6 ms·
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 respons
by throwup238 5mo ago
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/ https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/
- niwtsol 5mo agoFYI - Coffee at center camp was canceled as of 2022
- realo 5mo agoDon't get me wrong, but on one side you have the gift culture, and on the other side the exception that one of the only things sold the the community in one of the hottest, most arid deserts in the world is ... ice ... Got a chuckle out of me there.
- oldandboring 5mo agoThey also sell fuel.
- warrenmiller 5mo agoNot to any old so and so, only to mutant vehicle and art camps
- leptons 5mo agoI actually got to buy fuel there once. They were absolutely surly about it, too. Why didn't you plan ahead and bring enough gas??!? Well what happened was, we stopped at the gas station in Wadsworth where we usually fuel up the RV before heading to the burn. I put the gas nozzle into the RV and flipped the nozzle auto-shut-off thing up while I went inside to buy some last minute stuff. I came out, the auto-shut-off thing had popped and I thought the tank was full. But no, it wasn't. The scene there was a bit chaotic, I was distracted. So we only got about 4 or 5 gallons into the tank, and that's only enough to get the RV about 40 miles, so we roll into BRC with an almost empty tank. I did not notice this until we were actually inside the gate and the fuel tank was really low. Give me a break, I was driving for 14 hours, I just didn't notice the fuel level. So we had some fuel for the art car, which I was hoarding, but when I heard they were selling gas for the first time ever at BM, I dumped all the art car gas into the RV and then got on the art car and headed over to the gas station with every available gas can we had.
- martinwilly34 5mo ago[dead]
- cyanydeez 5mo agoIt's mostly yuppie culture as far as I can tell with it's hangerons and other cleanup artists, whatever. There's no such purity, but it's definitely not a flat organization.
- dylan604 5mo agoAs it has become so large, naturally you're going to get the hangerons. You also get all of the people that think it is trendy and go for the likes. All of the rich people that go out with custom RVs and all of that type of experience are just going to exponentially increase the hangerons as they have way more followers that want to follow the trends. Again though, any time you get such large numbers the "core" group will tend to get dwarfed. That's about time when people start noticing it more and think the hangerons are the event so the original culture is sort of lost to the zeitgeist.
- hilsdev 5mo agoThere’s no in and out privileges to get ice elsewhere, so the organization coordinates huge ice shipments into the event. All the proceeds from the ice and coffee sales benefit the local schools and students, which is great because that area is doing pretty rough economically
- smsm42 5mo ago> Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists And Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt... you get the idea. https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceos-founders-attended-burning-man https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceos-founders-attended-...
- mschuster91 5mo agoEither of the mentioned was at one point of their career someone who would have been considered at least belonging to "counterculture". Unfortunately, money and power corrupts, and lo and behold, one day you wake up to find you have become the very thing you once swore to destroy.
- 47282847 5mo agoAll of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
- tt24 5mo agoMillionaire is not some ultra privileged status in the United States, an upper middle class family with a paid off house in a somewhat decent area will have a net worth in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
- 47282847 5mo agoNumber of millionaires in the US: 23,831,00. Yet again, different idea of “privilege”, I guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
- tt24 5mo agoNot sure how this relates to my comment
- ButyTh0 5mo ago[flagged]
- vehemenz 5mo agoThat's quite the straw man you've constructed, which I suppose is appropriate for a Burning Man thread.
- bravoetch 5mo agoHave you been? Or are you basing this on second-hand information?
- ButyTh0 5mo agoOnce. Was impressed by the human effort in general, little specifically stood out. Worked in low voltage wiring through college. Have been a part of groups rallying behind large infrastructure projects; on farms, new office buildings, rapid response to weather related crisis (tornado alley). It's actually a very common human thing. Been to many an art fair around the world and the minutiae of Burning Man blends right in. Leave no trace while blowing fossil fuels into the air hauling tons of stuff to the desert. Nice loophole.
- bsimpson 5mo agoA friend introduced my to CouchSurfing in ~2009. The idea that a stranger would effectively be a free Airbnb host (back when Airbnb actually had hosts) was baffling. Turns out: 1. Travel is expensive in time and money. Hosting someone gives you a travel-adjacent experience without having to leave home. 2. People who are willing to host strangers tend to be cool/open/interesting/friendly people. Opting-in to CouchSurfing is a good filter for someone you might enjoy spending time with. Burning Man is similar. One of the mainstays of Burning Man is the Hug Deli. It's like a lemonade stand, but instead of sugary beverages, they serve affection. You can order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server. Want an extra pep in your step? Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment. The staff at the Hug Deli are all volunteers. You just roll up, toss on an apron, and start serving. (The guy who started it isn't particularly affectionate. He's a performer from LA who wanted a way to get strangers to try on characters.) You would never stand in Golden Gate Park offering kisses to anyone who asked. Burning Man is a container that allows experiences like that to flourish, because opting-in to Burning Man is a good filter for the kind of people you might be willing to try stuff with.
- charcircuit 5mo ago[flagged]
- bsimpson 5mo agoThat might be the worst take I've ever read on this website. It's just free hugs, but more theatrical.
- charcircuit 5mo agoYour post literally suggests that a customer spontaneously should kiss the employee. That kind of behavior is goes far beyond an innocent facade of "free hugs."
- helloplanets 5mo ago
- almostdeadguy 5mo agoI think the counter-intuitive examples of people who attend that you and others in the replies are pointing out are a demonstration of how many contradictions exist in these principals. I am the type of person who thinks many, many things about the way the world currently exists need to change, but I am incredibly skeptical of the purported mission of the Burning Man Project to "extend the culture" of these principles to the wider world.
- ghostly_s 5mo ago*people associated with counterculture and anarchists who also have thousands of dollars of discretionary income.
- some_random 5mo agoThe people who hate Burning Man don't care about paltry things like the principles it's based on, they simply don't like the people that go for completely unrelated reasons.