Burning Man

Burning Man, community and the corporation

My friend Riley asked me to take a look at his blog entry about Burning Man and how its organized:

I used to think that the whole “community” thing at Burning Man was some sort of rhetorical fantasy, but…. After spending two years as a Dirt Ranger, and three years listening to my betters (thanks, DirtWitch, LongPig, etc.!), I’ve discovered that not only is it not a rhetorical fantasy, it a way of life that more of us need to embrace.

There is certainly something to the whole community aspect at Burning Man. No doubt about it -- and with most things in life its about striking the right balance between open enough and too locked down. I'll get into that in a minute. Riley continues:

They got so big and complicated that they kinda retired their goof-ball friends who had been running things, and started replacing them with……. People like me. People who were corporate professionals. People who had no grounding in real life, but were highly qualified in the unreal world of the corporations.

And you know what? You put people like me in charge, and things are going to be fucking organized. Things are going to run like fucking clockwork. Nothing will be left to fucking chance, and anyone who disagrees is going to be ousted from the fucking Team. That’s the fucking truth.

I'm not sure that the corporate types were cherry picked for these jobs, but a certain amount of straight up, no BS people are really needed to make BM fly. Around 1996 the BLM and the local cops started coming down hard on BM. '96 had the first death and generally more chaos than was OK. Burning Man experienced serious growing pains that year.

Outside forces required BM to have law enforcement and fire fighters on the scene. Insurance was necessary -- and you need some corporate types to get all the stuff lined up. The choice was to organize and meet the oncoming pressures, or stay at home. The key is to balance the organization with the proper amount of mayhem and chaos to preserve the feel of BM. Certain parts of BM died that year (e.g. drive by shooting range) and will never be back. But that's life. You'll lose some people and gain others. Time moves on.

Larry,
Let my people go. Let there be chaos, because community can only exist within chaos. Everything else is just the planned mediocrity of people following rules. Let my people have flamethrowers in their camps, and if they end up accidentally burning down a large portion of the city, so be it. Burning Man will survive and arise from the ashes. Stop making Burning Man a planned community. Get rid of the streets and street signs.

That works when you have a few people. It did in 94 when I first showed up. No streets, no cops, total mayhem -- it was great. But only hard-core people were out there and hard core people tend to know how to survive. But when the news spreads, you get more people coming in and that forces change on you -- if you have too many people die at your event, someone will come down hard on you. And its always best to self regulate, ahead of the government trying to regulate you. Government can screw up boiling water.

When you have too many people and you do radical things like remove street signs, no one can find anything. The city is too big for that. That's negative chaos that should be minimized. True, that in the end you will form a new type of community that can cope with new streets and no signs, but that will likely be different from the community you wish to create.

I think Burning Man is doing a pretty good job finding the right balance. BM has got an excellent track record of recognizing problems and fixing them for next year. Last year we had a problem with lack of art on the playa, and this year a lot of things are getting shaken up -- we'll see if BM can maintain its track record this year. I think we'll lose a lot of burners if things aren't in a better balance this year.

What this all comes down to is this: The community needs to have the right amount of serious organization to create infrastructure in order to provide a blank canvas for the community to paint upon. You'll need corporate types to be organized and pull this off. This needs to be balanced out with artsy fartsy types that can then carefully influence how people paint on that canvas. This needs to be more chaotic than the corporate types, and the folks at the Artery have been a bit too far on the corporate side -- thus BORG2.

Not to beat a nearly dead meme, but: If you want to have an utterly chaotic event, set up your own event on a much smaller scale that allows people to have more freedom. Burning Man is not that place anymore and will never be that place again. Just be really careful about growth -- it will kill an event faster than anything else. Trust me, I just witnessed it.

Posted by Mayhem at July 29, 2005 02:04 PM