Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

sfstandard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 122 posts

Re: I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

#41

Post by ElProlactin »

gkoberger wrote: post #5

Burning Man is easy to hate on. I've never been. But come on. The world kinda sucks. If a bunch of people want to go to the desert with no cell phone service and just do their thing, why do we care? If some of them need an RV to do it, and they aren't charging others, so what? That's awesome, and life would be better if more people had the ability to do their own flavors of Burning Man.

> If a bunch of people want to go to the desert with no cell phone service and just do their thing, why do we care?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/burnin...

> ...and life would be better if more people had the ability to do their own flavors of Burning Man.

I'm biased and a bit amusingly jaded because I left the US many years ago and have been living overseas for a long time, so take my next paragraph with that context.

Have you been to a Mexican ranchero wedding that lasts several days? Enjoyed a weekend BBQ in a Filipino province? Been invited by a bunch of 60 and 70-somethings in a small town in Vietnam who don't speak English to sing karaoke with them?

Enjoying life doesn't have to be a monumental, once-a-year event, and it shouldn't be.

Re: I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

#42

Post by a-dub »

san francisco had that cool, edgy, gonzo art scene happening in the 90s. also survival research laboratories and their famous pitching machine, the omnicircus, chicken john, laughing squid, critical mass/commute clot, santarchy/santa con (before it became the weird frat thing it is today). similar things in brooklyn in the '00s like the madagascar institute, black label bike club, idiotarod, etc.

in the 2000s, there was kind of an interesting tech meets countercultural art thing where a lot of the more interesting tech people would pour their disposable income into interesting burning man art projects (nimby's ddi, jabba's sail barge) but it does seem like in recent years with the real sf affordability crisis that came with internet business actually taking off the creativity went down and the money seeking people showed up. i guess that's also true of sf (and brooklyn) more generally.

it was a fun time. i was a swe intern in the mid 90s and would marvel when the engineering team would disappear to the desert for a week and come back with colored hair. my boss drove a psychedelic school bus to work sometimes. in south of market on 6th street in sf, there was a building that had furniture welded onto the exterior like it had all come to life and was trying to escape the building.

Re: I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

#43

Post by teaearlgraycold »

megagpt2 wrote: post #31
brianshaler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point GP was making was that the co-founder was basing their judgment secondhand from stories from friends and headlines. Another bit I found peculiar was the mentions of anarchism while seeming to have a rigid idea of what the event should or should not be. It's certainly far less anarchistic today—placements, permits, law enforcement—but it's not exactly anarchism to say it isn't allowed to evolve to fi…

Every anarchistic community ends up with rules to ensure things run smoothly. I think anarchism should be viewed as the movement towards less rules, not a movement that allows absolutely no rules. Allocating office desks so that everyone knows where their desk is is just common sense - if you're concerned about people envying the best desks, randomise it every week. You have to mark out roads if you want there to be…

Anarchism is rules without rulers. Removal of unnecessary hierarchies.

Re: I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

#46

Post by johndhi »

I started going in 2002 and have friends who have gone every year since then.

There has been a meme that burning man sucks now and used to be better that entire time.

That doesn't mean the meme is false. It definitely has changed. There's an article in sfgate today that quotes the head of the Death Guild (Thunderdome) camp as saying something like, do people want to carry on the traditions their parents had, or invent their own?

I thought that was a great question. Both are valid paths.

Re: I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

#49

Post by gkoberger »

ElProlactin wrote: post #41
gkoberger wrote: post #5

Burning Man is easy to hate on. I've never been. But come on. The world kinda sucks. If a bunch of people want to go to the desert with no cell phone service and just do their thing, why do we care? If some of them need an RV to do it, and they aren't charging others, so what? That's awesome, and life would be better if more people had the ability to do their own flavors of Burning Man.

> If a bunch of people want to go to the desert with no cell phone service and just do their thing, why do we care? https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/burnin... > ...and life would be better if more people had the ability to do their own flavors of Burning Man. I'm biased and a bit amusingly jaded because I left the US many years ago and have been living overseas for a long time, so take my next pa…

You can't just post an article about pollution and use that as a trump card.

The pollution that comes from the Burning Man artwork, which is the crux of that article, is less than one plane from JFK to SFO. If we're going to complain about anything, the flights to Burning Man dwarf the actual event. But even then, the week of Burning Man, only 0.03% of travel will be people going to BM.

I get it, 70,000 people in one spot creates trash and pollution. But we all are, every minute of every day. In the grand scheme of things, Burning Man is _not_ the problem.

Why can't everyone just do what they want without us taking it to the extremes? I agree meeting locals is a ton of fun and should be a part of everyone's life. But if a bunch of people want to go to a desert and hang out for a week, and they clean up after themselves, why do you care?

Re: I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

#50

Post by gerdesj »

SoftTalker wrote: post #47

Festivals are big business now. Boomers and Gen Xers have money to spend and spend they do trying to recapture their youth. Hundreds of dollars for passes. Hundreds more spent on food and drink. Times tens or hundreds of thousands of attendees.

Quite right but it would be nice if the kids would invent their own things instead of whining about how expensive doing "boomer things" is nowadays!

Where are your modern alternative festis or something else? Where is the the modern counter culture? What on earth is a counter culture nowadays?

Its fucking doom scrolling shite that my peers dump on you!

Post reply on HN