The Vanishing Idealism of Burning Man
Not going this year; have gone maybe 20 times starting in 95.<p>There was IMO and experience genuinely something special (I won&#x27;t say unique, but probably... unique) there, which is now vestigial. Still discoverable but at a time, in some strata of the event, all but axiomatic.<p>I would describe that special thing as an emergent aspirational culture of techno-utopianism made possible by expending profound resources in the service of simulating (creating if you like, temporarily) an environment best described as &quot;plenty.&quot;<p>Much about our culture is defined by axiomatic scarcity, from which competition emerges.<p>The thing that made me keep going back was the recurring experience of an inverted order, in which a uniquely large scale collaborative game was being played, in which the rules were changed. Lots of rules. This created open social space and possibility. Guards went down and spontanaeity blossomed. Altruism and kindness and generosity were, quite often, emergent.<p>This was of course highly imperfect in a very long list of ways. And there were of course as always, bad actors, bad experiences, and a shadow side.<p>But that does not diminish the power of experiencing the potential of existing in a culture in which the competitive instinct can be harnessed to drive collective rather than individual benefit.<p>Many aspects of the now ossified and largely ignored &quot;precepts&quot; attempted to define and explain the constituent aspects which made this emergent culture function. A fools&#x27; errand but an absolutely necessary one in the face of massive growth and the encroachment of the outside rules.<p>Many (most all) cultures have some sort of time-out-of-time in which traditional norms are suspended. It&#x27;s a pressure valve and a laboratory in which the culture can tinker.<p>I consider myself unspeakably blessed to have lived in SF at a moment when my culture and generation experimented at this scale, thanks to the (at the time permanent-seeming) very temporary apex of the post-Cold War internet boom, when the Bay was still a meeting point between a lot of very creative, very iconoclastic people, and, suddenly, a f--k ton of money and resources.<p>We still have the latter, and it shows in the preposterous scale of very cool vanity projects on the playa now.<p>But we are in a much much darker moment historically and generally, the culture of the Bay is now within the event horizon of money and conventional rules of power.<p>I still have fun when I go, and there is still idealism.<p>But the safety, risk taking, collaborative play from a smaller city and the sense of fellow travelers who frankly were a lot more freakish and non-normal than attend now, lives on only in individual interactions and nooks and crannies.<p>It&#x27;s still the background radiation shows, and to the extent the &quot;precepts&quot; are pursued, still leads to magic.<p>And it&#x27;s still a great gathering of freaks, and celebration of potential.<p>Still worth it IMO if you can find the right people.<p>Never expect to see something ignite at that scale again in my lifetime. For a while Occupy had potential to be something more. Ah well.