alt Hacker NewsI won't pretend I grok the underlying spirit of Burning Man. But I find it deeply fascinating to see the interaction between desires for counterculture, anarchy, free spirit, etc. and the benefit and ultimate necessity of organization, planning, rules... governance, essentially. And where there's those things, there's always maps and data.
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Trashing the planet is mainstream. Taking care of it is counterculture.
It's a week long party for rich people. I don't think it's that deep.
The natural tension between chaos and order is one of the things that makes Burning Man so interesting.
People that don't mind SF might want to look at these for some examples of anarchy in fictional action:
The Day Before The Revolution, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Before_the_Revolution
The Dispossessed, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
Burning Man forces you to really think hard about social contracts.
For example - you won't get kicked out for leaving trash all of the ground but you will absolutely be shunned and shamed by everyone around you for doing so. That notion simply doesn't scale to a place like the US with 350M people with varying cultures, values, etc. because the social contracts are simply all over the place and inconsistent.
there’s an interesting side to this that better cell coverage, starlink, and others have made burning man more phone friendly. purists will say don’t bring a phone. or the event only works because no one has phones that work
but the event isn’t possible to run without internet. DPW has wifi at every station. internet has become a core planning and organization tool
Honestly, that contrast is what draws me in. In the same way ultralight hiking forces you to think about and let go of extraneous weight, going to Burning Man and doing the whole camp thing and seeing the city work showcases the "dead weight" of "making things happen".
People think of anarchism as against organizations and rules, but its just against hierarchy. Western people in particular are so used to hierarchical thinking that its difficult to even imagine an organization that isn't hierarchical in nature.
Yeah, well it's all fake really. Still filled with people that are terrible, from the organizers to the goers.
It’s fun to read everyone's preconceptions about Burning Man. Its ten principles are published [1] and include stuff like “radical inclusion” and “civic responsibility” and “gifting” (the latter of which is taken very literally, there is almost no currency use on the playa and everything is gifted except ice and coffee at center camp).
Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists, but it’s hardly representative, especially when you include the family zone and all the specialized camps.
[1] https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/