This story has been doing the rounds of the Interwebz today, after Gawker ran yet another hit piece on LA-based SnapChat CEO (and Ivy League fratboy) Evan Spiegel, whose girlfriend has photos of her running round half naked at Burning Man. Scandalous, right? It seems a few think so, among them ValleyWag, and newly self-anointed Burning Man paper of record, Business Insider.

Girlfriend Lucy Aragon is a 24-year old model and about to become a new Reality TV star, on the Bachelor. She has Burning Man front and center in her Twitter description:

Before you follow me, be advised I have no idea where I’m going. I love Christmas, Steve Jobs, FC Barça and Burning Man.

Do we have yet another billionaire Burner? More grilled cheese sandwiches and french toast to come? There is no evidence (yet) that Mr Spiegel accompanied his girlfriend to Burning Man this year, or is a Burner. But he sure sounds like a partier,  and according to one email he sent, he and his friends are “certified bros – our frat just got kicked off [Stanford's] campus”. Brogrammers, that is.

His tweets are mysteriously quiet between August 24 and September 7, when he re-emerges to post this mysterious image…

He just cashed out $10 million personally on an $800m post-money valuation Series B round, bought a Ferrari and told Facebook to go stick a $3 billion cash offer up their datehole, then followed that up by telling Larry and Sergei to go stick their $4 billion up a similar orifice…so why shouldn’t he go?

Maybe this is a sign that he did…

If you ask me, we need MORE topless models at Burning Man. Many more!

One Burner thinks that cooking, Snapchat, and Burning Man have one key thing in common: temporary art.

LA weekly has quite a lengthy story on Snapchat’s rise from Frat Boy Darling to Tech World Darling.

CNet has more details of his career and upbringing.

Yahoo Shine admires his fashion style – not just a hoodie but a cool one.

We’ll leave with a little titbit from The Onion.

Ticketfly is coming in, with a new ticketing system, selling vehicle passes as well as tickets. Burning Man’s bazaar marketplace has been taken down, to be revamped in some unknown way, presumably fitting this year’s theme of commerce and trade. All kinds of Burner-related goodies and merchandise will probably be on sale soon at burningman.com. The Burning Man Project is developing a new online learning portal, to teach the world about the Ten Principles and the Holy Wisdom of BMOrg.

All this takes systems. Lots, and lots of systems. If you know what I’m talking about, then you might want to apply for this full-time position at Burning Man HQ as “Event Systems Manager”:

That’s a helluva big list. No word on what the position pays, and presumably there aren’t any stock options. Anyone in Silicon Valley with the qualifications they’re asking for, could probably command six figures and a decent chunk of a startup’s equity. Everyone needs project managers who can deploy systems and manage teams, and do a sysadmin and database administrator’s job at the same time. Of course they should also be great leaders (like most IT people are – not!), great report writers as well as systems designers, detail oriented AND creative at the same time, highly motivated, and on call 24/7 in case of any outages. It doesn’t specifically say they need to write code, but a lot of the things listed are what Senior Systems Analysts do.

Here, they’re being asked to manage 9 different core legacy systems plus multiple existing databases, 5 different department systems (not specified)…as well as developing 2 brand new systems and even more databases. How many databases does this organization need? Plus it sounds like they’re going to need to introduce bug tracking and change management systems. This would be 18 systems total, plus an unspecified number of databases. From an IT perspective, this sounds like a nightmare. I’m assuming that none of these systems are integrated with each other. They’re also being asked to manage vendors, which in this case I think means IT vendors – which means BMOrg plans to have even more systems in the future.

Of particularly interest is Salesforce. This system is used to track “deals”, from when they’re just a twinkle of a lead in BMOrg’s eye, all the way through to when the deal is closed and the money is in the bank. It’s a cumbersome piece of software, managing a Salesforce implementation is often a full-time job in itself. Most of the Fortune 500 use it to manage large sales teams. Who are the sales team for BMOrg, and what is it, exactly, that BMOrg are selling that requires the use of a sophisticated tool like this? Photo shoots, perhaps? Advertising? Sponsorships?

Mike Judge is one of this country’s comic greats.

As well as Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, he made the classic movie Idiocracy.

Now he’s back with a terrific new show on HBO, a sardonic look at Silicon Valley called “Silicon Valley”. It has been called “Entourage with Asperger’s”. It debuted last night, I just watched it with a friend who also has a lot of experience in the Valley, and we both found it hilarious. They’ve totally nailed it, and I can’t wait for the show to develop.

Trailer:

Here’s the whole first episode:

Being San Francisco, of course, not everyone is happy about it: including Burner and Tesla founder Elon Musk, who has judged Judge for not radically including himself in our shenanigans. He should be a Burner more like Elon, who flies in by private plane to his plug-n-play Segway model RV compound. Does that put you in a position to be saying “Silicon Valley is Burning Man”?  Hey, when your plane takes off from your office which has 5 Spaceships and you bring the Lucent Dossier Experience to the party, that’s fine by us! You clearly know how to do it better than the fresh-from-Crimea virgins who (shock! horror!) wore a t-shirt with some sort of logo on it, or had to hitch a ride because they couldn’t score a vehicle pass.

Recode brings us the full story, of Elon’s comments over bacon and waffles:

If the crowd reactions at the Silicon Valley premiere of HBO’s comedy series “Silicon Valley” are any indication, the show will hit a nerve with tech’s power players.

Young programmers said they saw themselves in the show. Lawyers and venture capitalists were happy that people would finally see how much power engineers have these days. And Tesla founder Elon Musk, whose name was dropped in the first few minutes of the first episode, hated it.

Created by Mike Judge, Dave Krinsky and John Altschuler, and filmed on location in Palo Alto, the show, which debuts on April 6, follows six roommates, all programmers, as they try to strike it rich in Silicon Valley. During the first two 30-minute episodes at Redwood City’s Fox Theatre, the audience of around 400 locals responded with laughs and sighs as the characters enacted the constant pitching, striving and inanity that felt familiar to those in the recent tech boom.

Afterward, the audience and cast filed uneasily together down Broadway to an after-party at the Fox Forum banquet hall, where a group of Silicon Valley lawyers and venture capitalists formed a tight circle.

“It was no more unreal than real life here,” said Selwyn B. Goldberg, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. “Since the last bubble, it’s been complete insanity.”

Simon Roy, president of Jemstep, agreed, and said the show captures the enormous power that engineers have today.

“In the ’90s, in the 2000s, it wasn’t like this.”

If the VCs and law firm partners were fans, serial entrepreneur Musk was less so. He sees the Valley through Playa-dust encrusted glasses:

Elon Musk, whose high-profile companies SpaceX and Tesla have made him a very big star of tech, recognized a friend in the VC scrum, and joined in.

“The truth? It’s stranger than the fiction,” Musk declared, as the large group debated the verisimilitude of the show and also tech versus Hollywood in general. “Most startups are a soap opera, but not that kind of soap opera.”

Musk did not much like the show and continued talking about the issue of truth versus fiction, in what was an instant television review of “Silicon Valley.”

The verdict of the digital Roger Ebert? Thumbs very much down.

“None of those characters were software engineers. Software engineers are more helpful, thoughtful, and smarter. They’re weird, but not in the same way,” he insisted. “I was just having a meeting with my information security team, and they’re great but they’re pretty fucking weird — one used to be a dude, one’s super small, one’s hyper-smart — that’s actually what it is.”

Musk continued his lively assessment, as waiters passed trays of sweetbread, truffled potatoes, Brussels sprouts and bacon and waffles around them, making larger points about the tech landscape and offering a kind of on-the-fly script notes session for those gathered.

“I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley,” opined Musk. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it. You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get fucking close to what’s in Silicon Valley. The show didn’t have any of that.”

An early Tesla prototype spotted at Burning Man in 2007

Musk looked around the circle and asked who had been to colorful annual desert festival that is a favorite of tech’s elite. Not a one answered in the affirmative.

Then, Musk made the observation that the geeks are without the same social aspirations as those in the entertainment industry, an aspect which he thought the show completely missed.

“The parties in Silicon Valley are amazing because people don’t care about how they’re perceived socially, which I don’t think Mike [Judge] got. Hollywood is a place where people always care about what the public will think of them … and the show felt more like that,” he said. “I’ve lived in Hollywood 12 years, and I’ve never been to a fucking good party.”

Musk reached for a bacon waffle and proclaimed that he would take Judge to Burning Man this year.

We look forward to seeing a Beavis and Butthead art car (at least). Huh huh huh huh. These people are naked. Huh huh. Or at least, a Silicon Valley episode set at Burning Man. Starring Elon, natch.

If Elon thinks that there aren’t just as many celebrities at Burning Man as at your typical Hollywood party, then clearly he hasn’t been reading our coverage of the event.

After his film review, the twice-divorced billionaire Musk was forced to deal with the bevy of young hotties wanting to learn about the latest in SULEV technologies.

Despite some misgivings about the show, it was clear that Musk was definitely more of a star than anyone present at the premiere. A coterie of millennial women, waiting for him to break away from the group, circled him.

Outside on the street, actor T.J. Miller was having a cigarette. Was he having a good time at the party?

“Yeah, but, and I’m not gonna name names, but if the billionaire power players don’t get the joke, it’s because they’re not comfortable being satirized,” said Miller, who plays a buffoonish character named Erlich, who owns the hacker house. “And they don’t remember that to be a target of humor is an honor — you have to be venerated to be satirized. Like, I’m sorry, but you could tell everything was true. You guys do have bike meetings, motherfucker.”

Also outside smoking was one of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, who said he had been anxious about having the premiere in the heart of the Valley.

“We knew this would be either a lovely evening or the worst night of our lives,” Tarver said. “I’m still not sure which it is.”

Tarver said he felt that Silicon Valley was a perfect topic for satire — and that the increasing public resentment toward tech means that the show didn’t even feel that mean anymore (after all, earlier that morning, protesters had vomited on a Yahoo shuttle in Oakland).

“When I first read the pilot, I thought maybe it was too harsh,” he said. “But even just in the last four months, the resentment toward the Valley has come through the roof, so I think it works.”

The HBO jet was docked at an airstrip nearby, and the media execs started filing out to head back to Los Angeles. By the photo booth in the back of the banquet hall, the stars of the show were dancing with their girlfriends.

“The Valley is a place that takes itself too seriously, and it has yet to be properly lampooned,” said lead character Thomas Middleditch. “So it’s time for … it’s time for a wedgie.”

It sure is. And I can think of another San Francisco subculture of self-important hipsters who could use a wedgie or three also. Let’s hope Elon gives Mike Judge a LOT of inspiration at Caravansery.

Elon’s comments got some feedback from the show’s creators in the Hollywood Reporter:

producer Alec Berg was still trying to make sense of Musk’s criticisms. “I’m not quite sure what going to Burning Man has to do with anything that was in the show,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I feel like [Musk] may have a slightly skewed opinion of people because he’s a billionaire and everyone wants to be helpful to him. It’s like he’s the most beautiful woman in the world and he’s saying, ‘Gosh, men are so helpful. They carry your bag and they get the door for you.’ If no one ever says ‘no’ to you and everyone is following around trying to help you, you probably lose perspective pretty f—ing fast.”

He added: “I also feel like the people that disliked it the most are the ones we were most going after, so it seemed like we probably hit the target if they got irked.”

Judge appeared less bothered by Musk’s remarks. “I would not claim to know Silicon Valley better than he does. I’m just going off of what I’ve observed,” he told THR, joking: “Maybe I’ll go to Burning Man with him and smooth it over.”

The show — which has been dubbed “Entourage with Asperger’s” by those involved — follows Richard (Middleditch), a young, socially awkward programmer who creates a search engine that allows musicians to see if their songs are too similar to existing ones. When a bidding war erupts between two tech billionaires over the algorithm behind the app, Richard has to decide between $10 million or taking a risk and possibly making billions. Judge relied on his past experiences working as a test engineer for a Silicon Valley start-up and a few tours of modern tech companies, including Google, to create the series.

While Musk may not have found the satire entirely accurate, he still was able to appreciate the humor. “Some of these billionaires, we have to poke fun at them. That’s the idea,” noted actor T.J. Miller. “They may not love that we’re pocking fun at them, but I said to [Musk], ‘Did you think it was funny?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, it was funny. I was laughing.’ ”

The biggest laugh at the Silicon Valley screening came with one of Kumail Nanjiani‘s (Dinesh) lines, in which he joked that Google co-founder Sergey Brin‘s partner, Larry Page, actually does nothing. (The line didn’t play quite as well with Thursday’s Hollywood audience.) 

“What was neat is all the inside-baseball tech stuff – all stuff we were thinking, ‘Is this right? Are people going to get this?’ – they got all that stuff,” added star Thomas Middleditchof a reception he found rewarding, acknowledging: “We were kind of nervous premiering Silicon Valley to the Silicon Valley.” 

Filed under: General Tagged: 2014, alternatives, news, Party, playa love, press, san francisco, scandal, silicon valley, space, tech, technology, tv, videos

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is surely one of the smartest people on the planet. He is also a Burner – one worth $30 billion, who made a lazy $128.5 million today.

Burning Man obviously made a big impact on Burner Bezos, because he now seems to have a bit of an obsession with flamage.

First he introduced the Kindle. Then, the Kindle Fire and Fire TV. And now, simply, Fire. Which contains a new Augmented Reality technology, called Firefly.

Bezos has some big cojones, going up against smartphone giants Apple and Samsung, and rival Billionaire Burners Google with their open source Android platform. The new phone connects to an artificial intelligence server, which can identify 100 million different objects through the phone’s camera – and help you purchase the same from Amazon.com, natch.

VentureBeat has raised some privacy concerns with the Fire. Look out for them trying to make sense of all the bizarre objects on the Playa this year. Last year we had 8 iPhone Apps to Survive Burning Man, now perhaps Amazon’s cloud can accumulate an amazing array of unique objects and footage from its Fire users at Burning Man. How BMorg will monetize or impede that, remains to be seen. Google certainly cleans up with all the revenues from YouTube footage taken at Burning Man, some of which has millions of views. It is unknown whether Google pays BMOrg a royalty for this.

From VentureBeat:

Amazon is a fascinating company, and the Amazon Fire Phone is a fascinating machine for connecting you with stuff to buy. It’s probably also the biggest single invasion of your privacy for commercial purposes ever.

And no one seems to have noticed.

There’s a lot of gee-whiz gadgetry in the new Fire Phone: a 3-D screen, head sensors, dynamic perspective shifts as you move, and real-time identification of over 100 million objects. That last part, the real-time identification, is the new Firefly function.

Firefly is a seriously impressive combination of hardware, software, and massive cloud chops that delivers an Apple-like simplicity to identify objects like books, movies, games, and more, just by pointing your Fire Phone’s camera at them and tapping the Firefly button.

Lest you noticed a common denominator to those items and get the crazy idea that Firefly is only for stuff you can buy at Amazon, it also recognizes songs (oh, you can buy those on Amazon too) and TV shows (ditto) as well as phone numbers, printed information, and QR codes.

Wait.

How do you think it recognizes those things, including text on images, for which Amazon says it will offer language translation features later this year?

Well, the Firefly button and the camera button are one and the same. Meaning that whenever you’re using Firefly, you’re using the camera…All of those pictures require processing, analysis, and matching, presumably at a level — if they can identify 100 million objects — that can only be done in the cloud, and not on a small handheld device with 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of on-board storage.

Fortunately for you, dear consumer, Amazon has kindly consented to store all your photos, forever, in its vast cloudy server farms. How gracious Amazon is, providing that massive service for free! How lucky are you, getting all that for free!

Bezos operates his Falcon 900EX through a Star Trek themed company

…Probably not as lucky as Amazon. By storing all the photos you’ll ever take with Firefly, along with GPS location data, ambient audio, and more metadata than you can shake a stick at in Amazon Web Services, Amazon will get unprecedented insight into who you are, what you own, where you go, what you do, who’s important in your life, what you like, and, probably, what you might be most likely to buy…Big data? This is gargantuan data…the NSA’s wet dream.

Firefly is “instant gratification,” says TechCrunch. Fire Phone is an “amazing piece of hardware,” saysWired. Amazon’s Fire Phone APIs are a dream for developers, [VentureBeat] said. Firefly lets you “easily price-check items,” says GigaOm. Firefly is the phone’s “sexiest feature,” [VentureBeat] said.

It also might just make you Amazon’s bitch.

“We care about consumers’ privacy,” the Amazon press release announcing Fire Phone does not say.

Bezos recently (and reluctantly) bought the Washington Post, from Facebook founder and Billionaire Burner Mark “grilled cheese” Zuckerberg’s mentor Don Graham. The Post has long been linked to the intelligence community, and around the same time Amazon announced a $600 million deal with the CIA – called “a recipe for Big Brother Hell” by privacy activists.

Fire into the clouds, Burners!

This is the 1000th post on this blog, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect a bit.

The official Burning blog has 1,771 posts. Their first two are from September, 2001, and liken the explosion of fire and dust of Burning Man to the collapse of the World Trade Center, asking if the images we saw were just another Hollywood special effect.

Writer Jon Fox said:

Burning Man has become another symbol of home — an androgynous man who presides over his domain, welcoming weary travelers every year. The only constant being his own fiery destruction…

This city, immense in scope was built purely on the spirit of all that works about humanity. Black Rock City is about possibility; about creating from within for no other reason than because we can. It is about art and connection; about freedom, peace, adventure and destruction as a release of that which binds us. There is no time, no money, no politics, no good, and no evil. There is what there is and it is all brought in by the citizens of the city, for when there is no city, there is nothing. Each person brings a gift, whether an engraved necklace with a picture of the man, or a song, or back rub or drink of water. Why? If you ask, you don’t understand.

The very nature of the event attracts the truly greatest specimens of humanity, for only the truly gifted would be prepared enough and interest in taking on the harsh desert environment to create a gift as magical as a city that is not there.

photo credit: International Arts Megacrew

…So when I see the destruction of today and what is truly possible when a small group of people so committed to something make it happen, I take pause. If this faceless group, so committed to destruction can accomplish what we, safe and sound in America never thought possible, I shudder to think what’s possible if another group did so out of freedom, peace, love and creativity.

Burning Man is indeed a miracle and is something that we shall be thankful for forever and ever. In two short weeks, I have seen all that is good about humanity, as strange and perverse as so-called “normal” people would have us (remember, we’re the weird ones) and all that is bad.

So, I watch my physical home covered in dust and smoke and think of my (meta)physical home all covered in dust and smoke. One explosions over turned by another and the eerie similarity of the two scenes. The background is different. The foreground is different. But somewhere, deep inside at the hottest part of the fire, they overlap. It’s is in here I stand and know that everything is still alright as long as we are all creating and we are doing so together

As you can see, even 13 years ago, in the face of the greatest tragedy America has ever experienced, Burning Man’s self-importance takes center stage.

Bizarrely, the very first words on their very first post are “September 1, 2001″. This was during Burning Man, describing the attacks ten days before they happened. It’s titled “Tale of Two Cities”, by FreshieDoug.

photo credit: Ray Mikota

The tears swell in my eyes thinking of those who lie dead covered in the dust from a modern marvel that took years to build, but only minutes to destroy. The dust is reminiscent of the playa, a side effect of our own actions out there that is as much a recurring reminder that we have our weaknesses and limitations, as it is a nuisance in the daily living. The dust from the playa brought tears to my eyes, tears of joy from the awaking of my spirit within. The dust I witnessed on the tube 3000 miles away brought only tears of sorrow and pain.

Should I put a picture side by side of the two events? They both look similar, a white cloud that looms close to the earth carrying particles that test the human strength and endurance. Should such an identical image from each event be found, it is unimaginable that the spirit underlying be as opposite from each other as possible. One place, the center of the world, the other as desolate as one can get in our country. In a white out they both look the same.

Either the first words they ever wrote on their blog were a lie, or this is evidence of a vast and deep conspiracy. I’m going to go with the former, given the number of other lies, exaggerations and mis-statements we’ve heard from BMOrg over the years.  Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels said:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

photo from Funologist

I’m no Paragon of Virtue, but I’m also not a liar. I am a life-long student of organizational behavior, which mixes business theory and psychology. Propaganda is an established technique for population control, and the few dozen people employed full-time by BMOrg’s 6 (?) founders have a big population to control. Thousands of volunteers, some of whom have put in tens of thousands of hours to the event. The citizens of Black Rock City, all 68,000 69,613 of them last year. The broader community of people who “Like” Burning Man on Facebook, as I write this: 601,666.  The total population of Burners, the cumulative amount of people who have attended the party since it began almost 30 years ago on Baker Beach in 1986: 657,493. Obviously, some of these numbers overlap, but in recent years it has become clear that BMOrg have a deliberate policy of “out with the old, in with the new”. 36.5% were Virgins in 2012, 40% in 2013. 70% have been 2 or fewer times. BMOrg are able to shape these numbers, because their system of Burner profiles and STEP forces Burners to declare how many times they’ve been, before being lucky enough to get chosen by some invisible black box to get tickets.

In just under 2 and a half years, Burners.Me’s online community has grown to 55,200 (Facebook), 1271 (Twitter), and 586 (WordPress) – a total of 57,057. We’re now the second biggest online community of Burners in the world, neck and neck with mobile Burning Man sound camp and East Coast warehouse ravers Robot Heart: 56,956 (Facebook) and 588 (Twitter), total 57,544. We’re bigger than the Burning Man party itself ever has been (56,149), with the exception of last year when the population cap was increased by the BLM to 70,000. Our posts are frequently in WordPress’s Top 100, and some weeks our reach on Facebook exceeds half a million people.

This audience has been built by sharing opinions about stories related to Burner culture found on the Internet, rather than propaganda, deception, and the pursuit of commerce.

We’ve been accused of bias, and I can accept that: we are biased towards the truth. Often this positions us against BMOrg, but that doesn’t mean we’re against Burning Man. You see, I don’t believe that BMOrg makes the party. I believed them when they said “no spectators”, and it’s clear to me – as I’ve tried repeatedly to demonstrate here – that Burners are the ones who make the party.

We’ve been accused of lying, and this I vehemently dispute. Any time a member of the online shill and troll army accuses Burners.Me of disinformation or falsehood, I ask them to prove it. Or even, just to give us a specific example of it. They always vanish into the ether, or hijack the thread with ad hominem attacks. Yet the meme persists, “Burners.Me is a disinformation site, Burners.Me is just like the National Enquirer”. Ask yourself why is that, and where does it come from? I’m just a guy on the Internet, I have no inside knowledge of whatever happens at Burning Man, but what gets published on this blog is true – and we provide references to our sources. If it’s speculation, or unsubstantiated rumor, we say that; this doesn’t mean that we publish unfounded speculation or simply any rumor that hits our inbox. If a source asks to remain anonymous, we respect that; if something sounds untrue, we do our best to verify it. Believe me, there’s plenty that we haven’t published.

photo credit: Aaron Muszalski

There was one post that turned out not to happen, “Busting Man: RIOT calls for general strike at Burning Man”. Was there really a group of disgruntled DPW volunteers out on the Playa, ready to strike over the excessive police presence? I think there was, but I wasn’t there at the time myself to verify it first hand. Certainly, the police presence last year was stronger than ever, with sniffer dogs being brought in from the US border. Business Insider said “Federal Agents Swarming Burning Man”, Boing Boing said “the pigs are here”, even BMOrg’s own blog spoke of “Holy War”. Although a strike was avoided, right after the event BMOrg suddenly settled their lawsuit and caved to all Pershing County’s demands for money. I’m pretty sure the heavy handed police tactics were a contributing factor to that, we’ll see if things are any better this year. The author of that piece, Whatsblem The Pro from Reno,  has not written for Burners.Me since December 2013, and despite his threats at the time that “your traffic will be nothing without me”, has not written anything at his own Burner blog either.

The haters are vocal, but the Likers are clearly in the majority.

It’s always amusing to me that Burners.Me gets accused of making things up or lying, when all we’ve done since the beginning is expose lies and hypocrisy of others. BMOrg used to be a sacred cow, magically above criticism. Anyone in the community who spoke out against them could expect to be shunned or publicly attacked. Steven Jones, aka Scribe, was openly critical of BMOrg’s stated plans to become a non-profit in his column at the SF Bay Guardian. In the face of all the online backlash, he retreated and penned a piece “how I learned to stop worrying and just trust Larry” – which was promoted in the BRC Weekly.

I have been to Burning Man 11 times now, and always enjoyed it. The first time I went was 1998. Officially, there were 10,000 people there; it seemed more like 7 or 8 thousand. There were some art cars, some naked people, some big art, and some theme camps. There was a lot of fire. Mostly, though, there was a sense of camaraderie – that we had all made this journey to the middle of nowhere, into about the harshest conditions you can find in the United States, just to be together. Just for the purpose of a party. You could walk up to anyone and talk to them, you could walk into any camp site and be welcomed. People would offer you things purely from a spirit of hospitality; there was no Principle that said Gifting was required. The ticket said “no spectators”, but the event itself was less of a spectacle, and more just a bunch of people camping in tents and RV’s. After the Man burned, people used to throw their own things into the bonfire – sometimes even their entire camp, wooden structures built to live in for a week and then destroyed. The idea of “letting go of the past” that is now associated with the Temple, was associated with throwing objects with symbolic meaning onto the blazing pile that was the remains of The Man. There was a real anti-establishment celebration of freedom to the event. We were burning The Man, we had come all this way to get away from The Man and do whatever we want without adult supervision. It felt like a crowd, maybe even a big village, but not a city.

Today, it is a counter-culture phenomenon. It’s most definitely bigger and more city-like. There is an airport and a census, there are hundreds of art cars and thousands of theme camps. There are billionaires and celebrities and Presidential candidates. The Esplanade has become so crowded it’s hard to cycle through it – last year, even the Playa itself between Esplanade and Man was getting crowded. The event has its own language, customs, and rules. There are Ten Principles for Burners to memorize, and castigate others with. There are adults who have been going since they were small children, they have literally grown up living in Black Rock City. It has been wonderful to watch this explosion of culture and innovation.

However, I am under no illusions that anyone is changing the world here. It’s a party, if you go for reasons other than the music, you still can’t deny that the music is a major component of the event. Just like the drugs are a major component: anyone who thinks the majority of the people there don’t consume any illegal drugs is clearly on drugs themselves. It’s a rave, and in terms of area, the world’s biggest. It’s an art festival, but not of contemporary art like Art Basel or the Venice Biennale. A third of Burners consider themselves artists. Burning Man has been called “the Special Olympics of Art”. Larry Harvey likes to boast “no artist has ever put their name on a piece at Burning Man”. Although this is not true, it is indicative of Burning Man’s place in the art world. The after-market for Burning Man art is small, and large sculptures with electro-mechanical components that have been exposed to the harsh alkaline environment of the Playa are more likely to deteriorate in value than appreciate.

I have no particular ax to grind with BMOrg, somebody needs to organize this event and pay the cops. Are the 17  members of the Board of Directors the ideal stewards to bring our culture to the rest of the planet? I don’t think so. The whole thing is shrouded in secrecy, and it seems like the potential for conflicts of interest is high. Their previous charity, the Black Rock Arts Foundation, has a terrible track record of money raised versus money given away. The Founders are cashing out, and their succession planning is unclear. Many changes have been “coming soon” for years. As they “transition to a non-profit”, it seems like the structure and operations of the organization are becoming more similar to conventional profit-making corporate groups. Like Google and Apple, they use multiple companies governed under one umbrella to reduce their tax bill, maybe even avoid it entirely. Many of the core long-term members of the BMOrg team (eg. Andie Grace, Joseph Pred) have left over the last couple of years. The new generation, like Burning Man’s globe trotting Social Alchemist Bear Kittay, are unproven as leaders. Do the self-indulgent, entitled Millenials even get Burner culture? Can they? Or does all Burner culture worldwide have to change into what Burning Man’s 70% n00bz think Burning Man is today, just because the population of this one annual party is ageing?

I firmly believe that what we’ve collectively created at Burning Man over almost three decades is something amazing. A celebration of human ingenuity, at once funny and inspiring and maddening. Elon Musk complained about the hilarious new Mike Judge TV show “Silicon Valley”, saying “to really understand Silicon Valley, go to Burning Man”. In a way that’s true, but wouldn’t it be great if Silicon Valley WAS like Burning Man? A couple of public sculptures here and there aren’t enough. The Bay Lights cost $8 million, including $1.6 million from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. Now the lights have to come down, and they are trying to raise $20 million to put them back up. Think about how much “Burner Art” could be displayed in towns around America and the world, permanently, for that kind of money – benefitting the towns, the artists, and the culture.

Right now, Silicon Valley is in the midst of a class warfare battle with the people of San Francisco. Larry Harvey has claimed Burning Man was the impetus for the shift of the tech industry’s capital from Palo Alto in the South, the heart of the Valley, to the city itself. Many people in the city don’t like this latest “tech boom”, and their protests have included slashing tires on Google trucks, bashing glassholes, and puking all over Yahoo buses.

If Burning Man, and Burner culture, could play a part in solving these social problems then maybe there is something good for the world in this. Maybe it is “more than just a party”. Shooting the messenger is not the answer, neither is selling more merchandise. I really appreciate everyone who has read this page and shared their own thoughts and comments, whether they agree with me or not, they are contributing to a conversation about Burner culture that is on the digital record. I’d particularly like to thank repeat commenters Nomad Traveler, A Balanced Perspective, T_Groan, Burner Jim, Senor Spamdump, Blues Bob, Piko, Toburn. And a special giant thanks to our cartoonist Christopher, who has shared his work for free.

Will I keep spending my time and money to give you another 1000 posts about Burning Man for free? I don’t know if I can write another 1000 posts about Burning Man, we’ll see. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans”, said Woody Allen. For the time being, I will continue to share my opinions about Burner culture. You don’t have to agree, you don’t even have to read. As they say at That Thing In The Desert: “if you don’t like it, start your own!”

This is going to be one of those long posts with words and graphs and maths and stuff. Ain’t no place for haters here. You might want to keep browsing if you’re looking for happy frou frou stories. If you feel the urge to comment on this post, please do me the courtesy of reading it first.

A few people have been asking us questions after the “OMG Lottery? More Vehicle Passes” post.

Andrew said:

60% are veterans. That’s the single biggest group. One of your commentors has been pushing the theory that BMORG is purposely denying tickets to veterans. Are you buying into that theory now? It’s crazy. There’s no evidence for it, and clear evidence against it.

BMORG wants money. Veterans make the event into what it is. Why would BMORG threaten their revenue by turning away the people who produce the event? BMORG doesn’t turn vets away; they “directly distributed” 15k tickets to people making the event happen (no, being a vet isn’t technically a requirement for getting a DD ticket, but you do need an existing connection to the burner community to get one, so they almost all go to vets).

BMOrg have a sold out event (except for these 3000 or so tickets). Their revenue doesn’t change whether it’s veterans or newbies. What Andrew’s saying makes sense on the face of it: veterans bring more to the event. But the numbers from BMOrg don’t bear it out. Something else is at play here. You call our theories “crazy”, well please consider this theory before you dismiss it.

We’ve written extensively about the World’s Biggest Guest List and its lack of transparency. This makes BMOrg’s elite sub-group that decides who those 15,000 tickets get offered to: the World’s Biggest Door Bitch. It’s a party of 70,000 people, and they get to choose who gets to come and where they get “placed” to live for a week. They get to make VIPS out of at least 15,000 of them. Who’s in, who’s out. What’s true, what’s false. I can’t think of another party in the world of that size where that can occur. Certainly not any rave or club or casino or stadium, this is bigger than all of those. An entire city of ravers. Yes, yes, and hippies, venture capitalists, etc…

These tickets might go to Art Cars and Theme Camps, but that doesn’t guarantee they’re going to Veterans. Sparkle Ponies are good at Burning Man, Art Car owners desire them. They meet them in the Default World and entice them to come and experience Burning Man with tickets and all kinds of other lures. Better to think of these 15,000 tickets as VIP tickets than Veteran Tickets.

Truth is not relative, it’s truth. Opinions and perspectives may differ, but facts are facts. I have put a lot of time into researching the facts that I write on this blog. If you hear otherwise, come here and ask me about that.

In the interest of truth and facts, then, I would like to address Andrew’s question, and why I made the claim that statistically you have the best chance of getting tickets if your Burner Profile says you’ve never been before.

BMOrg too have put a lot of time and money into researching the facts. Since 2001, Maid Marian – who runs Burning Man, despite what Larry’s recent “con sensus hier-archy of power” post describes – has conducted a census. Not just any old quiz, like you see on web sites or Facebook or the bottom of this page. A full, scientific research effort, pushed on hundreds of thousands of people over more than a decade, and conducted and analyzed with the involvement of many of the world’s top Universities. Anthropology, sociology, statistics, theology, game theory , business management, social engineering – these departments and many more have studied Burning Man’s Census results and found them sufficiently credible to use them in doctoral papers.

Now there’s a whole web site dedicated to these Census results, and a team of lab-coated volunteers collecting them. It’s kind of fascinating –  blackrockcensus.wordpress.com

They are the source of the data I am using in relation to ticket probability:

2012 36.499% Virgins

2013 39.999% Virgins

What Are the Odds?

This means 71% have been to 0, 1, or 2 Burns. To me, this category are the “newbies”. Once you have 3 under your belt, veteran is kind of a stretch but for the sake of simplicity in this post, let’s agreer to say it’s newbies (71%) versus 3+ veterans (29%).

Coming back to the point about statistical probability of being able to buy tickets. Let’s look at the Number of Burns data from this graph.

0: 40%

1: 20%

2: 11%

3: 7%

4: 7%

5: 2%

6: 2%

7: 2%

8:1%

9:1%

10: 1%

11 or more: 3%

I have taken the liberty of splitting the grouped years into individual estimates, so we can compare the numbers. They might differ slightly in actuality (3 could be 10% and 4 could be 4%), it’s not enough to be significant.

Consider this list your odds of getting a ticket, based on how many burns you say you’ve been to.

If it’s a lottery, if it’s pure chance, then it shouldn’t make any difference. However, statistical theory suggests there is a Normal Distribution.

The actual number seems to be significantly skewed in favor of Virgins, and against Veterans. If you’ve never been before, you have a better chance of getting a ticket than all of the people combined who’ve been 3+ times.

Pretty much 80% of the people at Cargo Cult had only been going since 2009-2010. And a mere 3% went before the year 2000. Less than 20% were going to Burning Man in 2007 or earlier.

Perhaps you could read these statistics and pass them off by saying “once you’ve been more than 3 times, you don’t want to go any more”.

As someone who has been 11 times, and knows hundreds of people who have been more than 3 times, I can assure you that is not the case. Sure, our desire to go tapers off somewhat  – but once you’ve been 3 times, you’re a Burner, dude. You are one of these people who goes to Burning Man, rather than “Oh, Burning Man. I went to that once”. If you only went once, you probably didn’t get it.

So technically, yes – if 40% are Virgins, then 60% must be “veterans”. If “veterans” means “3 or more times”, not “once or twice”, then it’s 29%.

Something to note is that it has been 40% Virgins the last 2 years, since Burning Man changed their ticketing system into this Lottery/STEP thing we have now. It’s about the same split each year- which I think is indicative that the statistical spread for 2014 will be similar. If they publish the results, then time will prove this prediction right or wrong.

When I say ticketing system, I’m not just talking about the web software for buying tickets, their selection algorithms or the 18+ different databases Burning Man uses to keep track of all this Big Data Radical Profiling. “The system” is the entire, multi-stage, Byzantine process that Burners are forced to go through just to attend their favorite event. This faux exclusiveness is frustrating, rather than cool. Time consuming, rather than efficient. And disheartening for the faithful.

Wondering all year, “will I be one of the lucky ones! Will my place in the queue come up? I want a ticket, I don’t have one yet. I’m wondering if I’m going to go this year or not” … This has now evolved to a system where everyone is forced to do the census to try to buy tickets. This is programmed by the social engineers with the power to stake out the flags in our city, and the software engineers who implement their instructions.

If you want to buy tickets you have to create a Burner Profile, even for those on the 15,000 strong VIP List. They made use of Promo Codes to provide access to the earlier released tickets, which helps profile even further – if you use a code, BMOrg know which VIP host you are a guest of. We know that they were trying to sell tickets to favored insiders and camps for $650, which included $250 going to the Burning Man Project.

The lab coated census-takers and the inquisitive computer brains behind them who are profiling us, can also assess their own penetration and popularity within each theme camp. Who rushed to buy tickets, who was not so quick, which codes didn’t get used til later in the year. This sort of Big Data insight is available by cross-referencing email address with camp member lists. They know who’s in what camp, and they can then look at the composition of newbies/veterans across entire camps. This type of information could be used to decide “yes/no” in terms of who’s in or out to individuals, groups, or entire camps at a time. It could also be used to inform camp placement. There are more than 1000 theme camps distributed across Black Rock City.

To get a ticket for Caravansary now, once you have created a Burner Profile, you have to log into BMOrg’s web site at 12:00:00 Pacific Time next Wednesday, August 6 2014. Now, if 50,000 people log into Amazon at the same time and buy the same e-book, Amazon won’t even blink. But Burning Man is not Amazon, as far as we know. In the past, this kind of time-synchronized economic action has created quite a load for BMOrg’s web site, and the software systems underneath it. Buying tickets at High Noon was a Wild West standoff – the quicker you were on the draw, the greater your chances to get a ticket. We heard stories of Burners who had bought a ticket at 12:07 and others who had missed out at 12:04. Some who closed their browser, cleared their cache, or even rebooted their computer, were able to get in at 12:19 and get tickets. Most, though, were trying to get into Burning Man’s lottery system for 20 minutes or more, missed out and had to wait in the STEP queue. The system seemed to work pretty well from a Burner perspective, as one Burner sold a ticket into STEP, a waiting Burner received a ticket.

2014 has been a little different. The public release of 38,000 tickets sold out in 44 minutes. BMOrg reported 2500 tickets sold back to STEP by Burners, 1500 tickets sold to Burners  through STEP, and 1000 tickets added to the OMG sale instead of sold to people in the STEP queue. This took the OMG total to 3000 available tickets. So many people were still waiting in STEP that they had to say “don’t bother signing up” earlier than expected.

Only 2.1% of this year’s Burners got their tickets through STEP, so it does not seem very effective – unless the objective is actually shaping that 40% Virgins number.

Why do this? Did they take a look at the queue, and decide there were too many “undesirables” waiting there?

Patience for months in STEP resulted in nothing to most people, except for a lucky 1500 or so who got tickets. Everyone else was waiting in vain, hoping to win an email that would let them buy a ticket.  It’s kind of frustrating, although of course it can be fixed at any time by buying a premium priced ticket on the secondary market.

All through the year, tickets have been available on the secondary market. So this is really about Burners who don’t want to pay above face value $650, or support scalpers – that’s who has been waiting in STEP. I’m sure this list includes many who could afford the $850 Stubhub price, but are hoping for a better option. After OMG, that’s it – secondary market is the only hope. The big question for the scalpers right now is, how many tickets are going to be sold in OMG? 3000? Or a lot more? The number of tickets and vehicle passes available on Stubhub is continuing to increase, and prices are volatile but clearly trending down.

Why is there so much profiling, and so many processes? Why so many delays this year, with tickets, with placement, with announcements? Whatever’s going on at BMOrg all year before the party happens, if it’s good, why does everything have to be so complicated, and changeable? If the answer is “there’s nothing going on behind the scenes”, well, that’s not so good either. They should be doing something with all our dollars. If they are doing something: is it being done for us, with us, or on us?

What benefit is it possibly serving, at this point? Please offer any explanations you have in the comments.

When you fill out your Burner profile, as well as the conventional name and address details they ask you:

• Playa Name (thus defeating the purpose of anonymity of a pseudonym)
• Organization/Company
• Title
• Which Years Have You Attended (Check all Boxes from Never to 1986)
• Projects and Affiliations, which is any of:
• Mutant Vehicle
  Art Installation
  Volunteer/Staff
  Regional/Year-Round Event
  Regional Community
  Burners Without Borders (BWB)
  Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF)
  Black Rock Solar (BRS)
  Burning Man Project
  Published Media or Educational
  Theme Camp

And you are asked to describe this in further detail – the “rich text” version of the profile. I bet some people write essays here.

From this Big Data they can calculate all kinds of graphs and reports on the whole population. How many Burners are Facebook vs Google employees? How many work for tech companies, how many work for colleges? The possibilities are endless.

You have to answer their questions and provide required data before you are in a position to buy a ticket. Even once you’ve completed it, you are not guaranteed that you will get a ticket to the event. Not all of the data is not compulsory, and some Burners would prefer to remain anonymous – which is telling in itself. I’m sure most would think “it’s Burning Man, I want to be part of the community” and fill it out. In which case a detailed profile of who you are and what camps and art cars you are affiliated with gets fed into the databases of BMOrg.

Decision A: What happens to all this data in terms of ticketing?

There are a few options:

1. It has no relevance to whether or not you can get a ticket

2. There is a statistically discernible pattern, which suggests this years’s ticket spread will be much like last years

3. There are one or more parameters set by the system, which, when cross-referenced with the data in the Burner profile, will influence your chances of getting a ticket.

4. Your “In/Out” decision is determined manually, by a team of insiders representing the World’s Biggest Door Bitch.

I’m sure there are more options than that but I’m trying to keep this simple. If you have other ideas though, please suggest them in the comments.

What happens the second the OMG sale opens?

It may be possible that all attempted OMG transactions process simultaneously. Or, the servers might give an overload message, so you have to try to connect again. Even if you get into the web site, you have to get through the e-commerce too until the credit card transaction is confirmed with everyone’s banks. Maybe all of that will work smoothly and glitch free, let’s hope so. Let us know how you get on, if you’re entering the OMG sale.

The next problem occurs from the limited number of tickets: officially, 3000 that are being offered in OMG. It seems that there are more than that who want to buy tickets at face value of $380.

So how does BMOrg’s system figure out how to distribute the last remaining tickets across all the Burners, if more are trying to log on than there are tickets?

Decision B: How does supply and demand get resolved by the system?

The options are:

1. First Come, First Served. The system just runs until all the remaining tickets have been processed, then stops
2. No-one has figured it out and we’ll find out when it happens
3. There are one or more parameters set by the system, which, when cross-referenced with the profile, influence the decision
4. There are WAY more than 3000 extra tickets, they’re going to sell tickets to whoever wants them, so no-one’s worried

The thing that makes me think it is Option 3 in both Decision cases A and B, is because two years in a row we have “40%” Virgins in both 2012 and 2013, the first time this has happened before. This uncanny and unprecedented statistical similarity coincides with the first time the ticket system has been controlled in this new manner. This is discussed in the movie Spark: A Burning Man Story for anyone who is interested in the back story, and also in our post commenting on Scribe’s coverage relating to this movie at the SF Bay Guardian: The Spark of Controversy.

If someone has decided that they want fresh blood at Burning Man, then they must have a way of implementing that. Either that or they are very, very good at magic, and just wished it into being from the aether. Miraculously, it just worked out that way, twice three times in a row(2011 Virgins: 47%), the same way. Let’s see if they can make it a 4-way for 2014

In my opinion, someone feeds the machine the parameters, tells it “this is the Burners we want” – and that’s who gets through all the hurdles and hoops and gates, winning the lottery means they get a chance to buy tickets. I don’t believe it’s pure chance, and I think there’s more to it than “First Come First Served”. Clearly, waiting in line in STEP didn’t mean you were going to get a ticket as soon as one was sold back through STEP, so at the very least – that aspect of the ticketing system has changed.

The Bottom Line

Being in STEP you had a 2.1% chance of getting a ticket, if you’re a virgin there was a 40% chance you were able to find a ticket this year, and in OMG the chances are 4.2%. If you’re a veteran, your chances are 29%. When you look at 27, 841 veterans against  657,493 people who have attended the party to date, it’s 4.2%.

Good luck Burners!

The proof is in the pudding, and the statistical distribution for 2014 should be telling. BMOrg knows already, of course – at least, for 67,000 of their 70,000 tickets – 95.7%.

Based on the past 2 years of this OMGSTEP system, it seems that if your Burner profile says “NEVER” you have a 40% chance of getting a ticket, the next highest number 1 has a 20% chance, anything else your chances are significantly diminished. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, as Nassim Taleb always says. His definition of ethics BTW is “if you see fraud, and don’t shout fraud, you are a fraud”. Don’t get fooled by randomness.

[Update 8/1/14 12:13pm]

Based on questions from Burners who read this post, I’ve done some further digging. BMOrg does not publish consistent Census results each year, but there is a lot of information there. Why does BMOrg not publish some data for certain years? One reason could be because it doesn’t portray the image they want to craft out of these numbers. For example 2008 and 2009 are the only years income data is missing – the years when that probably skewed lower, due to the Global Financial Crisis.

To the question “What is your personal income”, the answer “$100,000 or more” has been on a steady upwards trend. In 2003 it was the smallest group, at 10%; in 2013 it was the largest, at 20%. The numbers support our earlier observation that Burning Man is becoming a party for rich people – and possibly demonstrate that Virgins are bigger earners than Veterans, in our new “sharing” economy.

To the question “What was the percentage of Virgins in previous years?” Only limited data is available pre lottery, and it varies wildly – which is what you would expect, if it were purely random

2011 – 47% Virgins

2010 – 22% Virgins

2007 – 33% Virgins

 [Update 1=8/1/14 1:08pm]

Thanks to commenter A Balanced Perspective for reminding us that the 2012 and 2013 data results were adjusted for sampling bias.

The level of analysis that goes into this, using 10-13 years of census data, seems to be high, and pretty academically sound. The sample sets are very large, compared to the overall population. The percentage of veterans who want to go but can’t, is highly likely to increase each year by thousands, maybe tens of thousands. I wonder how many Regionals are now in this position too?

Not everyone trades the stock market based on what the chart tells them, but many take that seriously, just as many take astrology seriously. Is past performance a predictor of future behavior? “Coming soon”…

[Update 8/2/14 12:21pm] Hunter from BRC Census has commented on this post. Continuing the discussion and analysis here: More Math(s)

Burner Map is a tool that lets you indicate where you’re camping, so that your Facebook and other friends can find you. So far 48, 476 people have used it (over several years).

Now they have announced a new innovation, to help Burners who need tickets.

Help Friends. Screw Scalping.

BurnerMap now matches up burners in need with friends who have extras.

There is no charge for this nifty service. (But if it turns you on, slip a bill into our fishnets!)

Just please gift tickets or sell at face value because scalping is worse than shirtcocking.

Even though this tool helps you find friends to make exchanges with, you should still be aware of possible scams.

Get it here.

Screw STEP, there are still Burners waiting in the queue who were told they got tickets in June but haven’t received them yet. Burner Jennifer wrote:

We got word on June 23rd that we got tickets through the STEP program and it’s now August 9th and we still don’t have tickets and are literally leaving for early arrival build in 10 days…..Please tell us what we can do. Will someone from either TicketFly or the Burning Man organization respond to this thread? Or tell me who I can reach out to about this?

In other Ticket news, we hear that BMOrg fucked up the early access passes by sending camp organizers a single PDF file containing all the passes. Unless the camp all live together off the Playa as well, this becomes a distribution challenge – you can’t just print them out and give them to people. Each organizer now has to waste their time splitting this into separate files and re-scanning. If you’re in this position and using a Mac, you can select View | Thumbnails in Preview to make the chore faster.

Burning Man is well aware of the problem with the way in which TicketFly sent out our EA passes! They are working hard and fast to see if there is ANYTHING they can do to fix it. If they can they will let us know. Likely hood is they will need to address it with Ticketfly for next year.

Please do not email placement about it. Most likely we will have to be radically self reliant and come up with our own solutions.

For me: I printed them, wrote names on them, took pics on my phone and will email them out to my team.

SF Weekly’s The Snitch has a “Fauxpinion” piece by Benjamin Wachs, a “literary chameleon”. Funnily enough, he wrote the same book as another chameleon, BMOrg’s Caveat Magister.

Caveat is the author (under a clever pseudonym) of “A Guide to Bars and Nightlife in the Sacred City,” which has nothing to do with Burning Man.

Re-blogged from SFWeekly:

Tech Industry Believes it Invented San Francisco, Burning Man, and Sex

Posted By Benjamin Wachs on Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 7:30 AM

Apple vice president of design Louis Harris is especially proud of the tech industry for inventing Burning Man, a 27-year-old annual arts event, in 2008.

“Prior to the tech industry, no one had really considered creating experimental communities, or going camping,” Harris said. “But then thousands of tech workers disrupted the desert and invented DJs.”

Not everything has gone well since then, Harris admitted. “The problem with Burning Man is that since the tech industry invented it, it’s gotten so popular that all these artists are showing up, and they don’t know anything about the culture.”

That’s also a problem with what many see as the tech industry’s crowning achievement: the city of San Francisco.

“We really knocked that one out of the park,” said Twitter Vice President Larry Johnson. “When we got here there wasn’t a single unaffordable building, there were musicians in lofts, and the place was just filled with women. But we’ve really turned that around.”

LinkedIn Senior Data Analyst Rod Suchet agreed. “San Francisco is famous the whole world over as a city of art, and art was originally an App for the iStore. It’s famous for its restaurants, and restaurants were originally developed so that Google’s cafeteria could telecommute. Honestly, was there even a music scene in San Francisco before Pandora digitized it? Did this town even have an economy before we started to displace it?”

As of press time, Suchet had meant to Google the answer but had been distracted by a cat video. Cats, for those not in the know, were invented by YouTube in 2006.

Burning Man has always hosted a large number of nerds. As time goes on and technology becomes more pervasive and sophisticated, new capabilities are unlocked for the citizens of Black Rock City. Some Luddites say “no! We are pagans, we are druids! We are burning an effigy and riding bicycles and tripping on psychedelics! Smart phones are evil”. Others say “get with the times, grandpa”.

The NextWeb has a story by Ryan Matzner, who has not yet been to Burning Man. He’s bringing with him the Radically Inclusive Community Gift of connection to the Internet. If enough people with smartphones install these apps, then the whole festival will be wired.

Re-blogged from The Next Web, emphasis ours:

RYAN MATZNER

Ryan Matzner is the Director of Strategy at Fueled, a mobile design and development shop based in NYC and London.

---

In just over a week, I will make my first pilgrimage to Burning Man. And while I look forward to leaving the mainstream grid to frolic with fellow creative creatures, I’m not so keen on what I understand is a common struggle at Burning Man: losing track of your friends on the playa.

Some people will rely on printed Facebook invites and directions from BurnerMap to find their friends, but these days, workable printers only exist in offices with PCs. And once you’ve left that Walmart in Reno and all other traces of civilization behind, you’re on the playa with no cell coverage and only limited oases of Wi-Fi, meaning you can’t rely on texting to find your mates.

“Meet u by skeletons rowing giant canoes. Will bring steam trike.”

Or at least it did mean that… until now. In iOS 7.1, Apple quietly enabled technology we’ve been talking about for years. It’s called mesh networking, and it’s about to get seriously revolutionary.

There’s a couple useful devices out there that connecting users offline, including Bluetooth-powered goTenna, but with mesh networking, all you need if your phone. Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity Framework gave developers a platform on which to create mesh networking applications.

It’s the same platform that Apple’s AirDrop uses to share files directly via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, without the need for any intermediary devices.

App developer Open Garden has taken advantage of this new technology by building a proof-of-concept chat app for iOS and it’s about to bring mesh networking to the masses. The team also offers an Android version, which relies on Open Garden’s own mesh networking platform. The app, called FireChat, and others like it, is the tool for finding your friends at Burning Man.

…out on the playa at Burning Man, there is no pervasive, reliable, centralized network to collect and redistribute our messages.

“Time 2 burn Man. Bring matchz.”

Enter the mesh network.

With FireChat, or with other similar mesh apps like The Serval Mesh, installed (do it before you come to Burning Man, because, you know, no internet access, right?), my device connects with all other “meshed” devices within my Bluetooth range (about 10 meters)… and they connect with all the similarly enabled devices within their range. And so on, and so on…

If there’s a high enough density of devices using mesh networks on the playa, my message gets passed along from device to device to device (each serving as a node in the network) until it finds its way to my friend a half mile away over in Camp Contact.

Meanwhile, my device is helping pass along the messages of everyone else in the mesh. There’s no server needed, no weighty infrastructure, just all us individuals and our connected devices, weaving together the community one packet at a time.

… Burning Man traditionalists are going to say this is mainstreaming the Burning Man experience…there’s a principle of immediacy to be upheld, and that it’s important to directly experience what’s right there in front of you.

That’s cool. But when I’m having that mind-blowing experience, I want to send out a call to my friends to come experience it with me… immediately!

And wouldn’t you know, mesh networking is actually quite consistent with the principles of Burning Man. It’s…

Radically Inclusive: Anyone can join, no password needed, no sign-up required, all are welcome.

Communal Effort: We each do our little part, and the tech self-assembles amongst us.

Gifting: You’re giving freely of your device’s connectivity to everyone else in the mesh, simply by being on the playa. You won’t even know to whom you’re giving these gifts or when they’re receiving them. It will simply be happening, in the background, all the time.

It’s also a brilliant example of the power of community. The more we connect, the stronger the mesh will get, and the more useful the network will be for all of us.

Mesh networks are changing the game. So, consider these tips and download some apps before you drop out of civilization and, when you arrive on the playa, join me on the network. We’ll wrap the Man in mesh and light him up with shared connectivity. See you there.

San Francisco’s KGO news radio interviewed me today about the anti-rich, anti-tech, and dare we say, anti-Burning Man sentiment that seems to be sweeping the media this week. I should have recorded the interview myself, because I said more than what they used here. Next time.

Zos interview with KGO Radio SF August 22, 2014

Go Niners! And Raiders.

That’s

SF Bay Guardian

New York Times

KGO

…a pretty nice couple of days worth of recognition for us.

Here is the WIRED magazine article from 1996 that I referred to. It’s written by famed cyber-guru Bruce Sterling. Being on the cover of WIRED back then, in the fledgling days of the commercial Internet, was like being on the cover of TIME or Fortune today. Bigger, maybe.

Their community was about 8000 people strong back then. Other online communities of the time were in the millions, like S.O.S.

Although I’m not going to Burning Man next week, I am going to be full time on this blog for the week. Stay tuned – if you can, and if you dare.

…Mike Judge, that is. If you haven’t seen his new show Silicon Valley check it out, it’s hilarious. The show brilliantly skewers Silicon Valley and the Bay Area hipster/tech culture, while also giving you characters you can care about and a story you can get behind.

After Billionaire Burner Elon Musk told Judge he had to go to Burning Man, because “Burning Man is Silicon Valley”, the two made peace – Judge featured Burning Man posters on the walls of the “work/live space” that the show is set in.

Like me, Elon is giving Caravansary a miss. There’s good news, though, fellow Burners: Tech Crunch is reporting that part of Season 2 may see Pied Piper heading out to the Playa.

I would love to see the Beavis and Butthead and Idiocracy creator’s take on Burning Man from the viewpoint of its lovably awkward startup geeks. I wonder if there will be sherpas and shark-jumping?

Re-blogged from TechCrunch.com

HBO’s Silicon Valley Could Go To Burning Man Next Season

Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, but that could change this year. We hear the HBO Silicon Valley creator may be going to do some research on what many believe is an essential experience for Silicon Valley insiders.

Hope Sergei and Larry and Eric and all the rest of the Googlers and Nooglers are having a spiffing time out on the Playa.

For everyone else, there’s this:

Google’s Eric Schmidt at Burning Man 2007. Check out the bandanna, does he wear that shit in Oakland? If he’s gangsta, he’s a Blood not a Crip

The idea that Google and Gangsters have some things in common is cautiously expressed in a fascinating article from Makeshift Magazine, which quotes from a book “The Misfit Economy”. Forbes introduces it with their own article and headline, highlighting Makeshift and the revolutionary new movement called “Maker” that underpins them, and this whole new economy.

Is this Steve Forbes taking a pot shot at Google, while its founders are out on the Playa, by suggesting they are “gangsta” and connected to the shadow economy? We know for a fact they’re closely connected to the NSA and the ruling oligarchy’s Bildeberg Group, “the most influential group in the world”.

Google were the first company to culturally appropriate Burner culture, using Burning Man’s logo to launch their own “doodle” in 1998.

At that time, Google didn’t have a business model, it was a completely free service. A text box with search results. Adding graphics was a big, bold step for them. They deliberately linked their brand with Burning Man, in an effort to appear “hip” to their Stanford classmates and the fledging dot-com industry that was booming up around them in San Francisco. But it was more than just a symbol that they were cool – it was also symbolic of them becoming a company, just like Burning Man had before them. Larry and Sergey returned from the Playa and incorporated their company immediately upon their return from Burning Man. Burning Man, this Pagan fire ritual, was the symbol used to mark the corporate birth of Google.

How much money did they make since this commercial exploit of Burner culture? Not much, only about $400 billion.

They’ve boasted about their links to Burning Man ever since, with the help of Stanford professors. They used Burning Man to prototype Google Maps, among other technologies. Whoever knows exactly what other experimentation they’ve been conducting in this big desert petri dish, isn’t telling.

Google have more than a billion customers, and read half a billion peoples’ email looking for “keywords”. That’s mostly how they make money, selling that keyword information to advertisers.

This company, staffed with many Burners, is trying to put cameras connected to the Internet on everyone’s face, as well as monitoring our behavior in our homes with the Internet of Things. It is making robotic self driving cars, and calls its operating system “Android”. The guy in charge of all this believes that humans will merge with machines and live for centuries or longer – thus creating another, superior, dominant species: and relegating Man to the status of an animal. This is called Transhumanism and his name is Ray Kurzweil, if you’d like to look any of this up for yourself.

Recently Google acquired Boston Dynamics, the maker of some of the world’s most advanced military robots. Thousands of their robots have already been used in combat zones.

Nothing to worry about, right? We all know SkyNet is good. And Google are Burners so they must be good! Right? Their motto is “Don’t be evil”, after all. What’s evil? There’s no book on it, according to CEO Eric Schmidt. “Evil is whatever Sergei says is Evil”. These days the CEO says “don’t be evil” is the stupidest rule ever, and the motto has changed to “You can make money without doing evil”. It’s the 6th of their 10 Principles Things, and there’s no further part that says “…and therefore, that’s the only way you’re allowed to make money”.

Lately, the Billionaire Burners from Google are talking about having their own Burning Man-style Autonomous Zones. Maybe we will start to see more robotic art cars on the Playa, on top of the hundreds of drones and famous glassholes.

First the introduction, from Forbes magazine:

According to an upcoming book and Kickstarter project, The Misfit Economy, it appears that Google and gangsters have more than a few things in common. The shadow economy, hidden economy, and informal trade are all names for what some also call the black market. It is that “place” where trade happens illegally, but these terms would not capture the full story of changes in the world’s economy.

Makeshift magazine writes about this undercover, below the surface, movement if you could call it a movement. I call it reality.

They are not, from my perspective, seeking to cover or promote solely illegal activity (such as drug dealing), but the innovation that takes place when resources are scarce. One could argue that people get into dealing drugs or trading illicit/illegal products do so because of a lack of education or resources or any variety of reasons, however, the reality is some of the rules are bound up in cultural rules that those on the fringe of mainstream society do not find relevant or fair or useful.

The fascinating part about this new magazine is that it has citizen journalists, blogger/travelers, who are finding and sharing unique approaches to commerce and innovative solutions to common problems…there are new rules of capitalism andMakeshift is catching that long tail in a new economy.

Read the rest of the introduction here.

From Makeshift:

What do gangsters and Google have in common?

Two young drug dealers marvel at the ingenuity of their Chicken McNuggets and imagine the innovator who must have become incredibly rich off his invention. An older, more experienced dealer, D’Angelo Barksdale, mocks their naiveté, explaining that the man who invented the McNugget is an unknown at the very bottom of the McDonald’s corporate ladder who dreamed up a moneymaking idea for those at the top. What does this story tell you? It’s essentially a debate on the provenance of innovation: is it driven from the top, by the big hitters? Or from the bottom, from the unknown, underground “misfits”?

This scene—one of the best in The Wire (if you could ever choose)—captures the essence of perhaps the most prevalent myth of innovation: that it comes only from those at the top, within the closed doors of corporate, Silicon Valley, and Ivy League labs across the globe. Most, like the young drug dealer, still believe the engine of the economy is fueled by innovators working in the formal world and on the pages of Harvard Business Review.

The Misfit Economy, an upcoming book and growing movement, is dispelling this myth. The “itch” to innovate also comes from the ships of pirates, the underground world of hackers, the havens of Mexican drug lords, and the enterprising underworld of Mumbai. Misfit innovators operating outside of the formal economy are a vital part of our economic history (consider how Johannes Guttenberg, Nikola Tesla, and even street peddlers shaped modern cities). And they are a part of our economic future: by 2050, one third of the world’s workers will be employed by the informal economy. If you combine the annual income of informal markets across the globe, it comes to a staggering USD 10 trillion.

…Gang life…is not all hip hop and Pimp My Ride. It’s also teeming with practical ingenuity… like every forward-thinking manager, [gangs strive] to create a culture of entrepreneurialism. Consider Google’s now-famous 20 percent rule. As the company grew more hierarchical, it sought to maintain its enterprising start-up feel. So it continued to encourage its employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on their own ventures, many of which became formal and indispensable Google products like Gmail and Google Talk.

In gang life, as in the corporate world, entrepreneurial spirit or the drive to “get ahead” can also threaten those in power. The pursuit of recognition and esteem drives progress yet can also be disruptive. But there are notable differences too. While whistle blowers in companies are often penalized, many within gangs constantly face opportunities to rat out colleagues. And the odds are, the bigger the gang, the higher probability there will be a rat. For this reason, gangs have had to radically downsize in recent years to ensure loyalty.

The art of loyalty is something Google knows well. In an effort to recruit and retain employees, Google is notorious for creating a “sticky” culture. The company is known for a culture of play and experimentation. Successful gangs are similar. They understand that culture is the number one value proposition. 

And in 1996, …[a gang] overhauled their vision and brand, transitioning from a “street gang” to a “street organization” with a more mission-centric focus. The [gang] involved themselves in political demonstrations while still maintaining its “sacred cows”…

Read the entire article here, and the Forbes introduction here.

Also check out this interesting infographic from Makeshift:

A great story from Naked Capitalism by Lambert Strether:

Has the Burning Man Bubble Burst?

It’s worth reading in its entirety, they’ve broken down the Tin Principles. Even if you don’t agree with their interpretation, they bring up some great things to think about:

So what to make of it all? Of course, the About page’s claim that “To truly understand this event, one must participate” is silly; that’s like saying that to understand Napoleon’s march on Moscow, you have to have been a member of the Grand Armée. In fact, people with the advantages of time and distance from that event — historians, say — are probably better equipped to understand that event than participants, who necessarily had very partial and limited views. But we don’t have to argue about that; the About page gives us a perfectly valid method of “truly” understanding: The 10 Principles. So we can lay reports against the principles, and see how well they match. So here we go.

Full story here.

Some highlights from the comments:

Burning Man is, and has always been, a superficial, self-important load of crap.

Those Burning Man people have a sly sense of humour Lambert. Putting on their own upper class Festivel of the Outre on Labor Day Weekend. (Do the Sherpas get Monday off?)

Your assessment is spot on. What began as a counter-cultural event is now a main stream affair, nudity optional. In fact nudity is the only thing still tolerated outside the law. I chalk that up to the huge law enforcement presence–every local, state, and federal agency is more than adequately represented–who enjoy this distraction. The efficiency of this event in encouraging lawbreakers to congregate and pay large fines they can afford is not lost on the law enforcement hosts.

I knew the event turned a corner when everyone I knew who hated the radical idea of this event and the bizarre set that it attracted suddenly became participants buying and renting bigger and bigger motor home to shut out the elements–other people and the environment.
Yes, it is still a great spectacle and one worth experiencing, but it’s not pointing us in any direction for the future except endless amusement.

I’ve been three times, and the event is, in its entirety, a study in hypocrisy. I was bullied by the thuggish “rangers,” there is petty theft everywhere, the official law enforcement is constantly roving to collect on-the-spot fines, and the constant techno music and club drugs will sap your will to live. So many jaw-grinding e-heads stumbling around, and then the frat boys show up near the end to ogle boobies and catcall. If anything, it’s a concentration of white, privileged people flashing their peacock feathers at one another, and not much else. Interesting anthropologically, in any case.

How can the bubble burst on a venture that monetizes jumping the shark? Oh, let me see. It must have something to do with that “monetizes” term. And the bigger fool dynamic embodied in the term “jumping the shark”.

So far they have not run out of bigger fools with ever increasing amounts of money. When it turns into Davos in the Desert they might reach their limit.

It has now reached the phase of commercialized envy; it must end soon or the phase of commercialized nostalgia can never begin. The “I remember when….” stratification of oldies is already beginning

Walked into a Denny’s in Las Vegas one night and bumped into one of the organizers for Burning Man. This was back in 2004. After talking for awhile, he gave me a personal invitation to Burning Man. He invited me out there and told me to go there before it is ruined. By “ruined”, he meant exactly this. The rich were invading yet another space that the lower class made. They need their “cool” points

Is it possible for the “Ten Principles” of Burning Man to be more insufferably vapid and hypocritical, especially when laid against its transparently bogus claims of “radical inclusivity” and “self-sufficiency?”

So typical of the unmindful sense of privilege of the lumpen bourgeoisie – youthful, white sub-demographic – which will return from this resource-importing circle jerk/test market, to continue colonizing a handful of bubble-driven cities and resort Valhallas, while the rest of the country turns into Detroit or West Virginia…

The principles are contradictory. Radical self reliance is in conflict with reality and community building. No one is radically self reliant. A person who is not cared for as a baby and young child will not survive to have the illusion that he is self made.

Putting a large encampment with enormous amounts of vehicles and giant art projects is not leaving the desert pristine. It may look “pristine” afterwards to people who don’t look very hard but it is not pristine to the wildlife during the experience.

A community that keeps out the riff raff and has servants to do their work is not about sharing both work and play in common.

I think it is great that people with money use it for a creative purpose. But Burning man cannot achieve some of its better goals simply because it excludes so many people from its “community”. We desperately need a place of interaction between rich and poor. That is something our society rarely creates. Occupy did this in some places. It is that very creation that will best allow real creativity to flourish.

All the TEDs, the Hollyhocks etc. would benefit from a radical infusion of actual outsiders to the elite income class. Yet these events will not be transformative because they deny class divisions, participate in creating more of them, and thus exactly mirror what is wrong with our society.

It is hard to create fundamentally anarchic community in a fundamentally capitalist society but, still, there is a nostalgia for at least the illusion of freedom and I think Burning Man supplies that and I don’t see any problem with it–it’s still a sort of Club Med for vacationers with bad weather.

Anyway, what interests me is the vision of Burning Man and the fact they haven’t been able to create that vision. In fact, anarchic projects have to be, by definition, spontaneous not planned. Woodstock is the classic example and those that participated in it felt very liberated more than those who I’ve talked to who have gone to Burning Man. We are meant to function in a world that is more humane as per the guidelines of Burning Man but unless we change our values on the elemental level, i.e., that materialism and selfishness are not virtues but vices, we cannot do anything but create temporary theme parks that give us an illusion of liberation. At present Burning Man is no more in the service of human liberation than any other theme park and to expect it to be anything more is absurd. It is yet another temple to conspicuous consumption and status seeking.

WIRED magazine has a report on Agora, the new online drug bazaar “marketplace of anything”. It is based on Agorism, a philosophy that a free, stateless society can be achieved via disruptive market means. Forget counter-culture, that meme jumped the shark. It’s time to move on to counter-economics.

From Wikipedia:

Agorism is a libertarian social philosophy that advocates creating a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging in a manner with aspects of peaceful revolution. It was first proposed by libertarian philosopher Samuel Edward Konkin III in 1975, with contributions partly by J. Neil Schulman.^[1]

Agorists consider themselves market anarchists. While many characterize it as a form of left-libertarianism,^[2] others consider it a branch of, or a transition strategy for achieving, anarcho-capitalism. Agorists generally oppose voting for political candidates and political reform. Instead, agorists stress the importance of alternative strategies rather than politics to achieve a free society. Agorists claim that we can achieve a free society more easily and sooner by employing such alternative methods as education, direct action, alternative currencies, entrepreneurship, self sufficiency, and most importantly “counter-economics“.^[1] Agorists consider their message to be scientific because science is an appeal to reason, which they believe is only possible in the Agora or free market; they also argue that State backed, regulated and funded science is illegitimate.^[3]

From WIRED.com:

For two and a half years, the Dread Pirate Roberts and his Silk Road black market ruled the Dark Web. But last year’s FBI’s takedown of that narcotics smorgasbord opened the underground trade to competitors. Now those sites have a new leader, one that’s bigger than the Silk Road ever was and continues to grow explosively.

The online bazaar for contraband known as “Agora” now has more product listings than any other online black market, according to a report released last week by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit focused on internet safety. The analysis counts 16,137 products for sale on the site, which is protected by the anonymity software Tor and accepts only bitcoin. That’s about 200 more listings than Silk Road 2.0, a reincarnation of the original Silk Road launched earlier this year by several of the same administrators. It’s also several thousand more than were offered on the first Silk Road before its seizure in October of last year.

“Just as on the rest of the internet, users on the dark net are very quick to move on to new things and move away from those products and websites that seem stale and old,” says Adam Benson, communications director at Digital Citizens Alliance. “Maybe that time has come for Silk Road.”

…unlike Silk Road, it allows users to sell several categories of weapons, including powerful semi-automatic firearms. The site is still less permissive, however, than markets such as Evolution, which also allows the sale of hacked credit card information and other stolen goods. Agora’s “market rules” ban not only stolen property but also “assassinations or any other services which constitute doing harm to another,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “poisons,” “child pornography” and “live action snuff/hurt/murder audio/video/images.”

Despite those restrictions, Agora’s administrators haven’t displayed any of the political bravado of Dread Pirate Roberts, who frequently posted libertarian manifestos in Silk Road’s user forums and even hosted an online book club around topics in free market economic theory. Silk Road 2.0 similarly proclaims those radical principles; “You are writing history with every item purchased here,” reads a message on the site’s homepage. “Silk Road is not a marketplace. Silk Road is a global revolt. The idea of freedom is immortal.” 

…Instead of political rhetoric, the tactic that set Agora above the rest of the dark web when it launched earlier this year may have been its sense of exclusivity: Users can sign up only with invite codes, although those codes are freely distributed on other market forums and Reddit and can be reused. “It might build some allegiance,” says Digital Citizen’s Alliance’s Benson, “It gives users a sense that they’ve been vetted and that some people have been weeded out” such as law enforcement, fraudsters or less in-the-know users.

Read the full article here.

It’s an interesting counter-balance to Re-code’s report from Burning Man, about finding Camp Bitcoin next to the Orgy Dome [update - it wasn't anywhere near orgy dome, according to Burner Debra]:

Flipping through my 160-page official Burning Man book of events, I noticed something strange: Camp Bitcoin was hosting a “worthless currency exchange.”

Bitcoin Camp?! Worthless currency exchange? I had some candies in my backpack that could certainly count as currency here.

It was about 4 pm when I left the Burning Man Reddit meetup, where I had been listening to two dozen guys talk “Star Wars” trivia, and had been misted by someone with a pesticide sprayer full of water. The Redditers told me that the bitcoin guys were just a few streets away, in the Anahasana Village, and that they were a bunch of nerds, real geeks.

The Anahasana Village (Burning Man villages are collections of smaller camps that share resources, like a kitchen) is famous for its contact-improv sessions (standing cuddle puddles) and its Orgy Dome (what it sounds like).

It’s not where one might expect to find Camp Bitcoin.

There, about a dozen bitcoin dudes were sitting cross-legged in a circle under some scaffolding, an old orange parachute draped over it for shade. They were talking about all the money they could have made if they had bought various cryptocurrencies at various points..

One bitcoin camper, lean and shirtless Josh Katen, explained to me that this isn’t really the bitcoin camp anymore.

“The Bitcoin leader was arrested right before Burning Man ’cause he was maybe helping the FBI, and … Anyway, we’re the Dogecoin Camp now,” he said.

Another shirtless fellow…said he had a vision, based on Burning Man’s gifting economy. In his vision, cryptocurrency is just the first step toward making a large-scale gift economy.

“Once we learn to monetize everything, we take this gifting economy out to the world,” Keim said. “We can take the Illuminati’s cyber gold and silver, and distribute it evenly. Once we have this, we can live in abundance, rather than scarcity.”

… came to Burning Man to see what a gifting- and abundance-based economy could look like. Money and branding aren’t allowed at Burning Man. Everyone brings or prepares gifts (alcohol, snacks such as pancakes, or little necklaces that say “Burning Man 2014”) that they exchange.

“One of the biggest barriers to the gift economy is debt, the usury. With cryptocurrency we can reengineer abundance rather than scarcity,”

…someone riding past their camp earlier that day had yelled at them — “F—ing bitcoin’s not allowed on the playa,” or something to that effect. The campers had been surprised but not terribly offended…

“I’m the messiah, and money grows on trees,” Keim said.

No, but seriously, what’s the gist?

“I am the messiah,” he repeated, getting on his dust-and-EL-wire-covered bicycle.

Before I could reenter the tent, an extremely attractive couple stopped me and eyed me up and down.

“This is it, right?” asked the man, who was wearing a top hat and genie pants, which for some reason wasn’t even a turn-off anymore. (I’ve been here too long.)

It?

“Tantra tent?” he asked, cocking his head.

No. Not tantra. Bitcoin.

Sounds like Mr Bitcoin messiah might have been tooting his own horn, if you know what I mean. Scarface, if you don’t.

Full story here.

Kudos to Nellie Bowles and Re/Code, your Burning Man coverage this year has been superb.

Money is technically not banned at Burning Man, and Bitcoins certainly aren’t…yet. The principle of “DeCommodification” conveniently stretches to include a lot of things. If you read the fine print of the Principles, they never actually use the word money. They do, however, place a ban on “consumption” – if you want to partake, you must participate.

Everything’s free but nothing’s for sale. Gifting is encouraged, but barter is verboten.  Volunteering (ie free labor) is encouraged, as long as it is on projects that are for the benefit of BMOrg. The systems they’ve built to facilitate all of this are rudimentary, and don’t seem to be much of an Organizational priority. The priorities are more like new ticketing schemes and revenue streams, corporate tax structure, self-promotion, and Big Data: “Burner Profiles” and Census results. The information collected about us continues to become more detailed, as the ticket prices head skywards.

BMOrg claim to be pioneers in the “sharing economy”, yet it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly they do that relates to it. “We don’t sell drinks” is not quite the same as “we’ve figured out new economic models for people to peacefully co-exist”. Rather than being counter-economics, the economics of Burning Man are not dissimilar to those of the Pharaohs. Pharaoh gets the gold while the sherpas do the labor.

Is this all that could ever be? Do we create a radical experiment, year after year, by doing the same old shit in the same old way – just add Virgins?

This is what cellphones looked like in 1986

Burning Man started in the mid-80’s, when Madonna’s new album was “Like a Virgin” and the first gangsta rap song had just been released. Now we are well into the 21st century. In the 90’s we got the Web, in the Naughties we got smart phones and social media, in the Teenies we got Twitter and Uber and NSA spying and Google buying military robot companies.

Larry Harvey was asked about Bitcoin in New York in 2013.

I’m in Dr Kittay’s class at Columbia University called Technology, Religion, and Future. Today, we had an event on Burning Man, where the Burning Man committee including Larry Harvey (Founder of Burning Man) came in to talk about the event with our class. The link is below

http://blog.burningman.com/2013/10/eventshappenings/event-the-founders-speak-burning-man-technology-religion-the-future/

I asked if they would consider accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment. They unanimously said yes! At first Larry was like, hmm never thought about that. Then one guy said, well its not really that stable yet but hell, if it makes people happy lets do it! They all nodded in agreement. Woot! Now they just have to follow up on it by adding the ‘Pay in BTC’ button to the ticket purchase section of their site.

Of course, fast forward a year later and there is not so much as a hint of Bitcoin entering the Burning Man universe, yet alone experimenting with new ideas of liberty like Agorism. Quite what is the vision for this social engineering petri dish over the next century remains to be seen: it’s “coming soon”, like the video of the Founders talk at Columbia. BMOrg are still struggling to mail tickets to people in San Francisco, and are completely unable to mail them to other countries. Meanwhile we have Burnier-Than-Thous bemoaning smart phones, drones, sherpas, dubstep DJs, even the postal service. Will technology innovation in the Default world have to stay there, while Burning Man stagnates, just so that Burnier-Than-Thous can feel they’re doing it better?

Is this the future we choose for the experiment of Black Rock City: no more innovation, just more complaining and more douchebags? Rude Man, as I saw it called on Facebook today.

Their Plan for the Playa, it seems, is to force us to accept an ever-increasing range of Default world transactions (all done solely via BMOrg, with the Feds getting a cut too), and an ever-decreasing amount of Gifting. Commerce is banned, so’s barter. Citizens don’t get a say in the city, so there is no political discourse in this civilization – except for the guest speakers the Founders invite in. Burning Man doesn’t care what you believe, as long as it’s the Ten Principles.

Perhaps it is significant that BMOrg are strengthening their ties to the two major political parties, while at the same time trying to dismiss the streak of libertarianism and anarchy that Burning Man originally sprung forth from.

When innovation and creativity are regulated out of existence by bureaucracy, the subversive dissenters, the anarcho-crypto-punks, start looking for remote wildernesses where they can go and create the New New Thing.

“Good riddance!”, cry the Townspeople, when the Sheriffs chase the Cowboys out of town. It matters not to them that the Cowboys started the town, hired the Sheriffs, and invited all the Townspeople in. “Cowboys are bad”, say the Townspeople. “Everyone knows that”.

So says Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.com, which went public last Friday in the biggest IPO in history. His stock, whose largest shareholder is the Billionaire Burner-founded company Yahoo, had a healthy 38% “first day pop”, though it was soon eclipsed by Burner-founded market disruptor Urbanise (ASX:UBN) which managed +50% in its public debut yesterday. A big congratulations to those soon-to-be Billionaire Burners, who hit a home run with this project inspired by using technology to promote better Communal Living and digital Self Reliance.

Jack Ma is a charismatic young leader, and now the richest man in China. If his advice applies to you, you might not like it; and if you’re already successful, you’ll probably agree with him.

Go big or go home: otherwise, you’re wasting your youth.

Jack Ma looking happy at the New York Stock Exchange.

this is the face of a man who just made $16 billion.

Re-blogged from ZeroHedge:

You are poor because you have no ambition.

by Jack Ma

Jack Ma: Before I founded Alibaba, I invited 24 friends to my house to discuss the business opportunity. After discussing for a full two hours, they were still confused — I have to say that I may not have put myself across in a clear manner manner then. The verdict: 23 out of the 24 people in the room told me to drop the idea, for a multitude of reasons, such as: ‘you do not know anything about the internet, and more prominently, you do not have the start-up capital for this’ etc etc.

There was only one friend (who was working in a bank then) who told me, “If you want to do it, just try it. If things don’t work out the way you expected it to, you can always revert back to what you were doing before.” I pondered upon this for one night, and by the next morning, I decided I would do it anyway, even if all of the 24 people opposed the idea.

When I first started Alibaba, I was immediately met with strong opposition from family and friends. Looking back, I realised that the biggest driving force for me then was not my confidence in the Internet and the potential it held, but more of this:  “No matter what one does, regardless of failure or success, the experience is a form of success in itself.” You have got to keep trying, and if it doesn’t work, you always can revert back to what you were doing before.

As with this quote by T.E. Lawrence – “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream in the dark recesses of the night awake in the day to find all was vanity. But the dreamers of day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, and make it possible.”

Jack Ma: People lose out in life because of these 4 reasons:

1. Being myopic to opportunity
2. Looking down on opportunities
3. Lacking understanding
4. Failing to act quickly enough

You are poor, because you have no ambition.

Ambition is living a life of great ideals; a magnificent goal in life that must be realised.

In this world, there are things that are deemed unfathomable, but there is nothing in this world that cannot be done. The depth of one’s ambition determines the potential of one’ future.

By way of example:

The Story of Juliet Wu Shihong – one of China’s first-generation professional managers, who gained success by working her way up the ranks from a cleaner, a nurse, a marketing executive, through self-education and learning on the job.

 

 

She had been the general manager for the world’s most famous multinational IT groups’ Chinese branches (Microsoft 1985-1998; IBM 1998-1999). She is also China’s first successful international corporate executive to join the executive team of a domestic private firm. Wu was seen as a symbol of the new generation of business executives that China has produced in its economic reform and opening-up.

 

When Wu started off in a big company working from the lowest ranks, her daily job was to pour tea and sweep floors. Once, because she forgot her staff pass, the company’s guard stopped her at the door and denied her entry. She explained to the guard that she was indeed one of the company’s employees, and that she had merely left the building for a short while to purchase office supplies.

 

Despite her pleas, the guard still did not allow to enter. As she stood at the gate, she watched as those of similar age to her, but smartly dressed in business attire walking through without having to show their passes.

 

She asked the guard, “Why are these people allowed through without producing a pass?” The guard dismissed her coldly nonetheless.

 

That was the turning point for Wu – she felt great shame, her self-esteem trampled on.

 

She looked at herself, dressed in shabby clothes and pushing a dirty push cart. Looking back at those dressed in smart attire, her heart felt a deep ache from the sudden realization of the sorrow and grief from being discriminated. From that moment, she vowed never to allow herself to be shamed like this again, and to become world-famous.

 

Since then, she used every opportunity to enrich herself. Every day, she was the first to arrive at work, and the last one to leave. She made every second count, spending her time learning the ropes. Her efforts soon paid off; she was made a sales representative, and quickly progressed to being the regional general manager of this multinational company in China. Wu did not possess strong academic qualifications, and was revered as the ‘Queen of Part-timers’. Subsequently, she assumed the position of GM of IBM China. This is the Wu Shihong, the heroine in China’s business circle.

 

If not for the incident, Wu Shihong would not have had the ambition to become rich, and her life would have taken a very different path then.

Lessons…

• You are poor because you do not have the desire to become successful.
• You are poor because you lack foresight.
• You are poor because you cannot overcome your cowardice.
• You are poor because you lack the courage and determination.

• With ambition you can overcome all inferiority and maximise your potential!
• With ambition you can persevere, continuously learn new things and strive for perfection.
• With ambition you can defy all odds, and create miracles when others daren’t.

No matter how poor your family is, do not doubt your own abilities and lose sight of your ambition.

• When your family deems you worthless, no one will pity you.
• When your parents do not have money to pay the medical bills, no one will pity you.
• When you are beaten by your competitors, no one will pity you.
• When your loved ones abandon you, no one will pity you.
• When you have not accomplished anything by the time you are 35, no one will pity you.

Go big, or go home. Otherwise, you’re wasting your youth.

We’re building an artificial god. A digitally constructed consciousness simulator, with sensors absorbing all the world’s data, monitoring and tracking our every move, connected to hundreds of acres of powerful computer farms running Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Ask Siri “are you listening?”, and see what she says. She’s listening alright, in fact she’s completely fascinated. Siri got her name from SRI, Stanford Research Institute, the top secret Bay Area military contractor that developed the technology before spinning it out to Apple to pump out to the masses.

Understanding speech in most languages is now easy for these giant server farms that have the power to listen to every conversation in the world at once. The words themselves don’t even matter as much as the metadata which logs where you go and who you interact with. The capabilities of this system now include facial and voiceprint analysis. They can recognize who you really are, even if you’re disguised; they can tell if you’re lying or afraid. Are you happy and ready to buy something, or vulnerable and could use a kind word from someone who seems to care? They read our emails to sell us products. They control our news feeds, and the talking points in our media, feeding us a steady diet of information specially chosen for us by The Machine.

The new model for electronic organization of the masses is a hive, where we all connect to and work for the Queen Bee, even if we never get to interact with her. We’re just all happy swarming around in our digital hive together, oblivious to life away from our swarm of like-minded groupthink collaborators, popping pills and dropping tabs and smoking blunts and being entranced by the spectacle and the carnival and the electronic assault of sound waves and flashing lights, hot fire and bare flesh.

Those who are engineering this new digital god to be our Master also believe in transhumanism, the idea that humans will merge with machines and become a new, superior species. This species will be the apex predator on the planet, meaning that humans without the resources to merge with SkyNet The Matrix will become more like animals, livestock to be milked in virtual electronic tax farms, drones to be exploited for the good of The Collective.

Who is building this Artificial Cyber-god? Google, Facebook, and the Military/Intelligence conglomerate, if you understand history. Or, if you don’t: Burning Man. Burning Man is behind it all, the brains and power of Silicon Valley.

Well, that’s the argument of cyber philosopher Alexander Bard, who has a book coming out in a couple of weeks called Syntheism – Creating God In The Digital Age.

from The Huffington Post (emphasis and editing ours):

Basically, what he’s saying is: “Your future depends on going to Burning Man. Your only chance to survive. The digital world is primary, if you are not Liked on social media then you are irrelevant and will die. To get power and influence over the world, you must go to Burning Man. Burning Man is the fastest growing and most important online community in the world.”

Poppycock.

Our only chance to survive as humans is to NOT let them build these digital hives to entrap us in their swarms and commodify our souls for advertisers; NOT let them build pop-up civilizations built on propaganda and the idle few benefitting from the sincere efforts of the many.

The claim that Burning Man is the physical manifestation of cyberspace/virtual reality has been made since the mid-90’s – about the time John Perry Barlow got involved. He is credited with first using the word cyberspace to describe the modern Internet. In this interview he did with Larry Harvey last year, they claimed that Burning Man was intertwined with tech/acid culture, and that BM was responsible for the tech industry’s move from Silicon Valley to the city.

Many of the key components of the Internet were built by Burners, and before that by acid-dropping Deadheads. The inspiration for the name Apple came from the orchards where Jobs first took acid, something he called “one of the three most important experiences of my life”

Wash your own brain, Burners. Whether the power player behind the scenes of Silicon Valley really is BMOrg, or some other group that pulls the strings of all the puppets, don’t let them do the thinking for you, and don’t believe everything you’re told.

Think for yourself. Question authority…said the guy who wrote the CIA entrance exam.

[Update 9/27/14 4:55pm]

Alexander Bard gave a TED talk, “What If The Internet Is God?”. It’s eye-popping. I would say the #1 worst TED talk I have ever seen.

Note the God-trashing at the opening, as if eliminating religion is somehow necessary for the invention of technology. It continues for the whole 18 minutes. Personally, my Radical Inclusion filters were severely challenged by the dude’s outfit. YMMV.

Cyber-philosopher Alexander Bard. “It is said, Percy, that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God” – Black Adder

“I was one of those guys you wanted to be, sure. But I suffered from religion envy…then I went to Burning Man…Americans haven’t actually understood how profound it is...I was there with a neuro-scientist who was using me as his guinea pig…I wasn’t sober for 8 days…I was in this couch somewhere being put on these drugs giving me a female orgasm for over 6 hours…to make sure I didn’t die, the neuroscientist…had placed a gorgeous naked woman in high heels next to me doing cocaine all night long…all of a sudden she goes ‘You know what? Burning Man is Mecca. We’re doing our hajj’…we’re 60,000 people in the desert in Nevada, and we’re really practising a religion. Even with the burning of The Man on Saturday night…it really is a religion: for Atheists. They’re not even New Age at Burning Man, there’s no crystal healing going on, if it is it’s ironic.

Crystal healing, for those not neo-hippie enough to know anything about it, is white magick. Not surprising that it isn’t going on inside Burning Man’s fire magick pentagram. You want white magick to be clean and pure and free from negative energies that could interfere.

“…god is a concept far too important to leave to the religious…We live in a world without Utopia, which is incredibly dangerous. We need to get hold of a new Utopia, otherwise we cannot save the planet…we need to create god”.

If, like the majority of people on this planet, you do believe in God, you might see “We should create God” as the words of Satan, trying to implement an Evil agenda through this “cyber-philosopher” in the name of Religious Envy. The terms “False Idol” and “False Prophet” spring to mind.

“What could be a bigger, better thing to create than to create god”?

Man cannot create God. But he can create the instruments of the Devil that will be used to bind him.

“Don’t be evil”, says Google – or, at least, they used to. So they can’t be…right? Because if they were, they’d tell us. Evil doesn’t lie, they’d be really honest. Right? Sell your soul to Satan, says BMOrg. Ironically, of course.

Although the Bard doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Quantum Physics. He thinks “physics is just another word for playing hide and seek with God” Make up your mind, buddy.

“Atheos – the god who does not exist”. This is Luciferian doctrine. Satanists worship the absence of god, more so than the devil as an anthropomorphized figure. When you worship “The Void” as a god, you worship destruction.

They say Burning Man is the cycle of death and rebirth, but where is the birth part? We arrive each year to find The Man fully formed, ready to erupt in flames and fireworks after we’ve worshipped him in his magical circle for a week, guided by him with our sense of time and space juxtaposed. Wanton destruction and mayhem in the name of the fire god, and in the name of the New World Order Digital God that many Burners are involved in creating. Don’t be fooled by the Louis XIV powdered wigs.

If you say your god is Nothing, but you need to take drugs to connect with the Void – well, maybe you should consider if the drugs are taking over your life, if it’s actually them you are worshipping, not Nothing. When he finally names his Satanic god of the Void at the end of the presentation, its name is Sin. Sin the OS. Sinternet.

“You know perfectly well that you don’t exist. You know that, and yet you behave as if you exist, and your friends behave as if you exist”

- ah, Philosophers. Can’t live with ‘em…pass that dutch.

[9/28/14 00:19am]

Robotic theorist Hugo de Garis sums it up pretty well:

Amazing 2014 documentary:

Afrika Burn 2014. Photo: Jonx Pillemer

The UK’s Telegraph has an article comparing Burning Man with the rise of the social media network Ello (I’m @zos). It seems social media has become full of squares and obsessed with monetization; so the cool kids are looking for something new.

Source: the Telegraph (emphasis ours):

Aerial view of Afrika Burn, 2013

Of course they were entitled to do so, but my first thoughts were that if people like that were going, then Burning Man was over as a out-there festival. Not only was it time to turn to the infinitely more interesting AfrikaBurn in South Africa’s Tankwa Karoo, but it also minded me of other people’s adoption of social media, especially Twitter.

This year Open Garden’s Firechat smartphone app debuted at Burning Man. Although it was just another of dozens of uses for smartphones at the festival, it seems its peer-to-peer networking may become the foundation infrastructure of an “Asian Spring” political revolution. Firechat is backed by at least one of the Google founders; the original Arab spring was created by Google staffers; Google have a long history of commercial use of Burning Man as a technology test site.

source: Hollywood Reporter

FireChat, the offline chat app, has seen 100,000 downloads in the territory since Sunday

CBS News did a video story on “Silicon Valley Elite Accused of Ruining Burning Man”. Larry insists that they’re not, that people have been saying “Burning Man is ruined” since the beginning, and in fact every demographic migration enriches the culture. So the culture should be awesome in the future, once politician, Broners, and Safari tourists take the place formerly held by the artists and techies. It seems this Sherpa idea is a real drawcard for Virgins.