The Vanishing Idealism of Burning Man

> But that's part of the meme, just as much as Burning Man's principles invite the criticism

Perhaps you misunderstand. I did not mean that those old-timers complained about Burning Man today and said it was passé. Some of them have not even gone again since that era two decades ago. But simply talking to a 1990s participant and a more recent participant about what they remember of the event reveals details of logistics, close-knitness, and interaction with the outside world that tell me that I would find the event much less enjoyable these days than if I had been able to participate in the 1990s.

I've been precisely once, and only in the last few years, so I am far from an expert on the trajectory of the event or any community surrounding it.

But my observations were:

* Any single characterization of an event that is partly defined by its city-sized number of participants is going to be incomplete.

* There's a variety of different experiences to be found there. Chances are good you can find an experience to your liking.

* There's better chance that you can bring an experience to your liking, and as in other situations, a lot of what you get out of it related to what you put in. If I go back, I'm mostly likely to do so as part of a camp that's doing something I'm excited about. The blank-canvas aspect of it might be the most interesting part.

* Among other things, it's a pop-up art festival in the middle of a particularly dusty lake bed with lots of interesting pieces, some of building-sized scale. No matter what else is going on, if you're into art, chances are good you will like this (unless you also hate camping and don't prepare for that).

* To whatever extent specific norms and stated values are different than mainstream, people are still people. You can expect to see some of the best on display and some things that are disappointing.

Is it still "in its prime" or is it "over"? Have the values been commodified or sold out? I don't know. I think the questions that matter to the average person thinking of going are whether it's still interesting to you, and what values you're going to try to bring to it. I don't know if I brought enough to the time I went, but I'm glad I did it, and under the right circumstances, I'd do it again.

I’m turned off from going by the fact that it seems the only friends I know that go are a narrow demographic of your typical techie. They plan their entire year around it and act like it’s their sole purpose in life. Honestly I don’t want to end up like that, thinking that the real world offers no thrill or spectacle or surprises such that I need to reduce my life down into a few weeks in the desert at the end of the year.

Straight from the BM blog: A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man. (TLDR: nobody).

https://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-center/...

Not going this year; have gone maybe 20 times starting in 95.

There was IMO and experience genuinely something special (I won't say unique, but probably... unique) there, which is now vestigial. Still discoverable but at a time, in some strata of the event, all but axiomatic.

I would describe that special thing as an emergent aspirational culture of techno-utopianism made possible by expending profound resources in the service of simulating (creating if you like, temporarily) an environment best described as "plenty."

Much about our culture is defined by axiomatic scarcity, from which competition emerges.

The thing that made me keep going back was the recurring experience of an inverted order, in which a uniquely large scale collaborative game was being played, in which the rules were changed. Lots of rules. This created open social space and possibility. Guards went down and spontanaeity blossomed. Altruism and kindness and generosity were, quite often, emergent.

This was of course highly imperfect in a very long list of ways. And there were of course as always, bad actors, bad experiences, and a shadow side.

But that does not diminish the power of experiencing the potential of existing in a culture in which the competitive instinct can be harnessed to drive collective rather than individual benefit.

Many aspects of the now ossified and largely ignored "precepts" attempted to define and explain the constituent aspects which made this emergent culture function. A fools' errand but an absolutely necessary one in the face of massive growth and the encroachment of the outside rules.

Many (most all) cultures have some sort of time-out-of-time in which traditional norms are suspended. It's a pressure valve and a laboratory in which the culture can tinker.

I consider myself unspeakably blessed to have lived in SF at a moment when my culture and generation experimented at this scale, thanks to the (at the time permanent-seeming) very temporary apex of the post-Cold War internet boom, when the Bay was still a meeting point between a lot of very creative, very iconoclastic people, and, suddenly, a f--k ton of money and resources.

We still have the latter, and it shows in the preposterous scale of very cool vanity projects on the playa now.

But we are in a much much darker moment historically and generally, the culture of the Bay is now within the event horizon of money and conventional rules of power.

I still have fun when I go, and there is still idealism.

But the safety, risk taking, collaborative play from a smaller city and the sense of fellow travelers who frankly were a lot more freakish and non-normal than attend now, lives on only in individual interactions and nooks and crannies.

It's still the background radiation shows, and to the extent the "precepts" are pursued, still leads to magic.

And it's still a great gathering of freaks, and celebration of potential.

Still worth it IMO if you can find the right people.

Never expect to see something ignite at that scale again in my lifetime. For a while Occupy had potential to be something more. Ah well.