burners. I expect a brisk trade for the Commodification Camps and Donation tickets.

image: Bearman/Flickr (Creative Commons)

In the comments to our BMOrg Hath Spoken article, Burner Cooter raised an interesting point.

This is a slight tangent but the deal with the non profit status is really starting to irritate me as it seems to get inserted every time the ethics of the Borg comes into question. Being a nonprofit organization in no way makes any implications on the honesty or ethics of the company. All it means is the profits get reinvested in the company since there are no share holders. 99% of the time this mean profits get spent on the salaries and benefits of top executives. Some of the most unapologetically corrupt companies in the world are non profits. Think FIFA or the NFL. But every time the topic of ethics comes up it is subtly pointed out that the Borg is a non profit. It doesn’t mean anything.

Sorry to irritate you, Cooter. While your general point is technically correct, and “non-profit” can simply mean “tax dodge” rather than “charity”, for the specifics of the Burning Man Project we need to look at 2 things:

1. The ByLaws of the Burning Man Project

2. The Statements of the Founders about the transition to a non-profit.

The NFL, chaired by Roger Goodell (Marian’s cousin?) is an unincorporated 501(c)6 tax-exempt trade association, based in Washington, D.C. Its tax-free status is quite controversial. FIFA is incorporated in Switzerland. The Burning Man Project is a 501(c)3 California Public Benefit corporation. According to the IRS:

Organizations described in section 501(c)(3) are commonly referred to as charitable organizations… 

The organization must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests, and no part of a section 501(c)(3) organization’s net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.

1. From the ByLaws of the Burning Man Project

Article 1: “The principled means that serve our mission shall always be inherent in our goals and projects”

Article 5: “charitable purposes” gets mentioned twice.

6:00 & Ring Road “The Directors may not engage in or approve any activity that is inconsistent with the Ten Principles”

6:00 to 9:00 & Ring Road: Duty of the Directors

“Directors shall conduct themselves ethically”

8:30 & Decommodification : Philosophy Committee

“must operate in order to remain true to the Ten Principles…shall become binding on the operations of Burning Man Project”.

Their latest blog post tries to claim that the “Burning Man event” is different from the “Burning Man Project”, but if the “Burning Man Project” did wholly acquire “Black Rock City LLC” as they claimed at the start of 2014, this cannot be true and the event must be part of “the operations of Burning Man Project”.

Black Rock City, LLC, which operates the annual event in Nevada called “Burning Man”, became a fully owned subsidiary of the Burning Man Project as of January 1, 2014:

On December 27, 2013, the Burning Man Project Board of Directors voted to make Black Rock City LLC a subsidiary and is now the sole shareholder of the LLC, which will continue to manage the event in the desert. The transition became official January 1, 2014.

Of course, they may have pulled “the old bait and switch”, and told us that they had sold “the” LLC to BMP, but actually sold Black Rock City, LLC to someone else. There are a lot of LLCs floating around within this this corporate conglomerate, as well as many registered non-profits. But I’m more inclined to take their statement at face value, which means the Burning Man event is a solely owned subsidiary of the Burning Man Project.

image: Dru/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Other interesting clauses in the Bylaws refer to “non-voting observers” (Article 3, 6:30 & Inclusion), the right of the Founders to license the trademarks back to the group (Article 5, 1:00 & Center Camp), “a proposed transaction” (Article 5, 4:00 and Center camp), all kinds of allowable Real Estate transactions (Article 4, 10:00 & Center Camp) , Directors making money from the business via consulting, sale of goods and rent “at or below fair market value” (Article 5, 6:00 & Center Camp).

Despite Larry Harvey’s claims that the “10 Principles are just an ethos, not the 10 Commandments”, a Director can be removed “for cause” for failing to cure a breach of any one of the 10 Principles (article 6, page 12).

You read the Bylaws here.

2. Statements of the Founders

We’ve been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that this is more than just a tax dodge, because that’s how they sold it to us since the idea was introduced in 2011, and that’s how it was promoted in the movie produced by former Burning Man Director Chris Weitz, “Spark: A Burning Man Story”.

The Burning Man Project’s Mission and Vision certainly sound very altruistic:

Mission

The mission of the Burning Man Project is to facilitate and extend the culture that has issued from the Burning Man event into a larger world. This culture forms an integrated pattern of values, experience, and behavior: a coherent and widely applicable way of life. The survival and elaboration of this culture depend upon a cultivated capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.

Vision

The Burning Man Project will bring experiences to people in grand, awe-inspiring and joyful ways that lift the human spirit, address social problems and inspire a sense of culture, community and cultural engagement.

When they announced that their transition had been “fully completed”, they said:

The Burning Man Project is a public benefit organization, and our intention is to build the network of connectivity through relationships with individuals, organizations and government entities. We have great ambitions for what we sometimes refer to at HQ as a “100 year plan.” We’re a little over a quarter century into that plan… and our best days are still ahead.

We are restructuring some of our operations to strengthen our capacity to deliver on our ever-growing potential as a force for creativity and good in the world

Marian Goodell, Huffington Post March 4 2014:

“In our more exciting moments, any one of us who has been to Burning Man thinks it can change the world,” she added. “It brings people hope, and it makes people less afraid of others. It transcends religion and politics. It’s worth it to expose others to what we’ve learned from this cultural experience.”

Larry Harvey, New York Times August 28, 2011:

“We’re going to treat Burning Man like what it always should have been: not as a commodity, but as a gift“

Larry Harvey, Burning Blog:

Our mission has always been to serve the community, and a non-profit public benefit corporation is the most socially responsible option to ensure and protect the future of Burning Man

Scribe in SFBG, discussing “Spark: A Burning Man story”

More cynical burner veterans may have a few eye-rolling moments with this film and the portrayals of its selfless leadership. While the discussions of the ticket fiasco raised challenging issues within the LLC, its critics came off as angry and unreasonable, as if the new ticket lottery had nothing to do with the temporary, artificial ticket scarcity (which was alleviated by summer’s end and didn’t occur this year under a new and improved distribution system).

And when the film ends by claiming “the organization is transitioning into a nonprofit to ‘gift’ the event back to the community,” it seems to drift from overly sympathetic into downright deceptive, leaving viewers with the impression that the six board members are selflessly relinquishing the tight control they exercise over the event and the culture it has spawned.

Yet our interview with the LLC leadership shows that just isn’t true. If anything, the public portrayals that founder Larry Harvey made two years ago about how this transition would go have been quietly modified to leave these six people in control of Burning Man for the foreseeable future.

Larry Harvey, the New Yorker:

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

Here’s the official launch of the Burning Man Project on August 5, 2011. I was in the crowd that day, before I started this blog. I believed them to be genuine in what they said: “we want to help change lives”. Larry starts at about 10:00.

image from WIRED

The news of hackers exploiting a “back door” in BMOrg’s new ticketing system broke last week on Reddit. We covered it last Wednesday in Ticket Hell. Now, the story has been picked up by a broader media audience, with stories in WIRED, Computer World, Paste Magazine, CBS Local, and SFist.

WIRED:

Burning Man has practically gone mainstream. The once-fringe desert camping festival is now cultural fodder for The Simpsons and Taco Bell commercials. Celebrities and CEOs routinely attend. So it’s no surprise that 40,000 Burning Man tickets sold out in less than an hour last Wednesday when they went on sale.

But software engineers in Silicon Valley hacked into the Burning Man ticketing system powered by Ticketfly to cut to the front of the queue. Who needs luck when you have engineering skills and you’re willing to use ‘em for your advantage?

…Several engineers and web developers on a Burning Man Reddit thread speculated that hackers were able to create this backdoor after discovering a few lines of JavaScript code on the ticketing website that gave preeminent access to tickets three minutes before they officially went on sale at noon on Wednesday.

“They left code in the page that allowed you to generate the waiting room URL ahead of time,” said Michael Vacirca, a software engineer at a large defense corporation. “If you knew how to form the URL based on the code segment then you could get in line before everyone else who clicked right at noon.”

Burning Man admits the error and says those hacked tickets will be put back up for grabs during the scheduled last-minute sale in August.

[Read the full story at WIRED]

It’s interesting to watch the corporate spin machine in action. Rather than any sophisticated hacking being required, simply entering your code directly into TicketFly seems to have worked. According to hundreds of Burner comments on the Interwebz, clicking the emailed link ten minutes after noon pretty consistently got Burners in to buy tickets immediately, whereas clicking the link a few seconds after noon led to many Burners being stuck in the queue for 90 minutes with no success.

To me, these are the real issues here: it was definitely not First Come, First Served, and it was trivially easy to bypass the queue – multiple methods were used, and most did not require the ability to write code or hack into systems. The focus on these “200 hacker tickets” is smoke and mirrors around the obvious explosion in the number of tickets being listed on the secondary market. Even BMOrg are now encouraging Burners to get tickets and vehicle passes “on the open market”. With software to automatically buy as many tickets as you want from TicketFly selling for a mere $750 – about the profit margin for a single ticket right now – it seems that there continue to be some serious issues with BMOrg’s ticketing system.

Who would have thought they could make it even worse than the lottery? As BMOrg proved with their Spark movie, perceived ticket scarcity makes a nice story for the media.

WIRED:

The way this year’s sale operated, however, didn’t help to dissipate the resentment. Those interested in purchasing tickets were placed in an online queue as each sale was processed and given a time estimate as to how long they would be kept waiting before they could purchase tickets. The time estimates kept shifting, going from an 24 minute wait, to 46 minutes, back down to 18 minutes, to then “more than an hour,” which might as well have read, “abandon all hope ye who enter here.” At one point, the line was inexplicably “paused” for several minutes, causing another nerve-wracking moment on social media.

This drastic, back-and-forth change in wait times gave those in line the illusion that somehow hackers were cutting in front of them and bumping them out of scoring tickets. Burning Man’s social media team responded by saying that the wait times fluctuated based on how long it took each buyer to complete the purchase. It surely didn’t qualm any anxiety to have used such an unpredictable factor as a counter, instead of a fixed number (“There are 39,999 people in front of you trying to buy tickets”).

See the comments from ZOrg in Emotional Roller Coaster From Hell about why this theory of wait times fluctuating because of some people taking a long time to complete transactions doesn’t add up.

WIRED:

This is not the first time Silicon Valley has been criticized for tampering with Burning Man’s ideals and processes. Last year’s festival garnered unflattering feedback from Burning Man die-hards after venture capitalists, executives and celebrities descended on the desert with air-conditioned camps, personal assistants and other VIP-perks. In recent years, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have all scored tickets to Burning Man.

It seems like now, Silicon Valley is leveraging more than its money to get in front of the line.

[Read the full story at WIRED]

Way to shift the blame to your customers, BMOrg. “Silicon Valley is using its technical might to cheat the system and get Burning Man tickets”: it sure makes a great angle for a story, compared to “some people typed the code into TicketFly”.

Actually it’s BMOrg’s leadership that has been criticized for tampering with Burning Man’s ideals, not Silicon Valley. No-one gives a flying fuck if Zuck brings his P.A., but many Burners do care when some on the Board of Directors are selling $17,000 hotel rooms like it’s some sort of Mega-AirBnB in the desert, and getting an unlimited supply of tickets for their customers and sherpas.

Cancelling 200 tickets will do nothing to fix the problems that occurred in the Directed Group and Individual ticket sales. There is no evidence that it will hurt scalpers, indeed it may even punish some Burners for being radically self-reliant. BMOrg have said they will void these tickets and add them back to the OMG sale – so now there are 1200 tickets left, for 60,000 Burners to attempt to buy in milliseconds on August 5.

Image: Simon Davison/Flickr (Creative Commons)

“Usually people are hacking to steal things…these people were hacking just to get a chance to spend $400 to get a ticket”

89.3 KPCC radio did an interview with Brian Doherty, author of This Is Burning Man, about the ticket scandal. Listen here.

The media blitz has continued, with MixMag, NY Daily News, Las Vegas Sun, the Bold Italic, NBC Bay Area, the SF Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and hundreds more.

It’s amazing how this narrative is so quickly being spun by BMOrg’s PR machine to “Silicon Valley techies hacked Burning Man and stole tickets from everyone else”, and away from “the ticketing system was not First In First Out and all you had to do to buy tickets was go through Ticketfly’s web site and ignore the queue”. Once again, the Burners get the blame – just for exercising Radical Self Reliance. And BMOrg, rather than accepting responsibility for the unique system they’ve designed and the problems it caused for tens of thousands of their most loyal customers, gets to play the innocent victim.

Despite the story going global, BMOrg haven’t even looked at the report from Ticketfly yet. From SFGate:

While Burning Man organizers confirmed they had been hacked — and that the suspected parties would be stripped of their tickets — they said they needed to see the report from Ticketfly to get into the details. Whether actual hackers posted their exploits on social media was unclear.

“We may have more information later, but Ticketfly is taking the lead on figuring out what happened,” Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham said Monday. “We don’t want to say anything that is incorrect.”

BMOrg confirmed they had been hacked? Not Ticketfly? Hmmm….

I was in at 12:00:56 and didn’t get tickets. Some were there at 12:00:02 and didn’t get them. Others logged in at 12:10 and later and bought tickets. THAT is the biggest problem, and is nothing to do with hackers.

Let’s take a condensed look at the ticket problems, as reported by Burners:

1. People wrote scripts to connect to the link at exactly 12:00:00
2. People looked at the source code of BMOrg’s web page and found what the URL would be for the link to the waiting room; entering this URL in their browser meant they didn’t have to wait until the button turned green to get in the queue
3. Bots were for sale for $750 that automatically bought tickets from Ticketfly
4. People logged in after the “Pause” and got straight through
5. People logged directly into Ticketfly, chose Burning Man, and entered their code
6. People on mobile devices on Verizon got straight through

[if you’re aware of any others, please share]

According to BMOrg, echoed through the world’s media:

200 Burners used sophisticated software hacking techniques to place themselves at the front of the queue

The comments to the WIRED article (and at Burners.Me) have been quite dismissive of the use of the word “hacking” in this story.

None of the numbered examples I listed require any hacking, or any code to be written, although #1 and #2 do require some very basic technical knowledge. So do all these methods get a pass, and there was another hack that we don’t know about? Or is BMOrg trumping up #2 as the scapegoat for all their ticket woes – before they’ve even received the report from Ticketfly? Is this whole story they’re telling simply based on speculation on Reddit? “We found these 200 people in the queue before 12:00:00, they must all be hackers”.

Even if there were more techniques used to circumvent the system, including hacking directly into the servers involved…it does not change the appalling delay between the last ticket being sold, and the 60,000 unlucky Burners in the queue being notified that they were only waiting to make a donation. For that one, they can’t blame hackers.

Meanwhile, tickets are now being offered for $1 million each on Stubhub. No word how many Mistresses of Merriment come with a million dollar ticket…

Image: Livin-Lively/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Burning Man is dead, proclaims the San Francisco Chronicle. Grover Norquist and some hackers killed it. So, what comes next? Apparently, low tech partying with carrier pigeons in Bakersfield…

Burning Man got killed by hackers and Grover Norquist. What’s next?

Burning Man is so over.

This isn’t exactly news in some quarters. It’s been 10 years since I last went to Burning Man, and I remember meeting burners who were complaining about the “new people” and their “new ways” back then…the last couple of years have brought such an avalanche of sad developments — from Grover Norquist’s caravan to the luxury camps of tech millionaires — that I think we can all agree it’s time to close the book on Burning Man’s “10 Principles” of radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, blah blah blah.

It was always a stretch of the imagination for the Burning Man organization to espouse those things when tickets cost hundreds of dollars and attending the event requires a time and material investment of several hundred dollars more…

So what comes next? It’s an interesting question, because the need for something like Burning Man has grown, not diminished.

The Bay Area may have a secular culture, but we’re still deeply attached to religious ritual — hence all the desperate talk of meaningful work and businesses that are going to change the world. Burning Man’s annual cycle, detailed behaviorial restrictions and ethos of purification all served the ritual purposes that so many people seem to need. Whatever comes next will likely have some of those elements as well…

My hunch is that the next “event” will start in an unexpected place and focus on being as low tech as possible.

I’m thinking about a place like Bakersfield or Fontana — a place with a lot of foreclosed houses and a distracted population.

It won’t sound as attractive as partying in the desert, but in time that will become a bonus. An unsexy locale will weed out the riffraff and be more environmentally friendly, to boot — reusing and recycling are always better than having to restore an environment that should have been left alone in the first place.

As for the low-tech element, that too will become part of the event’s founding mythology: “Imagine a brief moment in time and space where people gather together to celebrate, via information they receive from handwritten tickets, word of mouth, and carrier pigeons.”

If it sounds good now, it’s going to sound amazing by 2020.

Read the full article at the SF Chronicle.

Business Insider has yet another “the rich are taking over Burning Man” story, this time focusing on a company that will deliver a ready-made “Container Camp” for you on the Playa. Who needs Radical Self-Reliance, when someone else can do Leave No Trace for you?

From Business Insider:

Gene Temen, president of Quick Space, has been supplying the Burning Man event with office trailers for the event’s hospital and administrative buildings for seven years.

Three years ago, the team at Quick Space realized they could repurpose the trailers as living quarters. The units come with insulation, air conditioning, lights, and flooring, Travis Lekas, the operations manager for Quick Space, told Business Insider. This makes them perfect for campers who would rather not deal with the realities of living in the desert for seven days.

They call them “Burner Bungalows.”

Burners can paint and add onto the trailers however they wish, for an additional fee of $300 for the exterior and $200 for the interior. So instead of building a camp ground from scratch, they can either use the trailer as a shelter or build around it and use the trailer for storage.  “You can paint it if you want to paint the inside or the outside — whatever you want to do,” Lekas told Business Insider. “It also comes with three five-gallon bottles of water, a first aid kit, a fire extinguisher, and a garbage can along with additional garbage bags.”

This might not sound like the whimsical and artistic camps that Burning Man is known for, but the idea is to give campers the base on which to build their dream camp, Lekas explained.

And although they don’t look like the typical Burning Man structure, which can range from a yurt to a tent to an RV, the trailers are practical. The ready-made storage units come with necessities like water, insulation, and air-conditioning, and can be used for storage both during and after the event.

The company will also come and remove the trailer after the week is over, fitting with Burning Man’s “leave no trace” policy after the seven day event is over, which is included in the price. You can store your Burning Man gear in the trailer until the next year and not worry about shipping it or needing to fly back with all of your stuff for $750 per year of storage. [Source]

These containers are actually a pretty good deal.

The cost for the trailers is about $3,745 plus a $1,000 security deposit — more if you want to decorate the interior and exterior and store the unit all year. Generators also bear an additional cost of $250 [Source]

It would cost you way more to buy your own container, deck it out like this, and transport it to and from the Playa. These things weigh 6,000 lbs empty, meaning that mid-sized forklifts are usually required to move them around. It doesn’t come with a bathroom, but it does come with water, a trash can and air conditioning. Power is available for limited hours, or you can purchase 24/7 juice with a generator upgrade. You better hope that A/C works well, because these steel boxes BAKE in the desert sun. Yes, even if they’re insulated.

You can find out more at the Burner Bungalows web site.

I’m all for containers at Burning Man, if they’re painted. It should look like the world’s craziest city of art, not Iraq or Afghanistan.

ekoVillages.com upcycled art container. Artists: Ian Ross & Eon 75/Ian Ross Gallery

This Business Insider article is an amazing example of BMOrg’s propaganda machine at work. Their confusing language and misinformation gets picked up and promoted as gospel by the mainstream media:

The trailers might also be a good compromise for burners who were previously planning to rely on the fully-furnished luxurious camping options, or “turnkey camps,” that have been recently banned from the playa.

That means no more built-in personal chefs, sherpas, or other luxurious features associated with concierge camping. But with the trailers, tech millionaires can still have air-conditioning in a pinch and protect their belongings from the sand and dust. [Source]

Here’s what the world’s last Minister of Propaganda was all about. There hasn’t been one since – until Burning Man.

Business Insider perpetuates the myth that BMOrg heroically banned Commodification Camps, concierges, and sherpas, after listening to all the community feedback last year.

In fact, what happened is BMOrg just re-iterated the same policy that was already in place last year – that camps that get placement must have an interactive component. Similarly, despite BMOrg’s recent blog post Kicking Concierge Caboose at Burning Man, accompanied with a hearty “LOL! Nope!” on Facebook…Festivals Concierge Service are still happily in business helping their VIP clientele prepare to fly in to a pre-packaged Burning Man experience, complete with custom costumes and chauffeur driven art cars.

Concierge services such as FCS are not breaking any laws, Burning Man does not have jurisdiction over global commerce and their Outside Services contractors have a literal license to make money off Burning Man from the Federal government. If these services don’t accept cash on the Playa, then it’s hard to argue that they are even violating any of Burning Man’s Tin Principles – which we’re told are “just guidelines” these days.

I guarantee you that there will be even MORE sherpas at Burning Man this year, not less.

Expect to see more Burner Bungalows too:

Lekas told us that the company currently has 50 orders for units this year, and if the rise in interest over the past few years is any indication, they could double their orders by 2016.

“Our first year we started off, we just built a camp,” Lekas said. “The next year and the second year, we started off with five bungalows, and then our next one went to 40 bungalows. We’re hoping next year to supply 100 bungalows.” [Source]

According to Reddit, the Org are running one of these businesses too, and there is a 3 year waiting list to get a container:

How many bungalows does the city need to host, before last year’s ironic timeshare sales become a money-spinning reality?

The Occidental Oasis Econopod, marketed at the Caravansary Souk with brochures and sales assistants collecting email addresses. A big farce? Or seeding the idea?

Burning Man’s official web site recently published an open letter to luxury vacation tour businesses, which stated quite clearly that none of the luxury services offered by Caravancicle in their $16,000 canvas cubes was considered out of line:

burningman.com also promoted a Case Study of “how to do it right” for Safari Tour profiteers, which lays out how they’re taking a hard line against the practice,  by publicly endorsing it. Maybe someone can help explain that one to us! It seems to me more like a nice (free?) advertorial for a commercial tour package operator, a chosen one that BMOrg give tickets to every year for them to re-sell for profit.

Meanwhile, at the exact same time that Business Insider publishes the latest “rich Burners” article, VICE brings one of their own out promoting private aircraft travel to Burning Man. Mixmag also had a story about $15,000 plane rides to Burning Man.

Coincidence? Or PR campaign?

Tickets might be “sold out”, but the marketing to the elites is just getting started…

Another interview from Grover Norquist, in what looks like a summertime ski lift. The Grove is now a “Burning Man aficionado” after attending once by private plane and staying up til 2:30am on a couple of occasions. He said he did not witness a single intoxicated person at Burning Man, even though he delivered a lecture on Psychedelics and hung out mostly at the Absinthe bar. His outrageous costume was a Moroccan man-dress and a Russian military uniform he got from his spooky activities in Afghanistan.

Is this a case of the right wing trying to appropriate left wing culture, to try to be cool? These guys sure think so:

Fusion produced this video showing Grover in action gifting Cuban cigars, lip balm and Nutella on the Playa. He’s so cool that he’s drinking the Kool Aid, and wants to come back with his political dream team.

I’ve also just found this gem of an article with Grover, one of several media interviews that both he and political figure Denis Kucinich gave on-Playa at last year’s Burning Man.

From New York magazine:

Norquist strolls around Black Rock City in 2014. Image: NY Mag

It’s a hell-hot Friday afternoon, and conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and I are walking down a dusty footpath at Burning Man, the annual New Age festival held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. As we stroll past rows of parked RVs on Gold Street, we pass a large tent that advertises “Free Taint Washes.” A man approaches us from inside, carrying a jug of water with a misting attachment.

“Would you like a spray?” the man asks.

“Not today,” Norquist says.

The man smiles. “Well, would you like a taint wash?”

Norquist has been at Burning Man for less than a day, but he’s already learning lots of new things — including the word taint, which, after a moment of confusion, he asks me to define. (Hmm, how to put this to the godfather of modern American conservatism?) Sheepishly, I inform him that it’s the colloquial term for the patch of skin between the genitals and the anus, properly known as the perineum. People call it the taint, I say, because it taint one part and it taint the other, either.

“Okay, I did not know that,” Norquist says. “Is that a recent slang?”

We continue down the path, past a “shaman dome” and a 22-foot-tall sculpture of a penis entitled “The Divine Masculine.” Nearby, a topless woman rides by on a fur-festooned bicycle. The oontz-oontz of house music reverberates in all directions. It’s a much different scene than you’d find at the offices of Americans for Tax Reform, the influential right-wing organization Norquist leads, but he seems charmed rather than frightened.

“If you had 500 people get together and [they did] something like this, that would be impressive,” he says, surveying the blocks full of elaborately decorated theme camps. “But seventy thousand?”

Image: Tremr

Further down the path, while Norquist is making a point about the evils of labor unions, a man in a fedora runs over to meet us … (He is possibly very stoned.) “Gentlemen, I’m coming here to get some news on the report,” he says. After an awkward silence, the man whirls away and shouts, “Now watch me get run over — it’s going to be modern art!”

“Did you know that guy?” Norquist asks…

Grover lets the hidden agenda slip:

In the long run, Norquist thinks that the high-profile regulatory struggles of tech companies like Uber and Airbnb could help the GOP attract young Silicon Valley voters if it positions itself as the innovation-friendly party.

But really, he’s just there to party party. Sure he is.

Image: Fusion

…enough about politics — Norquist is here to have his mind blown…he periodically stops to admire the roadside attractions: a golf cart decorated to look like a gumball machine; an antique car with a “Nixon/Agnew” bumper sticker; a geodesic dome. We pass HeeBeeGeeBee Healers, a camp that puts on daily spiritual healing workshops where attendees are asked to chant like monkeys.

“Is that the gong one?” Norquist says with a laugh. “I saw an advertisement for a place where you lie down and they hit gongs near you and they can cure your appendicitis or something.”

Norquist is still getting used to Burning Man’s quirky traditions — for starters, he doesn’t yet have a “playa name,” the nickname given to first-time Burners as a rite of passage. (“I went through eight years of the Bush administration without a nickname,” he says. “I think Grover is sufficiently unique.”)

[Source: New York]

Read the full interview here.

There’s big elections coming up in 2016, and Burners are an attractive little bubble of voters for politicians to reach. Maybe if we’re lucky this year Hillary, Jeb, and Trump will all bring their planes and give interviews too, with paparazzi standing by to record the evidence of them actually Gifting and Participating and being all Radical. Of course, we’d have to turn the music down.

Burning Man sunrise 2014 http://t.co/SoX7HVc1UA—
Grover Norquist (@GroverNorquist) August 31, 2014

This is "the temple" people leave mementoes of those lost last year. Burns Monday. http://t.co/gGlVMQNfP1—
Grover Norquist (@GroverNorquist) August 31, 2014

Image: Beverly & Pack/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Earlier in the year, VICE news published a story When the DEA Went to Burning Man, Shit Got Redacted about the DEA’s activities at Burning Man, based on a heavily redacted FOIA response.

When we discussed the story in April, we also published the results of a FOIA request made by “Inkoo Kang” in 2012 (responded to after much chasing in Feb 2013). This provided documented proof that the FBI have been active at Burning Man.

For some reason, this story has hit the mainstream media this week. Here’s some of the coverage:

FBI Infiltrates Burning Man Festival, Collects Intelligence, Documents Show – CBS News

Undercover FBI agents spy on Burning Man Festival – Daily Mail

FBI kepts tabs on Burning Man Festival – NY Post

Burning Man Testing Ground For Free Speech, Drugs and New Spy Gear – Slashdot

The FBI are far from the only agency operating there.

Agencies Spotted at Burning Man

• 200+ police; BLM and sheriff’s combined patrols, integrated teams
• Night vision goggles, sniffer dogs, drones
• Run by Special Agent Dan Love – Bundy Ranch standoff
• Bureau of Land Management
• Department of the Interior senior management
• Pershing County Sheriff’s Office
• Washoe County Sheriff’s Office – ATAC (All Threats All Crimes)
• Nevada Highway Patrol
• Paiute Indian Reservation Police
• DEA
• FBI
• Centers for Disease Control
•  Department of Agriculture
• Department of Public Safety (Investigation Division)
• US Forest Service
• US Customs & Border Patrol
• Nevada State Board of Health

Not to mention Google’s prototyping of new technologies, such as Google Earth. Another technology prototyped at Burning Man, Firechat, played a big role in the Hong Kong protests a month after its Playa debut.

The festival takes place on a former military site that is still used for space launches. It is very close to Naval Air Station Fallon, and every year there are fly-overs. There are also all kinds of elite military personnel at the festival, plugged directly into reconnaissance satellites.

Blackhawk hovers low over Burning Man. Image: Chris Olewnik, Facebook

Military aircraft that have been spotted at Burning Man include:

• Blackhawk
• Chinook
• Apache
• F-18
• F-22
• F-14
• F-16
• C-130
• V-22 Osprey tiltrotor

Recently Alex Jones’ show InfoWars.com did a special on Burning Man’s bugs, asking if they also could be tied to government agency activities.

In Operation Chaos and COINTELPRO the FBI and CIA infiltrated the counter-culture of the 1960’s. History is repeating itself…perhaps by accident, or perhaps by design.

Some Burners will go “who cares”…but if you type “Burning Man” into Google and set time to “past 24 hours” under Search Tools, you will see that this is the main story being discussed on the Internet about Burning Man. Celeb coverage includes Business Insider, Harper’s Bazaar, New York Post, Hollywood Life, Marie Claire.

It seems that many people very much do care. Where else can regular folks party with billionaires and A-list stars, for only $400?

Maybe later in the week there will be other Burning Man news on the Internet for us to discuss. Hey, if you don’t like this story, write your own! We welcome guest posts.

Susan Sarandon got a lot of press for carrying Timothy Leary’s ashes in a procession to their final resting place under a masturbating nun, before they were merged with the rest of the ash after the Totem of Confessions burned.

Katy Perry made her Burning Man debut with video of her falling off a Segway, which has gone viral globally – 511,000 likes just on her Instagram feed.

Jared Leto handed out oranges. Diddy tended bar. Leonardo di Caprio was a rumored sighting last year, this year his girlfriend was confirmed.

Voices of Burning Man reports that “soccer star Ronaldo” was there, asking to be gifted some merch at Robot Heart [NB: the sport is called football, because you kick the ball with your foot, not hold it in your hands]. Turns out it was Ronaldo Lima, not current Real Madrid player Cristiano Ronaldo.

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Also rumored to be in attendance this year was Paris Hilton. Her Twitter feed was silent between Aug 29 and Sep 7, before she jetted off to Ibiza for a foam and diamonds party.

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Katy Perry, singer

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Susan Sarandon, actress

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Karlie Kloss, model, Victoria’s Secret angel

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Suki Waterhouse, model (note the numbered RV)

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Poppy Delevingne, model, socialite

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P.Diddy, mogul

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Cara Delevingne, model/actress/singer

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Dasha Zhukova, magazine editor, Mrs Roman Abramovich

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Derek Blasberg, magazine editor, author

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Constance Jablonski, model

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Mohammed Hadid (Real Housewives husband)

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Jared Leto, actor

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Kelly Rohrbach, model, actress, athlete – Leo di Caprio’s latest squeeze

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Shanina Shaik, model, and DJ Ruckus “the most sought after DJ in the world”

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Michelle Monaghan, actress

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Candice Swanepoel, model, Victoria’s Secret angel

If anyone encountered other celebrities at Burning Man this year, please let us know in the comments.