Some of this is selection bias, but lots of this is active work by the organizers.
Burning Man has slowly re-created the regulatory state in response to the standard pressures of civilization. To their credit, this has often been in response to near-misses, but sometimes in response to fatalities. It started with sanitation (potties), and banning guns/explosives. You can have 100 people shooting guns at a party in the desert without sanitation and muddle through. At 10k, you are building a cholera-mad-max experiment. A car running over a sleeping person prompted a designated road network. And then they adopted zoning, with hush-ville and the large sound installation ends. All supported by the ranger team preventing injury every day. Civilization is work.
I wish someone would expand this comment into a full-length study on the evolution of regulations and infrastructure within Burning Man. It's a really interesting topic.
You wouldn't need to look much further than the evolution of the BRC DMV
My friends who went in the late 90s recounted shooting at propane tanks from moving vehicles and having to camp inside of a ring of parked cars to protect your camp (from vehicular traffic)
After 2000 you had to show some decent design (not just a golf cart with dingleberries) and that was about it, they passed our moon car and shark van without much question, and the shark van was a giant sharp thing without lights.
Others will have to fill in the regs now, I understand things have gotten progressively more rigorous.
My understanding is that anything built on the playa, including the art (eg. temple of gravity) has an engineer's stamp just like would in Reno. Or just a bit more dusty.
After being made aware of Pauline Borsook and her pioneering critique of cyberlibertarianism in Cyberselfish (published 2000) (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866903">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866903), I followed some hyperlinks and searched some stuff referenced in the article and found this rather relevant analysis:
Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.
This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.
It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative.
When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.
So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at.
> Apple is, in some ways, very cynical. It markets utopian ideas all the time. It
markets its products as tools of utopian transformation in a countercultural vein. It has co-opted a series of the emblems of the counterculture, starting as soon as the company was founded.
> At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world
See also: The Tyranny of Structurelessness
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Why would that be revealed preference? If they have option to explicitly negotiate, they negotiate themselves different situation. This is what happens when you take that option away
I'm sorry, I forgot. Women can never be held accountable for their actions. They are just helpless innocent babes in the woods, perpetual victims of the universe. The only crime they can truly commit is being attractive in a sports ad.
1.) You cant take a single factor out of multi factoral decision and claim it is "revealed preference". It might be "cost they have to pay for something else".
2.) You cant assume they had ability to predict the future when they joined the community.
3.) You cant assume they have a place to go to now.
4.) You cant ignore women who in fact left those communities.
5.) You cant ignore majority of the women who in face did not joined the community.
And the same thing applies to men btw. You cant just claim that a suboptimal situation in which a man stayed is somehow revealed preference of males.
It’s not the same event but I know there is a pretty good docu on YouTube by wendover explaining Glastonbury festival logistics that may be of interest if this is your thing
Funnily enough a friend of mine recently completed their PhD on a similar topic to this regarding the sociology of burning man, and associated burn events across the world. I will message them for their thesis and can DM it to you.
They really did recapitulate the foundations of civilization. As a speed-run.
I'd love to read a history of it, but it won't be me. I haven't been in years, and it has changed profoundly since my first visit in 2000.
To begin with, camp fires were a normal -- even essential -- part of BM. Walking around, the city was illuminated by the flickering glow of crackling fires and conversation. And many of the temporary structures would be disposed of by having a big bonfire, often burn-night, or Sunday after, as a part of exodus.
But this caused several problems that demanded solutions. Camp fires can kick off sparks, and sparks in a large dense tent city is bad juju. So they forbid open fires, and required contained burn barrels or stoves. Big fires built directly on the playa get hot enough to bake the clay and leave burn scars. This violated their permits from the BLM. So they required metal insulation below. After a few of revs in the rules, fire in camps became practically forbidden.
It was sad. Campfires were replaced by lighting, and sound systems. Small group bonfire rituals were forbidden. So the warm, inviting glow of a crackling campfire and the murmur of conversation were replaced by the repellent cold light of leds, and edm, like an empty club. Serendipity and connection suffered.
michael1999 · · focus · HN ↗
Burning Man has slowly re-created the regulatory state in response to the standard pressures of civilization. To their credit, this has often been in response to near-misses, but sometimes in response to fatalities. It started with sanitation (potties), and banning guns/explosives. You can have 100 people shooting guns at a party in the desert without sanitation and muddle through. At 10k, you are building a cholera-mad-max experiment. A car running over a sleeping person prompted a designated road network. And then they adopted zoning, with hush-ville and the large sound installation ends. All supported by the ranger team preventing injury every day. Civilization is work.
ttcbj · · focus · HN ↗
AndrewKemendo · · focus · HN ↗
jonahhorowitz · · focus · HN ↗
[0] - <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/585886.This_Is_Burning_Man" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/585886.This_Is_Burnin...
wmwragg · · focus · HN ↗
aorloff · · focus · HN ↗
My friends who went in the late 90s recounted shooting at propane tanks from moving vehicles and having to camp inside of a ring of parked cars to protect your camp (from vehicular traffic)
After 2000 you had to show some decent design (not just a golf cart with dingleberries) and that was about it, they passed our moon car and shark van without much question, and the shark van was a giant sharp thing without lights.
Others will have to fill in the regs now, I understand things have gotten progressively more rigorous.
My understanding is that anything built on the playa, including the art (eg. temple of gravity) has an engineer's stamp just like would in Reno. Or just a bit more dusty.
Arodex · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/" rel="nofollow">https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/
Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.
This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.
It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative.
When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.
So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
> At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world
swerner · · focus · HN ↗
dTal · · focus · HN ↗
MrBuddyCasino · · focus · HN ↗
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
MrBuddyCasino · · focus · HN ↗
BigTTYGothGF · · focus · HN ↗
That's a big presumption.
MrBuddyCasino · · focus · HN ↗
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
1.) You cant take a single factor out of multi factoral decision and claim it is "revealed preference". It might be "cost they have to pay for something else".
2.) You cant assume they had ability to predict the future when they joined the community.
3.) You cant assume they have a place to go to now.
4.) You cant ignore women who in fact left those communities.
5.) You cant ignore majority of the women who in face did not joined the community.
And the same thing applies to men btw. You cant just claim that a suboptimal situation in which a man stayed is somehow revealed preference of males.
Havoc · · focus · HN ↗
mad_tortoise · · focus · HN ↗
Igrom · · focus · HN ↗
chris_bell · · focus · HN ↗
michael1999 · · focus · HN ↗
I'd love to read a history of it, but it won't be me. I haven't been in years, and it has changed profoundly since my first visit in 2000.
DuperPower · · focus · HN ↗
michael1999 · · focus · HN ↗
To begin with, camp fires were a normal -- even essential -- part of BM. Walking around, the city was illuminated by the flickering glow of crackling fires and conversation. And many of the temporary structures would be disposed of by having a big bonfire, often burn-night, or Sunday after, as a part of exodus.
But this caused several problems that demanded solutions. Camp fires can kick off sparks, and sparks in a large dense tent city is bad juju. So they forbid open fires, and required contained burn barrels or stoves. Big fires built directly on the playa get hot enough to bake the clay and leave burn scars. This violated their permits from the BLM. So they required metal insulation below. After a few of revs in the rules, fire in camps became practically forbidden.
It was sad. Campfires were replaced by lighting, and sound systems. Small group bonfire rituals were forbidden. So the warm, inviting glow of a crackling campfire and the murmur of conversation were replaced by the repellent cold light of leds, and edm, like an empty club. Serendipity and connection suffered.
michael1999 · · focus · HN ↗
bossyTeacher · · focus · HN ↗
Some of this seems subjective.