August 29, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Holy Smoke! Some trickster torched Burning Man last night. The SF Chronicle apparently picked up the story first. And now it’s making its way through the national and international press.

Paul David Addis, a 35-year old “artist” and resident of San Francisco started the blaze at 2:58am last night, according to the Chronicle. Said dude was booked on felony charges of arson and destruction of property. He also was booked for resisting a public officer. And, my fave, for possession of fireworks. He posted $25,632 bail and was released Tuesday afternoon from the Pershing County Jail in Lovelock, Nevada (whose mugshot appears to the left here). He has one of the better mug shots, I must admit. How did they allow him to pose like this?

Now, what happened here?

Some of the best reportage on the story I’ve seen is by RU Sirius on the 10ZenMonkeys blog. RU interviewed the arsonist in question on the blog several weeks ago, and even quotes him today dissing Burning Man as “toothless and wallowing in its own muck and irrelevant to anyone or anything” So why go to the time and trouble of going to the event? And getting arrested at it. Usually, sane people ignore things they consider irrelevant. They torch things that they consider relevant, and despicable.

The 10ZenMonkeys story seems to link up the recent decision of Larry Harvey and the Burning Man organization to allow corporate demonstrations with protests of the event this year (apparently, like Addis’s). Addis also apparently had a history of dissing the restrictiveness of the principles and rules governing the event and Larry Harvey’s management of the event. So the story suggests that maybe maybe there was a mistrust of the marketizing of Burning Man this year that motivated this act of resistance and arson?

A Burning Man ranger with the hairy name of Ranger Sasquatch is widely quotes as saying that this is an act of “an attention whore has made a plea for attention.” Hey, it’s an attention economy. Prematurely burning down the man is good for a big what of publicity.

Then, there’s the kicker. The 10ZenMonkeys story features and details Addis’ new one-man show where he portrays, wait for it, that great gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson. The story ends with a cryptic statement: “Then again, it is also true that Addis’ one-man show is poised for a West Coast tour.” RU, RU serious? RU ever? Are you really suggesting that this guy did this act as a promotional stunt? To make himself famous? To market his one-man show? Hmmmm.

A few years ago, my colleagues Sven Bergvall and Jacob Östberg made a film called “Burning Bock” that chronicles the annual burning of a goat-shaped straw figure in Gavle Sweden. The problem with the event in recent years is that it has turned into a contest between official organizers and the public to see who can manage to burn the goat first. Repeatedly, people have simply been too tempted by the goat, and set it alight themselves before the official ceremony. Although everyone is bummed out when it happens, it makes for a lively drama, lots of guarding and covert watching of the goat, and lots of smirking and tongue-clicking when some new jackass sets the thing alight. And guess what? The person who burns it ends up with their name in the press, immortalized. Hey, it’s way less than murder rap. And it provides almost the full fame content. In th attention economy thats a cost-benefit ratio that’s hard to beat.

Burning Man just got Bocked. Bigtime. As in, “Hey, you bocked my candle!” or, “Be careful with that lighter, you nearly bocked that pack of cigarettes.” Or, maybe even more generally (use your imagination here), “Ooops, I bocked.”

The question now is whether this will turn into a pattern or not. Whether there will need to be a full-time Ranger force guarding the Man. Or whether there will be an electrified perimeter fence set up around the man. Or a plexiglass display case. Maybe the Man could be burnt in a remote and undisclosed location, and the image of the burn transmitted live by satellite to Black Rocky City. Or maybe there will be vigilante forces that will guard the man around the clock, or hunt down those who burn it. Or a set of spare Men could be constructed for such emergencies, so that when one Man burns another is simply pulled out of storage. I kind of like that image.

So there are lots of solutions. I’m resting assured that the good folks at BMOrg will opt for the less oppressive ones.

It’s certainly relevant that even before the ashes have cooled, Burning Man’s organizers have pledged to rebuild the effigy in two (count e’m, just two) days. Their news release, posted on their website, conspicuously depersonalizes the event, apparently seeking to minimize the potential fame accruing to the perp.

And I think that’s the even more interesting story. This isn’t just about individual fame. It’s about community in crisis. Challenges faced. Building the Man only to freshly burn him down again, officially, because that’s the point. The Eternal Return.

For those of you interested in further delving, I recommend the LaughingSquid’s coverage of the event, including the debates about how cool or uncool is this act that runs counter to the counterculture. Me? I’m with the side that sees this as an act of attention-getting vandalism plain and simple (I really hope it wasn’t intentional self-promotion). Burning Man isn’t about anything goes (although it came from that history). It’s often about creating a social movement that respects people, their communities, and their rights. It’s not really contrarian; it’s utopian. Destruction for the sake of destruction (or self-promotion) isn’t about any of these things. In the year when Burning Man is supposed to be contemplating how we treat the Earth, what does this act say about how we can collectively and individually behave ourselves to reverse the damage already done and the monumental destructive momentum we’ve built up?
Or maybe, just maybe it’s even more important to notice how we are responding to the act.

Posted in Burning Man, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights | 2 Comments »

August 15, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Is Burning Man fading out or about to hit the mainstream, selling out or growing up? It seems like this is the biggest year yet for debates about the (ir)relevance of the greatest countercultural events of our times. So I thought I’d continue to chime in with a little list.

I remember in the 1990s being fascinated with a field of science called “Catastrophe Theory” that often got lumped in with the (then) emerging science of Chaos and Complexity Theory . Malcolm Gladwell later used and popularized a lot of this material to write the monster bestseller The Tipping Point, but the basic idea was that at a certain point you would see a rare phenomenon become dramatically more common. In sociological terms, the tipping point is when a trend, belief, or practice moves from a small, underground, subcultural types of phenomenon to the mainstream. The idea of a tipping point is of course very interesting to marketers, who all want to take little brands and businesses and make them universally accepted. Word of mouth marketing is based on this idea of targeting influential or influencers and then riding the wave to mass acceptance.

With a lot of naysayers decrying that Burning Man has finally, truly, really-really jumped the shark this year, I’m going to go contrarian. This year might mark the biggest transition yet between Burning Man as an one-week long event, and Burning Man as a Utopian Social Project, as a cresting manifestation of a Social Movement or, even better, a New Social Movement in itself.

Here are the Reasons I think Burning Man is at the tipping point, heading for mainstream infiltration, and ready for prime time.

#1. Solid Ideology: 10 Principles. Forget memes, they are determinist and inflexible. Ideologies have always been the way to go: complex, compact, portable, contagious, and complete; ideologies are promiscuous and intermarry, but stay loyal to their bloodlines. Burning Man has a polished and solid ideology developed from a range of intellectual locales such as Situationism and Surrealism but branching it with different New Left Movements. Check it out. Ten internally consistent countercultural commandments “principles that guide our regional communities” but that were developed in the Black Rock desert crucible as if it were some sort of social R&D lab: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. These are values to guide behavioral change on the individual, small group, and communal level. From a social movement perspective, that’s a key ingredient.

#2. The Spores of Diaspora: The Regional Burn Network. How do you nail down ideology and make it come alive in daily life? With Rituals and Practices, dudes and dudessas. Burning Man is nothing if not ritualistic. There’s the honkin’ big Burn o’ the Man, but there’s also the more sombre and introspective Temple Burn. Then there are all the behaviors, the costuming and performance art and self-expression that bring to life the ideology. Burning Man participants have been linking up online since 1998, but also using that network strategically to connect physically in the meat world. There are 128 “regional contacts” worldwide. Many local contact and communities have organized events that bring the ethos of the Burning Man event to a local level. Often it involved a camping trip to a remote region, striving to leave no trace, some participative theme camp forms, and then a ritual burning of some object: a figure shaped like a chicken, a moose, a cow, whatever. Larry Harvey writes about “a new movement” involving regular local town meetings that organize particular ongoing local projects in cities like Portland and Seattle, and a mentoring of one region with another. Rituals combined with institutionalization. That makes the Burning Man event more than an isolated one-week-long event.

#3. Net Presence: The Burning Man Network. For a while, Burning Man was described as the Internet in physical space. The analogy worked for a while, in the time the Internet was new and different. As a creature of cyberspace and California culture, whose growth has been intimately tied to Silicon Valley and the Information Economy, Burning Man has always used and developed Internet presence to its advantage. Its web-page, www.burningman.com contains all you need to know to get to the event, “survive” it, enjoy it, and connect with others on the “eplaya.” It’s a genuine community web-site that leads people seamlessly between where they are now and where Burning Man and its new values can take them. That makes it highly accessible to the mainstream. And an effective tool for keeping the disparate community together for the other 51 weeks of the year when they’re not in the desert. I’ll bet that the site gets a lot of traffic from people who have never been to the event. Burning Man’s DNA contains the new interface between cyberculture and culture-bearing.

#4: Mediated Disintermediation. Burning Man has always been media-friendly and known how to use and manage media contacts and contexts. That’s important for reaching the mainstream. Radio Free Burning Man and a zillion local stations are used locally at the event to broadcast Burning Man news. Now, they can podcast it to the world. Big uncontrollable media like MTV have been held at bay. But Current TV started up a netcast in 2006: TV Free Burning Man. As Larry Harvey said “We’re eager to communicate what we are doing.” Burning Man convinced Current TV to change their business model in order to work with them, further promoting their values out into the mainstream (the value, in case you’re interested, is biggie #3: Decommodification). Current TV gave Burning Man participants cameras so they controlled the content, they erased their logos, and they ran the programs commercial free. From private to communal enterprise, courtesy of Burning Man. And out into the public sphere via mass media distribution.

# 5. The Non-Profit Connection: Burners Without Borders. Taking their cue from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, the humanitarian NGO group of physicians and healthcare workers who practice medicine wherever it is needed regardless of political interests, Burners without Borders took the Burning Man ideals of civic responsibility and communal effort out into the world. In their first project, 299 volunteers spent six months rebuilding and helping to reconstruct some of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina. They also fashioned some of the storm debris into works of art, sculptures that they would later burn in bonfires. The ideals manifest; the rituals performed. See the pattern? Again, away from the event, in other locations. And providing volunteer humanitarian aid, assistance, and relief. The effort has spread: there are Burners without Borders groups now working in Chicago and Reno, and other places.

#6. The Controlled Corporate Experiment: Green Man Pavilion Project. As I’ve written about in another blog entry, Burning Man is experimenting this year with a new form of conceptual art: the repurposed corporation. There will be about 30 different individuals and organization involved contributing “installations” to the Green Man pavilion. Although the majority of these projects have no commercial profile, there are a few smaller entrepreneurs. These brave souls have agreed to bind themselves into a restrictive covenant that would have made The God of Abraham proud. No logos, no branding, no brochures or flyers, no sales reps of any kind. So, for example, people will be able to see a solar carport. The most high-falutin’ display sounds like it will be a huge solar array that is going to power the Man and the pavillion (to which I say: Yay! the alternative is burning a lot of fossil fuel to power them). After Burning Man concludes in fiery spectacle, the company and the Burning Man organization intend to install the solar array in the little Nevada towns of Gerlach and Lovelock to provide clean, renewable power to a public school and hospital, respectively. The little town of Gerlach might become the first American city to create more solar power than it actually consumes. Some have called this year’s experimentation a deal with the devil. It might be also seen as yet another way Burning Man is carefully building the institutional bridges that will move it from an event into a social movement.

#7. Google’s Burning Man Earth. Google and Burning Man have teamed up to bring to live a three-dimensional model of Black Rock City as it actually exists from year to year. You can find an early beta version of the project here that captures Burning Man 2006 in Google Earth format. The grand idea is to bring to life and make accessible to everyone, anywhere, any time, some of the Black Rock City experience. Digitally, people will be able to access and seem to travel down the streets (and presumably even into the portapotties) of Black Rock City. Here’s another interesting part/ They might also be able to make contact with every person who settles into the virtual Burning Man world. It sounds like Second Life, Burning Man style. And I have to note here that Second Life does indeed already have its very own Burning Man event that takes place annually (see pic below from Burning Life). The plan is, yet again, to make the Burning Man ethos, rituals, and even simulated digital experience open to all people everywhere, from a groups of 30 thousand or so in the desert, to something that millions and hundreds of millions of people worldwide can experience and learn from. And the idea within that is to allow direct contact, immediate contact between interested people to happen. And where contact and communication happen, community forms and culture is forged and shared. And then borne anew, like spores.

So that’s my list. Seven reason that the Burning Culture of Burning Man is spreading far beyond the desert, and why I think this year will be the most important year yet.

Posted in Burning Man, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights | 1 Comment »

July 31, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

A few weeks ago, following the incendiary Business 2.0 story about changes to Burning Man this year, I wrote a series of blog entries that looked in detail at the article, and then analyzed the responses and what I took to be a bit of a Black Rock Mountain being made out of a corroborative molehill. Larry Harvey, the co-founder and executive director of the Burning Man Project, was kind enough to write an extensive and insightful comment to my blog entry, expanding upon a number of points and providing a wealth of very valuable background information.

Yesterday, it was posted on ePlaya by Larry Harvey (Mon Jul 30, 2007 12:36 pm Post subject: Will the (drink) Org respond to the 2.0 controversy?). Unfortunately, Larry had some difficult posting it to my WordPress blog, probably because of the length of the message. But it certainly deserves our full attention.

I run it here, with thanks to Larry, in its entirety:

The following post was intended as a response to an entry in the blog of Robert Kozinets entitled, Burning Man’s Sold Out!! I think my mini-essay may have overburdened his website. It wasn’t accepted, so I decided to post it here. You see, we really do care about the ePlayans! — Larry

Dear Robert,

Thank you for your thoughtful essay. Thanks also for the following statement, “I’ve been researching and writing about Burning Man with the permission of great people like Larry Harvey, Marian Goodell, Jim Graham, Lee Gilmore, and Jess Bobier for almost a decade (my first burn was 1999). I have never heard them talk about Burning Man as a brand.” What you say is correct. We, the organizers of Burning Man, never speak (or even think, I’ll boldly add) of Burning Man as a brand. I’ll admit, however, that I have participated in an act of branding. This took place some years ago on the playa. One night a red hot branding iron was applied to the hide of Dale Scott, a good friend of mine and one of the original carpenters who helped construct the Man. I held the flashlight. I took this for a fairly radical act of self-expression. It produced an ugly welt (apologies to Dale) that roughly resembled our logo.

As a general rule, however, I hold that only cattle should be branded, not human beings. Commercial ‘branding’, like the branding of livestock, comes from without. It is imposed on consumers by the apparatus of marketing. It advances the seductive image of a ‘lifestyle’, shrewdly associated with purchasable goods and services, at the expense of a more authentic kind of identity: a mode of being and belonging that’s produced by acts of self-expression that we freely share with others. Unlike commercial branding, real identity can only issue from within. Its agency is deeply personal participation in a culture, not psychological manipulation.

The above expresses our ideals, but we are now accused of violating these principles. So, let me address what I believe to be the two immediate causes of the ruckus that has recently ensued. The first, of course, is the article in Business 2.0. We announced our plans for the Green Man pavilion back in February. Somewhat disappointingly, it generated very little public comment. However, the current controversy over the pavilion and the role of corporations at Burning Man was incited by that article. So let me start by pointing out that Business 2.0 is, very obviously, a business magazine that addresses business people. The author of this piece, Chris Taylor, was apparently trying to translate the values of our culture into business-speak.

For example, you cite four “lessons from the counterculture” that are contained in a sidebar. Each one of these so-called lessons revolves around a statement that I made to Chris Taylor. Lesson number one quotes me as saying, “People contribute [to Burning Man] because they feel that Black Rock City is them, not a source of entertainment. That’s an enormous motivator”. However the headline which summarizes the lesson supposedly derived from my remarks reads, “Make your customers feel like owners.” This reeks of manipulation. I was speaking of people – volunteers, theme campers, artists, nearly everyone at Burning Man—who feel that their identity’s enhanced by their involvement in the culture of our city. Making ‘customers’ feel like ‘owners’ sounds like Nike attempting to persuade consumers that they have a swoosh in their souls. As you suggest, a great deal was lost in translation.

However, I, like you, nearly jumped out of my seat when I read the fragment of a sentence that you quote: “Branding’s important.” Important to whom? To us? To them? Branding is inimical to nearly everything we’ve stood for over 22 years, and to see this phrase glaring back at me felt positively aberrant. I have never used the b-word in relation to Burning Man, in public or in private. What could she have meant? Was she offering up Black Rock City as a testing ground for viral marketing? Is this the beginning of that famous slippery slope – you know, the one whereby we gradually sell out and retire to pleasure spas?

I am quite certain that Marian regrets ever having said, “Branding’s important…” This statement, more than anything else, is the match that lit the fuse that exploded a firecracker. I think she may have been trying to make her language rhyme or resonate with that of the reporter. However, another clue to understanding what she meant to express is contained in the remainder of her sentence, spoken in the very same breath: “…but there’s a middle ground between having it all over the place and just knowing that it’s Current TV and feeling good about the way they’re treating you. That’s a very interesting potential for companies that see a value in Burning Man culture.”

The “interesting potential” of a “middle ground” that she refers to concerns Current TV’s netcast in 2006. We’ve always welcomed media at Burning Man. We’re eager to communicate what we are doing. We believe that we can change the way the world does business, and in this case, we did. They distributed cameras to participants (allowing them to produce the content), erased their logo, ran the programming commercial–free, and for one week became an interactive participant-driven news service. Frankly, I would love to see more companies behave in this way. Did this segment gain them more viewers? Maybe (though much of this potential audience was at the burn). If they continue to produce more programming in this fashion—and make it commercial-free – will they deserve attention? I am inclined to think they will. Did we make any money by allowing them to film? Absolutely not.

The same is true of our relationship with Google. In the magazine article, I am quoted as saying, “A lot of Google people come to the event. And the reason is that their corporate culture has similarities to ours. They do what they’re interested in. They have fun and worry about monetizing it later.” I was referring to Burning Man Earth, a version of which we hope to house in this year’s Green Man pavilion. We are working with Google to create a three-dimensional model of Black Rock City as it actually exists from year to year. Participants will be invited to map themselves, their artworks and their camps into this digital environment, just as they create things on the playa. What is the point? This is what I asked when I was first approached with this idea. Is this some sort of hermetic game environment, a passive and masturbatory entertainment, a substitute for immediate experience? Far from it. People who enter into this digital realm we be able to travel—eventually, it’s hoped—down every street of Black Rock City. They’ll also be enabled to make contact with every participant who chooses to become a settler in this on-screen metropolis.

In other words, one needn’t just ogle on Google. This is not intended to be a spectator environment. It will be possible to see behind the scenes, to knock on the door (or scratch at the tent flap) of anyone who has elected to participate. It’s never possible to experience all of Black Rock City. It really isn’t feasible to see even 5% of Burning Man. But, once we’ve gathered up successive years of the event, once people have lovingly labored to recreate what they have done in the desert, it will be possible to witness something like the fullness, the spatial-temporal plenum, of the Burning Man experience. But, again, the crucial point is that people will be able to make direct contact with other people, to visit their websites worldwide and communicate with them via email.

It is notoriously difficult to describe Black Rock City to people who have never attended the event, and efforts to evoke it too often reduce down to descriptions of spectacle. Burning Man Earth will allow participants to peel back the spectacle and reveal the lives, knowledge and the aspirations of fellow burners. In other words, we hope to engineer, with the help of our community, one of the largest fully (and deeply) interactive social environments ever contemplated. Did you see something on the playa that you’d like to emulate or understand? Soon (well, relatively soon and with a whole lot of work on our part), you will be able to go to the source. Just ask people why and how they’ve done things. Burners being burners, they will probably tell you.

So, what is Google getting out of this – a lucrative demographic, a valuable branding opportunity? Hardly. They’re very rich and we (I don’t want to offend anyone who thinks that Burning Man is the center of the known universe) are really very small. The truth, instead, is that we’re near and dear. The founders of Google have attended Burning Man for years. They feel they’re part of our community. Many of Google’s employees are participants, too. People put it in their resumes. Entire walls at their headquarters a papered with Burning Man photos. Are we being paid off? No. Are they making money? Well, no. They are offering resources as a gift. Does this large cooperation covet your business? Not really. They have plenty of business (and most of you, in point of fact, are probably their customers, already). Both parties simply thought it would be fun to work together. We’ve signed no contracts. We have done no deals. And we don’t envision advertising as a feature of Burning Man Earth. We regard this collaborative effort as a purely culture-bearing enterprise.

What I’ve been describing is a process of benign détournement whereby one reuses or repurposes well-known media to create a new work with a different message that’s conditioned by the context of authentic culture. This is a form of decommodification, and it applies directly to the Green Man pavilion. After all the ballyhoo, — the howls of execration and denunciations—let me describe the ground-floor reality of this effort. Currently, about 30 different parties are contributing installations to the Green Man pavilion. The majority of these projects are DIY affairs undertaken by veteran burners. These are attempts at self-expression by individuals and groups who care passionately about the environment. They have no commercial profile. This also applies to three or four non-profits that are exhibiting.

What is left reduces down to a handful of mom and pop entrepreneurs who’ve accepted all of the remarkable restrictions that we’ve placed on marketing. We banned, as you note in your essay, the use of logos, the display of brands and any sort of sales representation. They were willing to participate in a festival of ideas that focuses on green technology. Will witnessing a solar carport, stripped of its commercial context, interfere with anyone’s experience? Will it substitute passive consumption for an immediate act of encounter? Or will it function as a motivator that inspires folks to go back home and re-examine how they lead their lives? Our theme this year is educational. The purpose of the Green Man pavilion is to display environmental technology, some of which might help to change the world. This is not a sly attempt at marginal or viral marketing. I really can’t imagine that an anonymous carport is going to corrupt anyone.

The Business 2.0 article induced some people to assume that we were frolicking with corporate colossi, doing secret deals, accepting sponsorships, but none of this is true. It is true that we talked to some large corporations about exhibiting their wares at the pavilion. However, when faced with all the strictures we applied to marketing, these big boys chose to walk away. In the end, the pavilion project will host only two businesses that can be said to represent capital in a significant way. The first involves the installation of a very large (and beautiful) solar array that will power both the Man and the pavilion. After the conclusion of the event, we intend to install portions of it, at our expense, in the small Nevada towns of Gerlach and Lovelock. It will provide power to a public school and hospital, respectively.

The company that’s doing this brokers solar power deals, mostly for large institutions. They make their money from clean energy tax rebates that are offered by the government. Neither we, nor our participants, can be said to represent their target demographic. They are accustomed to much larger operations. What, then, is their motive? They were simply tickled by the notion that, over time, the tiny town of Gerlach could become the first municipality in America that employs solar power to produce more energy than it consumes. I’ve no problem if our partners in this project want to claim the bragging rights for eventually doing this. Last year, we distributed $91,000 in charitable contributions to local communities in Nevada. For us, this is simply a continuation of that practice.

The second large-scale pavilion project involves an array of wind turbines that will be installed along the Y3K light circle that surrounds the Man. In this case, we were able to go around the marketing departments of various companies and approach the scientists themselves. Scratch a scientist, I’ve often said, and you will find an artist. These folks felt that exhibiting their beautifully engineered handiwork would be ‘cool’. They’ve been motivated by a kind of passion – radical self-expression, if you will. They have no intention of selling these large objects to our ‘customers’, any more that Jim Mason, the artist who is creating the Mechabolic—a massive mobile slug-like object powered by organic refuse—has any intention of selling Mechabolics to ‘consumers’. (Although, I almost wish he would. I’d like to imagine that the roadways of America will some day teem with giant fire-spewing slugs.)

After reviewing all that I have said about the pavilion, I think it’s clear that we are doing nothing that betrays our values. Specifically, we are not violating the principle of decommodification. This is the third of our Ten Principles. It states, “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.” Nothing that I have described violates this tenet. It’s said that he who sups with devil must dine with a very long spoon. However, in this case, I think its clear that we’re not supping with the devil; we’re not even doing brunch.

This talk of deviltry brings me to my last point and to what I think is the second cause of controversy. After the Business 2.0 article, talk of corporate involvement struck a visceral nerve in our community. Many of those who bitterly protested the Green Man pavilion seemed to feel that we were trying to inject some sort evil corporate bacillus straight into the heart of Black Rock City (though others, gratifyingly, had faith that we would never do this). But why were so many ready to impute a bad intention? It seems to me that, as consumers, we are tempted to assume that there is a law of spiritual entropy, a force inherent in the ‘default world’, that drags us down, that makes us all ‘sell out’.

This can sometimes generate a callow cynicism, a half-baked knowingness, a virulent sense of distrust. It can lead people to say that the Org, the BMORG or, my favorite, the BORG conceals deeply sinister motives. We are imagined, in this scenario, to be a profit-driven Juggernaut: a heedless corporation, an impenetrable bureaucracy that ignores the needs of the community. In reality, we are a very small corporation that employs only 30 full-time people. The majority of participants in our community, on the other hand, probably work for much larger corporations – certainly ones that do not publish letters such as this. This sometimes makes me wonder if we’re being offered up upon an altar as a sacrifice to pay for other people’s economic sins.

The disgruntled tone of some of what has recently been said about the Burning Man Project speaks to me, at times, of a deep-seated malaise. Only a consumer of mass-marketed products would assume that objects such as turbines and carports can be mysteriously instilled with meaning at the factory. This, after all, is what consumers often seem to feel they’re getting when they buy a ‘life-style’. Furthermore, only a dispirited consumer could yearn for deliverance, for some kind of absolution in a city that they imagine to be a moneyless utopia that’s unconnected to the word-at-large. The truth is that the Project, as a corporation, spends millions of dollars to create Black Rock City, and our participants spend many millions more in a capitalist marketplace in order to inhabit this city. Once that occurs, however, it is entirely up to all of us to actively instill these goods with meaning. That is what identity is all about.

We believe that our community can change the ‘default world’. This is what the Green Man theme aspires to accomplish. We know that this is possible because the Project has already begun to help insert Burning Man’s culture back into everyday life—without selling out. For those who’d like a progress report on these efforts, I suggest you consult this year’s Burning Man Journal and, in particular, a front page article entitled, The Default World. It may accessed at our website. I also suggest that people read the featured article in last year’s Journal, Commerce and Community. It might help to put these issues in perspective.

Sincerely,
Larry Harvey

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