Benjamin Breen at The Appendix has written this fascinating overview of the scientific discovery of illicit drugs. It’s concise, rather than comprehensive, but it makes for a good Sunday read.

It skips Ecstasy, which was invented by pharmaceutical giant Merck just before World War I. MDMA was later synthesized and popularized by Burner (and Bohemian Grover) Sasha Shulgin, who passed away in Berkeley this year at the age of 88.

It also misses the “discovery” of Magic Mushrooms by JP Morgan’s PR guy Gordon Wasson; their psycho-active ingredient psilocybin was synthesized by Albert Hoffman, the same chemist who “accidentally discovered” LSD. Both of these substances had actually been around for thousands of years, used in ritual hallucinogenic ceremonies like the Ancient Mystery Rites of Eleusis which Burning Man was based on.

Re-blogged from The Appendix:

Meiji Meth: the Deep History of Illicit Drugs

Posted by Benjamin Breen on August 23, 2013

“We’re not going to need pseudoephedrine,” Walter White mutters through clenched teeth. “We’re going to make phenylacetone in a tube furnace, then we’re going to use reductive amination to yield methamphetamine.” Chemicals go in, and out come 99.1% pure crystals glittering with the brilliant azure of a New Mexico swimming pool.

The invention of Breaking Bad’s blue meth has become the stuff of television legend, and has even inspired a spate of real world knock-offs. But few know the true origin stories of illicit drugs—for instance, the strange fact that methamphetamine was actually invented in 1890s Japan.

Chemists have been fascinated by recreational drugs for a very long time. Robert Hooke, the short-tempered genius who discovered cells, was also the author of the first academic paper on cannabis. In the fall of 1689, Hooke ducked into a London coffee shop to purchase the drug from an East Indies merchant, and proceeded to test it on an unnamed “Patient.” It was evidently a large dose. “The Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth, or doth,” Hooke reported. “Yet he is very merry, and laughs, and sings… and sheweth many odd Tricks.” Hooke observed that the drug eased stomach pains, provoked hunger, and could potentially “prove useful in the Treatment of Lunaticks.”

An early depiction of cannabis from Jean Vigier’s Historia das Plantas (1718), originally published in French in 1670.The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

Hooke also strongly hinted that he’d personally sampled his coffee shop score: the drug “is so well known and experimented by Thousands,” he wrote, that “there is no Cause of Fear, tho’ possibly there may be of Laughter.” (There were good reasons that Hooke’s readers might be afraid of a new drug—this was, after all, a world where pharmacies sold ground up skulls and Egyptian mummies as medicine).

Historians have largely ignored Hooke’s adventures with cannabis, entertaining as they may be. Albert Hoffmann’s accidental discovery of acid, however, is well known. In fact it’s arguably the most famous tale of drug discovery, challenged only by August Kekulé’s famous dream-vision of the benzene molecule as an ouroboros, which preoccupied Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Even LSD, however, has a more obscure prehistory. Roman physicians described a painful disease called the sacred fire (sacer ignis) which by the Middle Ages came to be known as St. Anthony’s Fire—“an ulcerous Eruption, reddish, or mix’d of pale and red,” as one 1714 text put it. Sufferers of this gruesome illness, which could also cause hallucinations, were actually being poisoned by ergot, a fungus that grows on wheat. Several authors, most recently Oliver Sacks in his excellent book Hallucinations, have noted a potential link between ergot poisoning and cases of dancing mania and other forms of mass hysteria in premodern Europe.

“The Beggars” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a painting believed to show victims of ergotism.Wikimedia Commons

By the 1920s, pharmaceutical firms began investigating the compounds in ergot, which showed potential as migraine treatments. A Swiss chemist at the Sandoz Corporation named Albert Hoffman grew especially intrigued, and in November 1938 (the week after Kristallnacht) he synthesized an ergot derivative that would later be dubbed lysergic acid diethalyamide: LSD for short.

It was not until five years later, however, that Hoffman experienced the drug. Immersed in his work, Hoffman accidentally allowed a tiny droplet of LSD to dissolve onto his skin. He thought nothing of it: hardly any drugs are psychoactive in such minute doses. Later that day, however, Hoffmann went home sick, lay on his couch, and

sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.

Three days later, the chemist decided to self-administer what he assumed was a tiny dose to further test the drug’s effects. He took 250 micrograms, which was actually roughly ten times higher than the threshold dose. Within an hour, Hoffman asked his lab assistant to escort him home by bicycle. Cycling through the Swiss countryside, Hoffman was shocked to observe that “everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror.”

By the time he arrived home, Hoffman decided to call a doctor. However, the physician reported no abnormal physical symptoms besides dilated pupils, and Hoffmann began to enjoy himself:

Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.

Hoffman awoke the next morning “refreshed, with a clear head,” and with “a sensation of well-being and renewed life.” In an echo of Hooke’s report about his friend’s cannabis experience, which left him “Refreshed…and exceeding hungry,” Hoffman recalled that “Breakfast tasted delicious and gave me extraordinary pleasure.”

One of the interesting aspects of Hoffman’s story is how detached it was, both temporally and culturally, from the 1960s context with which LSD is often associated today. This delay between the scientific identification and the popular adoption of a drug is a common story—and in no case is it more stark than in the gap between the discovery of meth and its widespread adoption as an illicit street drug. Methamphetamine was synthesized by a middle-aged, respectable Japanese chemist named Nagai Nagayoshi in 1893.

An elder statesman of Japanese science and medicine, Nagayoshi Nagai and his wife hosted Albert Einstein in 1923.Wikimedia Commons

A member of the Meiji Japanese elite, Nagayoshi devoted much of his energy to the chemical analysis of traditional Japanese and Chinese medicines using the tools of Western science. In 1885, Nagai isolated the stimulant ephedrine fromEphedra sinica, a plant long used in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine.

The year before, in July 1884, Sigmund Freud had published his widely-read encomium to the wonders of cocaine, Über Coca. Cocaine was radically more potent than coca leaves, and chemists the world over were on the lookout for other potential wonder drugs. It’s likely that Nagai hoped to work the same magic with ephedra—and in many ways he did. Ephedrine is a mild stimulant, notable nowadays as an ingredient in shady weight-loss supplements and as one of the few drugs historically permitted to Mormons, (although see thisresponse post for an interesting breakdown of the debate over “Mormon tea”).

But in 1893, Nagai blazed a chemical trail that would live in infamy: he used ephedrine to synthesize meth.

As with LSD, it took the world a couple decades to catch on. In 1919, a younger protégé of Nagai named Akira Ogata discovered a new method of synthesizing the crystalline form of the new stimulant, giving the world crystal meth.

It wasn’t until World War II, however, that meth became widespread as a handy tool for keeping tank and bomber crews awake. By 1942, Adolf Hitler was receiving regular IV injections of meth from his physician, Theodor Morell. Two years later the American pharmaceutical company Abbott Laboratories won FDA approval for meth as a prescription treatment for a host of ills ranging from alcoholism to weight gain.

Ambar: a potent mixture of methamphetamine and phenorbarbital, shown here in a mean-spirited 1964 advertisement that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 1, No. 5385).

The rest is history—by the 1960s, “tweakers” had made meth a byword for deranged drug addicts, and it lost its standing in the scientific and medical communities. Much like heroin, which was originally marketed by Bayer as a companion to aspirin (the company still technically owns the copyright to the name), meth began life as a wonder drug only to segue into a depraved middle age.

It all points to an interesting and unexplored dichotomy in the history of drugs: there’s a huge gap between the inventors of illicit drugs—usually rather austere, cerebral and disciplined—and their consumers.

I’m guessing that Robert Hooke, Nagayoshi Nagai, Albert Hoffman, and Walter White would have a lot to talk about.

Slashdot brings us a story about An Algorithm To End The Lines For Ice At Burning Man:

I skipped burning man this year but went for the first time in 2013. One of the only goods for sale at Burning Man is bags of ice — to keep your own food cool, or simply to refresh yourself, you can line up to buy bags of ice that are sold by Arctica camp out of the back of a refrigerated truck under a tent. Bags cost $3 apiece.

photo: Nellie Bowles

During peak times last year, the lines were up to an hour long. This year, so I heard, the lines on the first day were even worse, because two of the three distribution points were unable to open due to closed roads, so everybody lined up at the only sales tent that was operating.

Regardless of the conditions, the procedure when you get to the front of the line is the same. You specify how many bags of ice you want, and deposit cash in a container on the counter. Then a volunteer walks back to the ice truck to fetch one or more bags from the truck and brings them back to the counter. You collect your bags and continue on your way.

OK, before reading any further — based on what I just wrote, can you think of a way to speed up the line? No cheating — read the preceding paragraph and think of what you might do differently. Spoilers follow!

The thought that occurred to me almost immediately after I got my bag of ice, was: Why not just have the volunteers carry the bags of ice from the truck to the counter, before people place their order? As long as the line is moving, no bag of ice would sit on the counter long enough to melt. And then each transaction at the front of the line would be reduced to: Customer pays for bag(s), customer picks up bag(s) and leaves. By eliminating the time to walk back to the truck and fetch the bag(s), the system would significantly reduce the per-customer transaction time.

I’d asked a handful of Burning Man veterans about this, and they said that Arctica had tried this at one point, but was required to stop by Nevada health code regulations, which treated ice as a “food product” and therefore said that it could not be moved out onto the counter until an order has been placed. This sounded puzzling to me — don’t cafés place other “food products” out on a counter all the time, where they can be bought and picked up by customers? And for the ice bags, why would it matter in practice anyway — even if the state of Nevada is worried about germs starting to multiply as soon as the bag is removed from the refrigerated truck, the time the bag spends sitting on the counter is still negligible compared to the time the customer spends transporting it back to their own camp.

So I emailed the Nevada State Health Division to ask them what the regulations actually said, and if they would allow the ice vendors to load bags of ice onto their sales counter before they had been paid for by a customer. One of their Public Health Engineers replied and said, “I can assure you that we do not require the ice to remain in the truck until it is ordered” (and dryly added, “It is common for vendors to blame the health authority for imagined regulations”). Regarding the resulting long lines, he also advised me, in the spirit of Burning Man radical self-reliance (if not practicality), “You may consider bringing your own ice to the Playa rather than purchasing it from them.”

So that’s it. There’s no regulatory reason why the ice can’t be brought to the sales counter before it’s paid for — where it wouldn’t even have time to start melting, if there are customers eagerly waiting to carry it away — and no reason why the line couldn’t probably move 5 to 10 times faster as a result. (I emailed Arctica to ask if they would start having volunteers bring ice bags up to the counter before customers place their orders, and showed them the email from the Nevada Health Division saying it would be legal. I received a very friendly reply, mostly asking me who I was and why I was concerned about the issue; I said I had no stake in the matter except hoping to reduce the wait times and hence the aggravation and health risks for people waiting in line in the sun. I have not received a reply to any subsequent inquiries after that.)

In a previous article I’d theorized about an algorithm for speeding up the vehicle exodus at Burning Man. (Basically, have a “priority lane” where cars can exit at different times of day, depending on the last character on their license plate. So one hour where the priority lane is set aside for cars whose license plates end in “A”, another hour where the lane is used by cars with plates ending in “B”, and so on. This means that drivers who want to use the priority lane, can just wait for the designated hour, instead of spending five hours queueing up to leave.) That was intended more of an intellectual exercise, as a jumping-off point for a discussion about which algorithms would work best under different theoretical assumptions, and with only the small possibility that it might ever actually be implemented at the real event.

The call to speed up the ice lines is not an intellectual exercise. Unless there’s a non-obvious major problem with making this change, this is something that could be done the very next year, and would save people thousands of person-hours waiting in line in the sun.

My other suggestion would be to have a “turbo” line even faster than the main one, designed for people to complete each sales transaction in seconds. Every customer in the “turbo” line would be required to have exact change (or be willing to overpay and let the vendor keep the change), and every customer would be required to have their cash fanned out in their hand like playing cards when they got to the front of the line. (A volunteer could walk up and down near the front of the line to verify that people already had their cash displayed properly.) A transaction at the front of the line would simply consist of, “Three dollars — bag”, or, “Six dollars — two bags”, where the customer shows their fanned-out money, dumps it into the cash receptacle, and picks up one or more bags from the counter.

With or without the “turbo” line, at first it might seem like it would take extra labor to keep a supply of ice bags moving constantly from the truck to the counter, but that’s not the case. For a given number of bags to be sold, every bag has to be moved from the truck, to the counter, exactly one time. So the total amount of labor is always going to be the same, for a fixed number of ice bags. To have a steady supply of ice moving quickly from the truck to the counter, you might need to have more volunteers working at the same time, but that just means that rather than having 5 volunteers with one-hour shifts spaced throughout the day, you’d have those same volunteers working simultaneously to keep the bags moving.

With the lines moving that much more quickly, what if the ice bags run out halfway through the day? Hopefully the vendor can just send the trucks back out to fetch more bags of ice to be brought back in and sold in the afternoon. But even if they can’t — even if, for some reason, the number of ice bags sold per day has to be fixed at X — you’ve still done an enormous amount of good by reducing the wait time from 30-45 minutes to 5 minutes. Because you still sell the same number of ice bags, but you’ve eliminated the pointless deadweight loss of all the time the customers were previously wasting in line.

And if the vendors can bring in more ice whenever their existing stock sells out much faster, that’s a win too — regardless of whether they’re selling the ice for profit or just for altruistic motives. If they’re selling ice to help people, then selling more ice is better. If they’re selling ice for profit, then selling more ice is better, too.

I’m being fairly pedantic here because I want to make it clear that I think that I think there’s no counterargument to be made to this, under any combination of reasonable assumptions — whether the vendors can bring in more ice or whether they’re stuck selling a fixed number of bags per day; whether the goal of selling the ice is for altruism or to make a profit. Bring the ice out before it’s paid for, shave the transaction time down to the bare minimum of the customer paying money and then grabbing their ice bags, and everyone will be grateful they don’t have to wait an hour in the sun.

And if you’re an adventurer thinking about going to Burning Man, my tips for making it (slightly) easier include bringing your own cooler (separate from any food storage cooler) so that you can buy a bag of ice each day, dump it in the cooler, and have your own supply of ice water. That’s well worth it, whether the wait time in the ice line is five minutes or an hour.

Makes perfect sense to me. So, will it happen?

Like many suggestions for improvements to Burning Man, the first response is “NO”. We’re told “we tried that and it didn’t work” and “the authorities won’t let us do it”. Kudos to Bennett for doing the work to fact check these statements: sure enough, they’re false. There is no regulatory reason for making Burners suffer in queues in the desert.

Having applied his brainpower to the Exodus and Arctica lines, perhaps Bennett can now turn his grey matter to the Will Crawl problems. Hint: mailing tickets to the 20% of Burners coming from outside the US will halve the number of people who have to go to Will Call. Fewer people should mean shorter lines.

Will BMOrg listen to the Burner community, and try something new to make things better for their customers?

MC2 Audio has a story about what goes into the sound at Ooligan Alley. It’s heavy on technical details, which will be interesting to some readers. A team from the UK brought out a serious system, featuring 12 Funktion1 speakers and 12 subwoofers power by MC2 amps and XTA processors. The DJ booth was the cockpit of a Boeing 737, and they kept the audio equipment in an air-conditioned Hexayurt. Even the DJ’s monitor speakers were Funktion1’s!

In case you don’t know, a setup like this is expensive – hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of kit. And I bet it sounded ridiculously good. Thanks Ooligan Alley, and everyone involved in gifting this level of sound experience to Burners.

Here are some of the sets played through this setup:

A Hundred Drums

DJ Professor Stone: “The Great Plane Throbbery”

DJ Vitor Friday Morning Sunrise

re-blogged from MC2 Audio:

The ephemeral Black Rock City, a place that exists only for the length of the spectacular Burning Man festival of counter-culture, music and arts is a gruelling test of endurance for both man and machine alike.

Taking place in the middle of the Nevada desert, where the temperature regularly reaches well over 40 degrees in the day and can plummet to below zero under the clear skies at night, you need to be a special kind of animal to adapt and survive in these conditions.  With dust storms whipping up every few hours out of nowhere, it takes the community spirit and a love of all things avant garde to get the best from what some see as one of the most “out there” global events in the world.

Yet, despite the challenging conditions, over 60,000 participants are drawn to the desert location each year to take part in over a week of 24 hour exploration –  of each other, of arts events, of music, dancing and parties, and testing individual limits of self-expression and self-reliance.

Whilst part of the ethos of Burning Man is to create “Black Rock City” out of nothing each year and, when the festival ends, return the desert site back to whence it came leaving no traces of humans even having been there, whilst the festival is in full swing, facilities must be created and basic needs met.
Music is integral to the backbone of the entire experience, with performances spanning individual acts of self-expression up to full-on dance music systems of the slightly more traditional form, as you might see at Glastonbury.  This is where our story starts, with a British company shipping out to be part of the “Ooligan Alley” project, equipping and manning music and dance events at Burning Man.

Oz Jeffries, from pro-audio specialists Audio Feed based on the south coast of England, takes up the story for us:

“Having been to Burning Man 3 times before, I was excited to take part on the Ooligan Alley project, but I knew the challenge ahead. Black Rock City is the ultimate test of survival, endurance and self-reliance on us, and therefore on all of the equipment out there in that environment for 10 days.”

Audio Feed supplied a huge Funktion One speaker system for the event, which was exclusively powered by MC² amplifiers and XTA processing.  Twelve F1 Res4Ts and twelve F1 F221A subs made up the main PA.  Such a serious system demands a seriously cool look, and the focal point for the set-up was the Jumbo 737 airplane cockpit that had been cut in two to become the DJ booth.  Monitoring in the cockpit was via a pair of Res2s and F-121s.

Oz continues:

“We powered everything with 4 x MC² E100, 4 x E25 and the XTA A6 amplifier modules [for the subs], all running through XTA 4 Series processing including 2 x DP448 and 1 x DP428  [same as DP448].

I was very happy to be powering everything with XTA and MC² equipment knowing their reliance, and we decided to use a sealed Hexiyurt to house the amplifier racks including the XTA A6 modules which we took out of the back of the bass cabinets to protect them from the dust as much as possible. We then ran 2 air conditioning units within that yurt to keep control of the temperature, all run from an isolated generator with an output of 230v to reduce the amperage. We wired each bass cabinet with 4 core cable to allow us to have independent control of each driver.

Each single 4 Ohm Funktion One 21″ driver was run from a single MC² channel E-100 channel, or a single A6 module channel, therefore giving the best output power with plenty of headroom. Running as a 7 way system we had full separate control of the top Resolution 4’s to cover the back of the arena, all controlled via our iPad using the DP4 remote app connected to the 4 series processors, this control is invaluable throughout the event for front of house control.”

In case you haven’t heard of the A6 modules – a little bit of history:  The A6 modules were XTA’s first foray into the world of digital amplification and were a collaborative project with Funktion One, producing a 2 x 2.2kW amp with full DSP and remote control in a package not much bigger than a telephone book!  These modules were fitted to the back of the sub cabinets and could power an additional sub each.  There was also a smaller A4 module which was used with the Res2 speakers.

Oz was delighted with the results:

“All of the equipment performed outstandingly. After an 8000 mile journey across the Atlantic and a 4 hour truck drive out into the desert, within hours even with the best will in the world all the equipment was covered in dust, so a lot was expected of the moving parts and electronics. Being in a very desolate location for 10 days we had to rely on the equipment with only limited spares. No spares were needed, and even in the dust storms and 14 hour a day running times through 40 degree temperatures differences all the speakers and electronics blinked not once, and upon inspection afterwards we found no dust inside the amplifiers.”

Burning Man shows no sign of burning itself out growing in size and popularity year upon year – a British rental company making a pilgrimage across the ocean with no speaker or electronic casualties shows just what a dedicated and professional a team of people work at Audio Feed.  Whether there were any human “casualties” due to party overload is something that will surely stay on the road!

McKinsey and Company is an ultra-high end management consulting firm. They help set the direction for the Fortune 500, and their advice in the past has included Burning Man as an example of “how to excite your customers”. They’ve just published a video interview with AirBnB founder and CEO Brian Chesky.

Two of AirBnB’s Vice Presidents sit on Burning Man’s Board of Directors, and this year they added “Black Rock City” to the 34,000 cities in 190 countries that they rent rooms in.

In the last couple of years Burning Man has hosted panel discussions and given media interviews to position themselves as part of the Sharing Economy trend. The main difference between BMOrg’s interpretation of the model and most others, is AirBnB, Uber etc share the profits. That’s what makes it an “economy”.

Later this month AirBnB and Burning Man will be giving “mind-blowing” talks at the CMX Summit in San Francisco on “How To Build Community: Learning From Burning Man, AirBnB and NASA”:

Jenn Sander, BMOrg

This event is packed with thought leaders, CEOs, and community experts representing organizations like NASA, Burning Man, Airbnb, ProductHunt, Zynga, Salesforce, BetaBrand, Exposure and more…

Burning Man is one of the best examples we have today of a massive, organic movement with a thriving offline community. There’s a great deal we can learn from the programs that Burning Man runs to apply in our own work every day as community builders.

Jenn Sander is an innovation, communications, and engagement strategist with a passion for uniting international communities around arts, technological innovation, and physical space. For The Burning Man Project, she focuses on connecting their global networks and developing demonstration projects.

AirBnB founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s words have a timely resonance for the Burner community. Given their strong representation on the Burning Man Project’s Board of Directors, and BMOrg’s claims to be a similar example of the Sharing Economy, it’s interesting to get an insight into the way this company thinks and the language they speak.

Transcript re-blogged from mckinsey.com (emphasis and image selection ours):

For $35, you can buy the CEO’s body-building DVD. photo: Valleywag/Gawker

Since its founding, in 2008, Airbnb has spearheaded growth of the sharing economy by allowing thousands of people around the world to rent their homes or spare rooms. Yet while as many as 425,000 people now stay in Airbnb-listed homes on a peak night, the company’s growth is shadowed by laws that clash with its ethos of allowing anyone, including renters, to sell access to their spaces. In this interview with McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland, Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky explores how the company’s relationships with cities can evolve. An edited transcript of Chesky’s comments follows.

Starting a revolution

It’s a currency of trust, and that used to live only with a business. Only businesses could be trusted, or people in your local community. Now, that trust has been democratized—any person can act like a brand.
Airbnb is a way that you can, when you’re traveling, book a home anywhere around the world. And by anywhere, I mean 34,000 cities in 190 countries. That’s every country but North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba.

The reason we started was I was living with my roommate, Joe, in San Francisco, and I couldn’t afford to make rent. That weekend, the International Design Conference was coming to San Francisco. All the hotels were sold out. Joe had three air beds. We pulled the air beds out of the closet, we inflated them, and we called it the “Air Bed and Breakfast.”

The reason it’s grown so fast is, unlike traditional businesses, we don’t have to pour concrete. The infrastructure and the investment was already made by cities a generation ago. And so all of a sudden, all you needed was the Internet.

The ‘disruption’ debate

I never really loved the word “disruption,” because it suggests that maybe it’s the kid in a class who was disruptive, who probably didn’t add a lot to class. I think that we have a lot to add to society.

Over time, cities have gotten so big that the sense of community has gotten lost. And I think once you know everyone, that community can reemerge. And as far as our relationship with cities, we can’t succeed without a city. Or we can’t really thrive without a city. We don’t want to thrive in spite of a city. And I think if we work together, it’s going to be amazing. I think the people win. And I think if we don’t work together or if we fight, the loser isn’t really us or the city—it’s the people in that city.

Getting cities to embrace sharing

Fundamentally, the idea of the sharing economy is going to be great for cities. It means that people all over a city, in 60 seconds, can become microentrepreneurs. And they can be empowered. And they can make an income. Now, this is amazing, but it’s also complicated because there are laws that were written many decades ago—sometimes a century ago—that said, “There are laws for people and there are laws for business.” What happens when a person becomes a business? Suddenly these laws feel a little bit outdated. They’re really 20th-century laws, and we’re in a 21st-century economy.

It’s probably going to be a fair amount of work to revise some of the laws and rethink the way cities and platforms work together, but I think that work is worth it. Because what cities don’t have to do is invest billions of dollars in infrastructure to create jobs. Whereas historically, to create opportunities, cities would need massive projects and investments, these jobs only require the Internet. Now what they need to do is navigate the legal framework, which is typically outdated. We want to work with the cities. We’re not telling them that their laws are terrible. The world continues to change. Laws must continue to adapt for that world.

We want to help cities understand what our world looks like so they can modernize the laws to make sense. We’re not against regulation. We want to be regulated because to regulate us would be to recognize us.

Airbnb’s plans for growth

We want travelers to be able to book homes anywhere. Anywhere includes Asia. Asia’s a nascent market for us. Number two, we’re also looking at other use cases. Airbnb started as a way for travelers to find a budget way to vacation in a city. But now we’re starting to see people who aren’t on a budget. They want a much more high-end experience. And the third is that at the end of the day, if you’re traveling to Tokyo, you’re not traveling to Tokyo to stay in a home or a hotel. You’re traveling to Tokyo—if you’re on vacation—because you want to have an experience. And we’d love to do more to make that experience special and memorable.

The future of sharing: Your free time

I don’t think people would view the jobs created in the sharing economy as jobs. I don’t even know if they get counted as jobs when the White House has a new jobs report. They are jobs. As far as I can tell, people are working, they’re making income, and they depend on that income. Half of our hosts depend on it to pay the rent or mortgage. Maybe it’s a new kind of job. Maybe it’s like a 21st-century job. Tom Friedman talks about how in the future people may not have jobs. They’ll have income streams.

I believe that the sharing economy broadly can probably provide tens of millions of jobs or income streams for people all over the world. This is going to have a pretty big effect on the economy, mostly a good one.

The sharing economy started by democratizing and creating access to probably two of the biggest assets people have: their homes and then their cars. But I think the whole idea of ownership is changing. When my parents were young, owning things was a privilege, and there was a sense of romance to owning a house, owning a car.

Today’s generation sees that ownership also as a burden. People still want to show off, but in the future I think what they’re going to want to show off is their Instagram feed, their photos, the places they’ve gone, the experiences they’ve had. That has become the new bling. It’s not the car you have; it’s the places you go and the experiences you have. I think in the future, people will own whatever they want responsibility for. And I think what they’re going to want responsibility for the most is their reputation, their friendships, their relationships, and the experiences they’ve had.

So I think the biggest revolution will be in the biggest asset of all. The biggest asset is not a house. It’s not a car. It’s people’s time. People’s time may start with just gigs: waiting in line for you, delivering something for you. Over time, I think it’s going to move upmarket. And eventually, menial tasks become real trades, and real trades become art forms.

Somebody may say, “I cook a great brunch. I wonder if people would enjoy having brunch at my house?” And you could be able to book a brunch at someone’s house, instead of at a restaurant. That person isn’t trying to create a restaurant, they’re just allowing someone to have brunch. They build a reputation. One day, that person can be a Michelin-rated chef in their house.

Earlier this year, we reported on the arrest of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was nabbed in a public library in the Mission, a few blocks from BMHQ. We wondered if Burning Man’s “Caravansary” theme was an attempt to cash in on all the Silk Road publicity. They do like to be on trend, after all. It’s certainly something that resonates with their customers more than camels: our recent poll showed 91% of Burners have done illicit drugs at the event.

Now, “Silk Road 2″, one of many popular online drug bazaars that sprung up immediately afterwards, has also been shut down. A combined operation led to the arrest  in San Francisco of Blake Benthall aka Defcon. The 26-year old Radiohead fan left his job working for Billionaire Burner Elon Musk’s SpaceX to run a website processing $8 million/month of drug sales.

According to this Reddit thread, the task force was much bigger:

Mr. Bharara praised the outstanding joint efforts of the FBI and its New York Cyber Branch and HSI and its Cyber Crimes Center and Chicago-O’Hare Field Office. He also thanked the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Strike Force, which comprises agents and officers of the DEA, the Internal Revenue Service, the New York City Police Department, HSI, the New York State Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, Office of Foreign Assets Control, and New York Department of Taxation. Mr. Bharara also thanked the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section for its assistance and support, the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division Office of International Affairs, and the law enforcement authorities of France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

He wasn’t exactly a master criminal, using the email address “blake@benthall.net”, bragging about being “the biggest market on Darknet”, and re-tweeting about the Princess Bride (where the name Dread Pirate Roberts used by Silk Road’s mastermind came from):

That’s Dread Pirate Benthall on the left. Image: Facebook

From Ars Technica:

It only took about one month from the time the Silk Road drug-dealing website was busted for a successor to be created. The new site, like the old, was on the “Darknet,” only accessible via an anonymizing Tor browser. It called itself “Silk Road 2.0″ and kept the appearance of the old site, down to the green nomad-and-camel logo. Its creator named himself Dread Pirate Roberts, after the first site’s admin.

It’s said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the second Silk Road was certainly flattering to the first. “It is with great joy that I announce the next chapter of our journey,” announced the new Dread Pirate Roberts last November, writing on a Tor-only forum about the black market. “Silk Road has risen from the ashes, and is now ready and waiting for you all to return home.”

He added that he had “taken steps the previous Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t have even thought of.”

Whatever those steps were, it wasn’t enough to protect the site from old-fashioned human infiltration…Within several weeks, an undercover agent from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) wasn’t just perusing goods on the new site—the agent was on staff, with access to special discussion forums and technical data.

…Over the next several months, the site would do millions of dollars of sales in narcotics and other illegal items, like fake passports and drivers’ licenses. Silk Road 2.0 made its money through a 5 percent commission on each purchase.

“We are the most major market on the darknet site at this point,” Defcon wrote on January 5. With that came security responsibilities. In a seller-only section of the SR2 forum, he wrote:

We are in a position to teach an incredibly valuable life skill for this buyer community: Always encrypt… we are doing this more for buyers’ sake than vendors’ sake. PGP encryption teaches users to never enter their address on ANY darknet site, which greatly decreases LE’s ability to set up honeypots.

…Linking the server to Blake Benthall wasn’t exactly rocket science. “The server was controlled and maintained during the relevant time by an individual using the email account ‘blake@benthall.net,'” wrote Vincent D’Agostino, the FBI agent who signed the complaint…after just one month, the site had generated about $8 million in sales and $400,000 in commissions…

When Agent D’Agostino accessed Silk Road 2.0 last week, he found 14,024 listings under “Drugs,” including 1,654 listings for psychedelics, 1,921 listings for ecstasy, 1,816 listings for cannabis, and 360 listings for opioids…5 grams of “Highest Purity Cocaine — Direct From Colombia,” on sale for $488 in bitcoins. One hundred grams of “Afghan Heroin Brown Powder” was on sale for $4,555 in bitcoins. A fake Danish passport would run a buyer $2,414, while a fake New Jersey Driver’s license, including holograms, would be a comparatively cheap $98… a 4-7 day effort “to HACK the website you want,” for $624. A method of hacking Gmail accounts was offered for $42

…he had a five-month stint working at SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private space flight startup, which lasted until March of this year…“Facing a ‘now what’ moment at the end of StartupBus,” wrote Benthall on Facebook on March 8

 

Read the full story at Ars Technica.

One of his last tweets before the arrest now seems tragically ironic:

IM BORED.

— blake (@blakeb) November 6, 2014

 

Engadget reports that it wasn’t just Silk Road 2.0 that was shut down – their penetration of the “supposedly secure” TOR network has led to 17 arrests and the shutdown of 410 online drug marketplaces. Now they’re going after the customers…

From Engadget:

Yesterday’s takeover of Silk Road 2.0 was just the tip of the iceberg apparently, as the FBI and European law enforcement organizations have announced a “global action” against similar darknet marketplaces. “Operation Onymous” resulted in 17 arrests total, the removal of 410 hidden services that allegedly offered illegal drugs and weapons for sale, as well as the seizure of more than $1 million Bitcoins in, $250,000 in cash and drugs. Troels Oerting of the European Cybercrime Center told Wired that his staff hadn’t had time to assemble a full list of takedowns, but it includes Cloud 9, Hydra, Pandora, Cannabis Road and more. The Telegraph reports six Britons accused of helping run Silk Road 2.0 are among those arrested, while the BBC has word of two arrested in Ireland. Like both iterations of Silk Road, the sites were using Tor to anonymize access, but were still exposed. Details of how the service was pierced have not been revealed (we have an idea), but The Wall Street Journal quotes Eurojust spokesman Ulf Bergstrom saying “You’re not anonymous anymore when you’re using Tor.”…

So what’s next? This round of arrests focused on those running the marketplaces, occurring in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA. According to Oerting, the next step is to go after others, including those who purchased illegal goods from the marketplaces

The Washington Post says that the DarkNet makes the world a safer place – by making the quality of drugs better. The recent arrests only took out a third of it.

there’s a strong argument to be made that the darknet economy makes the world a safer place overall. By taking drug transactions off the street and putting them online, you eliminate a significant link in the chain of violence between drug suppliers and end users. Drugs purchased online are typically less adulterated with dangerous contaminants than street drugs are, and a system of reviews rewards sellers who provide high-quality product.

image: Darryl Lau

image: Washington Post/Wonkblog

There’s already a Silk Road 3 – use it at your own risk, it’s not like the authorities will be watching or anything…

This video shows the range of merchandise that was on offer in this “Amazon of drugs”

Be careful Burners. That Molly might be Bath Salts.

“Molly is the moonshine of today”. As the documentary shows, what people think they’re taking, may not be what they’re really consuming at all.

A recent Reddit thread discussed how a Burner thought she was taking a lazy 3 hits of LSD at once, but it turned out to be designer drug 2C-C-NBOMe – an invention of the late Burner/Bohemian Grover Sasha Shulgin. She flipped out big time, and had to be restrained to a stretcher and treated at the medical tent. According to Reddit, for some unexplained reason, Burning Man had a chromatograph mass spectrometer there, able to analyze on the spot what was in the drugs. This led to a medical paper being written for the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Case Report: A 24 yo female was found to be tachycardic, tachypneic and with agitated delirium after drinking wine, smoking marijuana and ingesting 3 blotter paper doses of what she thought was lysergic acid diethylamide. She thought she was being attacked by invisible assailants. She was transported from her campsite to an on-site field hospital by emergency medical personnel, where she was treated with intravenous normal saline and lorazepam with complete recovery within 10 hours. Leftover blotter paper samples were analyzed using Agilent Liquid Chromatograph-Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (LC1200-TOF/MS 6230). The primary compound detected was 2C-C-NBOMe, with a smaller amount of 2C-I-NBOMe also present…

just lying around in the Medical Tent?

Use of designer drugs is increasing, as evidenced by the well-documented rise of synthetic cannabinoids (herbal incense, spice, K2) and synthetic cathinones (bath salts) in Europe and the United States, the pervasiveness of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) in pop culture, and the constant detection of novel compounds with high resolution mass spectrometry techniques. The 2C class of psychedelic phenethylamines was first synthesized by Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin in the 1970s and 1980s. They are 5HT2 receptor agonists with variable receptor activity. Although 2C-I and 2C-B are both 5HT2A receptor agonists, 2C-I also has a high affinity to 5HT2C). Sold as “research chemicals”…

image: Pinterest

A 24-year-old Caucasian female with no significant past medical history was screaming in her tent while camping at Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, USA. She was agitated and confused, under the impression that she was being attacked. On initial evaluation, her HR was 140 bpm with RR 32 per minute. Her pupils were dilated to 5 mm and her skin was moist and hot to the touch. She was not oriented to person, place or time. Per her boyfriend, earlier that evening she drank wine and smoked marijuana. Thirty minutes prior to evaluation, she ingested 3 doses of “acid” on blotter paper. She had taken acid (lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD) many times in the past without adverse effect. After brief assessment, paramedics physically restrained her to a gurney and transported her via ambulance to the on-site field hospital. Overnight, she was treated with intravenous normal saline boluses and 2 mg intravenous lorazepam, making a full recovery within 10 hours. The following day, she had complete amnesia to the events that had transpired and was otherwise asymptomatic. Seven other people had ingested single doses from the same blotter paper that evening, but none had similar adverse effects. No one had taken more than one dose. All users had received the drug for free from one supplier. A leftover drug sample was obtained from the supplying party, who had obtained it directly from the producer and was under the impression that it was “25C,” telling the patient that the drug was not acid, but “like acid.”

The American Journal of Emergency Medicine Volume issue 2014 – The electric Kool-Aid NBOMe test

However hardcore you think you are, it’s never a good idea to triple-drop. Especially with something you’ve never done before. Triple the drugs doesn’t mean triple the fun. “But they said it was like acid, I’ve done acid before” – that’s not how drugs work. Maybe if they were decriminalized and regulated, all acid would be the same – but even then “this is like acid”, is not the same as “this new thing you’ve never tried is identical to something else you’ve done before”.

People are handing out free designer drugs at Burning Man, and Burners are getting greedy, and getting into trouble. Who wants to go to a party, and end up as a case study in a medical journal? Or beating off in the cop shop?

Although they say “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, I think “know what you’re taking before you take three of it” is better. Safety trumps politeness. Dancesafe sell testing kits here.

The new theme has been announced. As per the rumor we leaked on November 16, it’s circus-related:

This year’s theme is about mirrors and masks, mazes and merger. It will be a kind of magic show that takes the form of an old-fashioned carnival. This Carnival of Mirrors asks three essential questions: within our media-saturated world, where products and people, consumption and communion morph into an endlessly diverting spectacle, who is the trickster, who is being tricked, and how might we discover who we really are?

Classic carnivals, as theaters of illusion, upheld a very strict dividing line that separated carnies, cast as showmen, from members of a naïve public who were labeled chumps and suckers, marks and rubes. Our carnival, however, will perform an even more subversive trick — its motto is Include the Rube. The wall dividing the observer from observed will disappear, as by an act of magic; through the alchemy of interaction, everyone at once can be the carny and the fool…

Old-fashioned carnivals were dominated by an all-pervading hucksterism; midways featured barkers, shills, rigged games of chance and skill, and not infrequently defrauded customers — “short change” is a carny term. They also featured titillating freak shows, geek acts and museums of the outré and forbidden. Our midway, on the other hand, will satirize deception while inviting all participants to summon up their inner geek, that secret freak who hides behind the mask of what is called normality. We will turn grifting into gifting; otherness becomes creative self-expression.

Read the whole thing here.

Merger? What does that have to do with carnivals? The whole thing is about deception, defrauded customers, tricksters, and the naïve fools who buy into the illusions being spun by the carnival hucksters.

I think the irony of this theme is what the Commodification Camps are really doing is turning our Gifting into Grifting – by the ring-masters who pursue the “alchemy” of monetization of our beloved Playa. The occult continues to be a core element: “the occulting mask will melt away”, “magic show”, “an act of magic”.

The Fool – a throwback to the very first Baker Beach burn, where they burned a dog effigy too?

They are creating a clear division between the “showmen” (presumably, themselves, since they believe it’s BMOrg who create Burning Man, not Burners), and the “chumps and suckers” who buy their product (ie, us). The subversive magic trick of “you’re all showmen and you’re all chumps at the same time” seems to facilitate their attempts to define Commodification Camps as “turnkey camps, on a spectrum like any other camp”. Are you a safari tourist in a wristband-only camp? No problem, everyone is the carny and the fool at once.

We’ve now had three car- themes in three years: CARgo cult, CARavansary, and CARnival. Is Larry just going through the dictionary?

The design of the Man seems to be the same big humanoid stick figure as this year. At the base, instead of the Souk, will be a bunch of funhouse mirrors, ironic fortune tellers, vendors, and whatever else the Regionals can come up with.

Man base design by Larry Harvey and Andrew Johnstone. Illustration by Andrew Johnstone with Hugh D’Andrade

At the same time as announcing the theme, BMOrg launched their magical new web site, and a new tag line:

Welcome Home. A city in the desert. A culture of possibility. A network of dreamers and doers.

Burningman.com now automagically redirects to burningman.org.

They’ve gone for aesthetics over user-friendliness. It looks visually eclectic, certainly more appealing than it used to be; but it’s become more like a maze to find your way through it all. Some pages like the “Tech Innovation” still look like the old site, with its much cleaner navigation at the top.  ePlaya has not changed. You can find it under Menu (top right), The Network, Get Involved, Connect with Burners, then scroll down the page.

The “Burning Blog” is now called “Voices of Burning Man”, and has been integrated into the site. The many comments from Burners are there intact – however, you’ll have to navigate through a bizarre two-tone color scheme and the grouping of posts by category only, and comments 50 at a time. This makes it much harder to read through the comments, a further indication that they’re more interested in what they want to tell us, than listening to what we Burners have to say.

The oldest post readily available is Halcyon’s Let Them Eat Cake “Burning Cake: A Cautionary Tale”; you’ll have to hunt to find earlier posts such as “Virgins And Turnkey Camps Are Ruining Burning Man” and “Turnkey Camps (Moving Towards Effective Solutions)“, which are filed under “The Ten Principles” and “News” respectively. You are no longer able to use “Previous” and “Next” to scroll through all the blog posts. This appears to be a deliberate design feature, rather than a bug; the same with breaking the comments up onto multiple pages so you can’t just scroll through them all. If they publish a blog post that gets the community up in arms, all they have to do is have their friendly “shills” come in at the end once the people have vented with some peace, love, and unicorns stuff and the negativity can be tucked away in the “Older Comments”. They seem to have been trialling this strategy in the comments on their blog over the last week. For example, the “Turnkey Camps (Moving Towards Effective Solutions)” post has 255 comments; but only the most recent 5 are shown with it.

Earlier in the week we mentioned the Burning Man Arts Grants online system, which is for Arts Grants for non-Burning Man projects. The deadline for submissions there is December 1, 2015.

The new Arts Honorarium Grant system is now live too. The deadline to submit your Letter of Intent is December 19, 2015. The link on the Front Page to Honoraria Grants – New Process for 2015 won’t take you there, though.  You can find it under “Important Dates” on the main screen.

As we predicted, the “system” turns out to be just an online form. The form is broken out into a few different screens. You’ll need to sign up with Slideroom and create yet another profile. The Honoraria grants applications appear to be free. Perhaps they listened to our griping, or perhaps their plan from the start was that only the artists applying for smaller grants to bring Burner art to the world have to pay $5 to submit their Letter.

They’ve finally put the dates for the 2015 Nevada burn on their main web site – good news for those who were curious if it was even going to happen. The dates are August 31 – September 7.

The main page of the site lists Upcoming Global Events in a scroll-box at the bottom – all 21 of them. The dates of each are “TBA” – if you want to know when the event is, or where it is, you’ll need to go to their Regional Events page which lists 41 events, including Decompressions.

The “Where Does Your Ticket Money Go” page that falsely claimed they pay $4.5 million a year to the BLM (which we proved to be really $3,485,000, with a missing $1 million+ unaccounted for), now re-directs to the Philosophical Center. It no longer shows up from their search box, but it is still visible in the Internet Archive.

I think BMOrg would be very happy for Burners to just move on and focus on 2015 now, where the fools and chumps will be merged together with the hucksters. Will the community leave them be, and take their silence and the new theme as the answer to our questions? What will this word “merger” come to mean to Burners by the time August 2015 rolls around?

Burning Man. What is it? A rave in the desert? An arts festival? A Temporary Autonomous Zone? An experiment in new ways of living together as a community, relying on each other to survive, without the trappings and comforts of modern society? The world’s biggest occult ritual?

Or is it a giant drug- and sex- fuelled Bacchanalian orgy of debauchery?

If you ask me, it’s all of the above. But to most of the world, it’s the latter.

Recently The Simpsons, one of the world’s most popular TV shows, went to Burning Man – or, as they called it, “Blazing Guy”. One of the show’s directors, Tubatron, is a long-time Burner. Many Burners were excited to see our favorite magical event portrayed in a TV show that has been running about as long as Burning Man itself has. I remember watching the Simpsons on the Tracey Ullman show when I was a teenager, before it became its own show on Fox and part of the fabric of mainstream society. Was this part of the Burning Man Project’s mission to spread Burner culture around the world? They’d held workshops on The Ten Principles in Education, and how businesses could learn from the Ten Principles in the sharing economy. Would we now see the Ten Principles go global, on one of the world’s most famous and successful TV shows?

Sadly, no. They chose to highlight the drugs. We saw infant Maggie playing with a MOOPed syringe that she’d picked up on the ground. The main storyline of the episode was Marge being dosed with a hallucinogen without her knowledge: one of the absolute WORST things you can do to someone anywhere, and the complete opposite of what Burner culture is about. She trips off her face, gets all horny with Homer, and overall seems to have a positive experience. Most Burners are portrayed as rude, shady, ego-driven characters.

This year also saw two famous political figures attending Burning Man for the first time. Former Presidential candidate, Democrat Denis Kucinich gave interviews on the Playa, and a political speech. Tax-reformer and Republican party puppetmaster Grover Norquist gave interviews before he went, tweeted from the Playa, and then went on a PR tour to promote his involvement in Burning Man.

What did the press want to talk about? The Ten Principles? The amazing art? How Burning Man is saving the world?

No. It was the drugs and the nudity.

We recently ran a poll asking Burners if they had ever done illegal drugs at Burning Man. I realized that if I just asked “Yes/No”, there would be many readers who had never been to the annual Nevada burn. As it turns out, about a quarter of respondents. Of those who had, 90% had done illegal drugs there.

Is Burning Man about drugs? Undoubtedly. Can you go there without taking drugs? Sure, and about 1 in 10 do – around 6000 people. To put this in perspective, 10% of Burners visited the Orgy dome. There are about as many people having a sober burn than there are indulging in a public orgy. It’s worth noting with these statistics that there are at least 4000 children at Burning Man, hopefully not doing drugs, and hopefully not visiting the orgies.

San Francisco has always been pretty tolerant of drugs. BMOrg’s founders don’t seem to care. Larry Harvey has publicly acknowledged having hallucinogenic experiences before. John Perry Barlow, who was promoted by the Org in their “The Founders Speak” event in 2013, is a very public advocate of hallucinogenic drugs – it was a fundamental part of the whole “Deadhead” scene. Michael Mikel spoke publicly about his drug use at a community event in San Mateo earlier this year, saying “we had access to stuff direct from the Stanford Chemistry Lab”. The crowd laughed approvingly.

The spectrum of illegal drugs at Burning Man runs from medical marijuana, which even if prescribed by a doctor in Nevada is illegal on the Federal land underneath Burning Man; to exotic designer drugs, which get medical papers written about them. Sasha Shulgin, the regular Burner, Berkeley chemist and Bohemian Grove sax player who passed away this year, is considered the “father of Ecstasy”, and credited with popularizing that drug in the US. He isolated more than 200 different drugs in his career, wrote many books about them, and collaborated with the DEA.

For many Burners, whether or not they actually take drugs at the event doesn’t matter. By going to Burning Man, they get tainted with the stigma. A recent Black Rock City census poll asked:

The majority of Burners never mention that they’ve been to the event in the public space. Many don’t even tell their friends and family that they go.

Their professional life is the largest category requiring secrecy.

Do people use their Playa name outside Burning Man, or do they keep it a secret?

Only about a quarter have ever used their Playa name publicly:

As you can see, the majority of Burners do not tell their Playa name to their non-burner colleagues, friends, or even family members. Why not? Because of the reputation of Burning Man: drugs, nudity, and extreme sex.

Most of the “unique” aspects of Burning Man are modelled on Bohemian Grove. Nicknames at the event, theme camps, a ban on commerce, an effigy burn, robed lamplighters, educational workshops, corporate networking opportunities. Burning Man is much closer in its nature to Bohemian Grove, than it is to any other EDM Festival. The use of nicknames at Bohemian Grove evolved because the event was started by a bunch of journalists working for Hearst newspapers, and theatrical performers from the predominantly male San Francisco of the late 19th century. The Captains of Industry who financed the thing, wanted to let loose “without Care” and without their antics being reported by the press when they got back home.

Even most of Burning Man’s 6 founders prefer to interact with the public primarily through different identities than their birth names. “Crimson Rose” is really “Nanci Peterson”. “Harley Dubois” was called “Harley Bierman” when the event began. ” Will Roger” is really “Will Peterson”. And “Danger Ranger” also goes by the unlikely moniker of “Michael Mikel”, often shortened to “M2″. This extends to their management team too: their Social Alchemist “Evan Kittay” goes by “Bear”, one guy calls himself “$teven Ra$pa”. Then we have names we recognize from the Burning Blog Voices of Burning Man, like Halcyon, Answer Girl, Caveat Magister.

“Burner Names” or “Playa Names” are a popular and accepted part of Burning Man’s culture, and have been for a long time. That’s cool, right?

Well in the early hours of yesterday morning, Burning Man founder “Danger Ranger” decided to publicly “out” me. If I wanted to keep my corporate identity separate from my Burning Man life, he would take that privilege away from me. And in the process, maliciously slur me with lies.

Before I even went to Burning Man, I had a nickname. Pretty much everyone in my family, and almost all of my friends, call me “Saus”. I named the first company I started after my nickname, “Sausage Software”. I owned the domain name sausage.com, and wrote software for making Web pages called HotDog. In 1997, Wired magazine named HotDog as the third most downloaded piece of software on the Internet – after Netscape, the only real browser of the time, and Eudora, the only real mail application of the time.

I started the company in my bedroom when I was 22, and down to my last $18. 16 months later I took it public, it was the first Internet company to list on the Australian Stock Exchange. I became the youngest ever CEO of a public company, taking a record Rupert Murdoch (who inherited his Dad’s business) had held since the 1950’s.

When I went to Burning Man for the first time in 1998, I had already built my own community of more than 1 million people. By the time I left the business in 2000, retiring at age 26, this had grown to 3 million. We had more than 800,000 active users, who were using the product at least once a month. This community went on to become Sitepoint, which is still the largest webmaster community in the world, and regularly in the Top 1000 websites. We competed with some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the industry: IBM, Adobe, Symantec, Microsoft. HotDog was the #2 product in its category, beaten only by Microsoft’s FrontPage – which was given away for free with Office, the world’s most widely used business application.

In 2000, I sold the company just after the famous “dot com crash” for $700 million. Our peak market cap was $1.7 billion, so one way to look at that is we lost a billion dollars. But I think most people would say to go from nothing to a $700 million exit in 5 years was a pretty good run for a kid in his twenties with no experience, money or family connections. At the time of the sale, I had created 1200 jobs and enabled hundreds of thousands of people around the world to earn a living building web sites – a profession that didn’t even exist in February 1995 when I started. Back then, there was no Amazon, no e-commerce, the browser (Netscape/Mozilla) was free software from a college not a company, and Yahoo was a list of web sites, not a search engine. We played a major role in making the web easy and accessible to people in more than 200 countries. We gave our software away for free to schools and sold site licenses incredibly cheaply to colleges. In fact, I gave it away for free to anyone – for the first 30 days. After that, you had to pay. I called it “the heroin model” – we get you hooked for free, then you love it so much you’ll gladly give us your money. The basic version of our product cost $29 and the professional one was $99. 75% of our sales were for the more expensive product, which had more features.

Some of the “Black Rock City Communist Party” at burningman.com have said anyone with money didn’t make it, they stole it. It’s hard to see where my theft was. I made a dozen people working for me millionaires – a common practice these days in the tech industry, where Twitter’s IPO was estimated to create 1600 millionaires from its staff, but practically unheard of in Australia at the time. Many of my founding team have gone on to great success since, with Sitepoint/99 Designs, Hitwise, Reactive, and Urbanise – another company I founded, which went public 3 months ago.

I’ve heard countless stories since my first IPO from ordinary people who saw me on TV and believed in my vision, bought stock, and were able to pay off their mortgage. The stock was $0.08 at its lowest, and $8.20 at its highest. After Sausage’s IPO, we raised $130 million from corporate investors Intel, Telstra, and St George Bank, and turned that into more than $500 million for those guys in less than 2 years. The company that bought us, SMS Management and Technology, paid a fair price and got an amazing amount of value – the most elite technical team in the Southern Hemisphere.

How is any of that theft? And how does any of that make me a “bad Burner”?

It’s almost 3 years since I started Burners.Me, and I’ve never told this story before. I’ve never made a big deal about who I am, what I’ve accomplished in my career, or what I do in my “day job”. I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to hide it, either – my photo appears with every comment I make, and I’ve talked about some of the charities and companies I’m involved with before. I wrote under the pseudonym “burnersxxx” – why xxx? Because I’m only interested in talking to adults, and I believe the drugs, nudity, and sex of Burning Man are not suitable for children (not to mention Playa lung, Playa foot, and the other harsh physical realities of the environment). Political correctness might have its place in the world, but not on my blog. I want to speak frankly, coarsely sometimes, and about adult themes.

Why try to keep my professional life separate from my time at Burning Man? It’s because of the reputation of the event – one which, according to the information I’ve published above, is well deserved. I am an investor in many different businesses, that employ thousands of people. I have a number of investments in the security space, an area that is notoriously conservative. Some of the technologies my teams have developed over the years required a Munitions Export license (for military grade cryptography), which means vetting by the Department of Defense. I travel extensively around the world, and for certain countries have to go through complicated processes to get visas. I have a lot of business activity in the Middle East, specifically all the Emirates of the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman. Some of these places are governed by strict Islamic sharia law, where not even alcohol is permitted – and drugs are a death sentence. In Dubai, “bringing drugs into the country” includes drugs that are in your system because, for example, you smoked prescription marijuana a week before. Holding hands with your wife in public can get you thrown in jail. I have always felt that a public association between my corporate identity and Burning Man could make it harder for me to do deals in these places. Not only that – it would make life harder for the many people who work for me, who have nothing to do with Burning Man and no desire to go. “Guilt by association”, people who are completely innocent being affected by my personal life.

Well, now Danger Ranger, a man living under a pseudonym, with a 14-year “black hole” in his LinkedIn resumé, has decided to take that away from me. Why? Apparently, to take some of the Burner community’s quite legitimate heat off the founders and their Board of Directors.

If you believed the trolls, you’d think I’m somehow embarrassed about who I am and what I’ve accomplished in my life, but this is hardly the end of the world for me. After re-engaging with business life again more than a decade ago to build up facilities management software company Urbanise (formerly Majitek), I stepped down from their board in February, and it went public without me in September. I own a bunch of stock, but no longer have anything to do with the company. At 41, I’ve pretty much retired for the second time. For the last 18 months, I have been writing a book about the “Dark Side of Utopia”, which I always intended to publish under my own name, rather than a pseudonym. The choice of where and when to link this blog with my research has now been taken away from me, but I’m going to do my best to turn that into a positive. I’m starting to get sick of only writing about Burning Man, anyway. I used to believe in them, used to drink the Kool Aid, but the more research I’ve done, and the more of the actions of this group that I’ve chronicled, the more the cult-like indoctrination has worn off. I see things now as they really are, and it’s disheartening.

This story should be a lesson to anyone else in the 55% of Burners who don’t tell the public they go to the festival. Your privacy means nothing. Your career means nothing. The truth means nothing. Speak out against the “Almighty Borg”, and they will have no hesitation about doing whatever they think they can to hurt you. This year has seen a spate of suicides in the wake of the event – 3 from DPW, I believe. This is nothing new, it has been happening for a while, and like so many other things with this cult, gets hushed up and swept under the rug. They are the only organization since Adolf Hitler’s Nazis to employ a full-time “Minister of Propaganda” – yes, that is really Will Chase’s title. And look at the spin that comes out of them. “Oh we listened to your concerns! Now Commodification Camps have to go through the placement team!” This was already their policy. “We’ve discontinued our Donation Tickets program” – which only happened because we caught them red-handed. They tried to deny it, and Burners sent us more evidence. Then they tried to ignore it. Eventually, when they realized this wasn’t working, they came clean and admitted it – but tried to hide it in a bunch of verbiage saying “we’ve always had a Holiday pre-sale program”. No matter that they don’t even try to pretend this is so Burners can buy tickets to Gift at Christmas any more.

And what of the rich? We waited 3 months to get some kind of statement from BMOrg about Commodification Camp concerns, and what did Larry Harvey say?

Wealth is a straw man issue.

And then what did Danger Ranger do, that very night? Talk about attacking the Straw Man.

Look! The Goodyear blimp!

He posted on Facebook at 1 in the morning. It seemed like he was doing what the community was asking for – calling out their Director Jim Tananbaum for running a for-profit Commodification Camp, despite the strict wording in the Burning Man Project’s Bylaws about volunteer directors profiting from the activities of the group, and the requirement that all Directors uphold the Ten Principles. But reading the fine print, as we are forced to do with these propagandists, showed that really he wasn’t throwing Tananbaum under the bus at all. He was giving him a pass “oh, he lost tens of thousands” – which implies that his goal from the beginning was profit, because otherwise it would be “he gifted tens of thousands” – something many of us have done at Burning Man, without charging $17,000/head, bussing in Mistresses of Merriment to entertain our high rollers, and creating elaborate wristband-only cocktail lounges complete with paid sherpas and drinks menus. Instead, Danger Ranger blamed all the problems of Caravancicle on the camp’s producer, who he then accused of embezzlement.

No, in a classic case of misdirection, it was actually ME that Michael Mikel (if indeed that is his real name) chose to throw under the bus. Not just by “outing” me with my real name, which I have never used publicly in relation to Burning Man; but by spreading outright lies about me. Because this is a Burning Man founder, owner, and director, his words are more than just some cranky Burner on the Internet. They are taken as gospel by many in the community.

He said:

I immediately addressed his concerns, saying:

But it seems it was too late. The nearly 70-year old former Navy seaman, infiltrator of cults and neo-nazi groups, defacer of billboards, builder of robots, underground explorer, had gone to bed. That didn’t stop many other Internet trolls from piling on the hate.

I stayed there until the early hours of the morning, addressing the issues raised. Hoping that Danger Ranger would respond. I messaged him privately. The trolling escalated. People started posting personal photos from my Facebook page. I told them they didn’t have permission, and asked them to take them down. Some did, others went and made dedicated web sites just to post my personal photos.

Finally, about 9 am, Danger Ranger appeared again commenting on his post. “Great!”, I thought. “Surely this person, who is posting under a pseudonym, with a legal responsibility as a Director to uphold the Ten Principles and act ethically, will at least respect my request to keep my corporate identity out of his rant! Maybe he will even realize that he was misinformed, and remove the lies!” But no, Danger ignored me and just responded to other commenters. Then, I was locked out. I couldn’t get into his post any more. Some loyal readers have since told me that he then went through the comments on his post and simply deleted mine. Suddenly, his account was suspended.

I was instantly blamed for doing it. For the record: NO, I didn’t report Danger Ranger for using a fake name on Facebook. This happened to me about a month ago, and has been happening to many users on the Burning Man Facebook group – which now has no admins, thanks to people reporting pseudonyms there. Most of the admins there used pseudonyms. Facebook has a “real names” policy, and like it or not, rules are rules. Since I joined Facebook in 2007, I’ve met about a thousand people all around the world who only know me as “Zos”. No matter, I was forced to change my name. This really sucks, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, let alone a founder of Burning Man, an event that I love so much I’ve spent three years of my life writing about it for free. As a gift, because I’m shit at art but I know a thing or two about the Internet.

I was on Danger Ranger’s facebook group for hours, trying to clear up his false statements about me. It makes no sense that I would do that, if I wanted to report his account.

But the blame continued. And Danger Ranger, rather than correcting his lies, used his official power as a Burning Man director to up the attacks on me. He commented on blog.burningman.com at 9:12am, and his comment got picked up by known troll Simon of the Playa at 9:14am on ePlaya (to his credit, Simon removed my corporate name from the post, which is required by ePlaya’s terms of service). I’ve also heard that Danger Ranger’s post was then sent out to thousands of people via their Regionals mailing list.

BMOrg changed their blog to allow replies to comments. Propaganda Minister Will Chase, and Communications Director Megan Miller, were all over the blog responding to comments. I replied to Danger Ranger, once again correcting the false statements.

They could have edited the message so it was less of a personal attack on me, but still critical of Burners.Me. Instead they said:

So there you have it, folks. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Truth doesn’t matter to BMOrg. The founders can openly lie, just to smear someone’s reputation, and they feel no need to correct it. Things BMOrg write on the “Voices of Burning Man” don’t have to be 100% factually accurate, no matter who it’s coming from.

The troll attacks against me have continued – funny, given that I am the one accused of trolling. This post is long enough as it is, so I’m going to write about that in more detail later for those who are interested.

If other wealthy, successful people out there are reading this, be warned. “What happens on the Playa, stays on the Playa” is a myth. This cult has thousands of volunteers at its disposal, tattooing their logo on their bodies, ready to go to extreme lengths to do their bidding and cultivate “borg points”. This NPD-driven CULTure provides a convenient “plausible deniabillity” to the instigators, who can operate through unseen proxies. The founders have shown that they have no qualms about slandering their customers, and will not show respect for truth or privacy. This comes straight from the top. Associate with this group at your peril, and donate your money to their tax-exempt structure if you must – but if you think you’re making the world a better place by taking drugs at a rave, well I have a rainbow bridge in the desert I can sell you.

One thing I always loved about Burning Man is people didn’t ask “what do you do?” or “where do you live?” or “what car do you drive?” For a brief while, 20 years ago, I was kinda famous in Australia and New Zealand. There’s almost nothing good that comes with fame, it’s pretty much all downside. At Burning Man, I could relax and party without having to deal with muckraking journalists trying to “expose me” and drive my company’s share price down, making life harder for all my employees. The Burner I was talking to could be one of the long-term unemployed, but rather than sitting on their ass smoking dope, had worked for months scraping together used materials to create an amazing piece of art. Or they could be growing the dope, and using some of the funds to build some incredible fire-breathing apparatus with their engineering skills. They could be the founder of a tech company, or a famous actor, or a politician, or a trust-fund kid who spends their life working on charitable projects. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. We were all the same. We were all Burners, using the same port-a-potties and choking on the same dust storm. Having fun together at a party that we’d all traveled miles into the middle of nowhere to enjoy.

Some have tried to paint the Commodification Camp issue as a “class war”, advocating everything from vandalism and arson to violence as the appropriate response – in the process, deflecting protests away from First Camp, and towards anyone in a nice RV. Certainly, there is an “anti-tech” element in San Francisco today, driven by escalating real estate prices and the loss of housing that has been subsidized through rent control (a concept alien to most of the world). Some are making fortunes in real estate and tech, while others are being forced to move from neighborhoods that have gentrified to places they can still afford. They wait in line for public transport, and see happy, successful young people getting onto buses to take them to booming tech companies – and decide that is someone else’s fault. This really should have nothing to do with Burning Man. Up until now,  I thought that those saying “eat the rich” and “Burning Man is the front lines of the revolution” were just a few kooks. I didn’t think it was a deep part of the ethos of the event, at which I’ve met some of the richest people in the world.

But Larry Harvey saying “wealth is a straw man”, followed by Danger Ranger trying to single me out as some sort of hypocrite for having default world success, shows that this goes all the way to the top. Perhaps because they’re a “non-profit”, they think they can cash out of the event with millions while pretending to still be “part of the people”. Perhaps they have to cultivate this charade to encourage thousands of volunteers to build their $30 million event for free. Maybe there’s a split on the board, with Danger and his cronies wanting to go back to their anarchist punk cacophony “Satanists with guns” roots, while Larry and Marian and Bear court the world’s billionaires and venture capitalists and Presidential candidates.

From my perspective, I still don’t think it matters. I’ve burned sleeping in a car, I’ve burned in the most extreme luxury you can imagine (a post for another day). For the last 4 Burns, it’s been my year 2000 Fleetwood RV that went to Burning Man – the only RV I’ve ever owned. I’ve gifted tickets to friends, and I’ve traded tickets to people who drove so that I could drink. I’ve bought flights from overseas for friends and family to join me at Burning Man, and paid camp dues for them. So what? How does this make me a bad Burner?

For three years, I have contributed my art – such as it is – to this community. Not just for a week, but pretty much every day. I’ve given my time for free, on top of what I’d done previously: helping to fund art cars and art projects and logistics, and gifting the experience to virgins. For that, I get called a “troll” and all kinds of other names. And I get the Directors of Burning Man bringing their drug orgy into contact with my corporate career, which will have no real affect on me in my retirement, but could potentially hurt many people around the world who’ve never been to Burning Man and never would.

I go out of my way to provide links and references to all the claims I make on this site. It takes a long time to do this. I have always invited anyone to come here and comment, whether they agree or disagree. If they update me with new information, I change my stories. I take the time to respond to almost every single comment – even the trolls.

Meanwhile, Burning Man’s founders simply LIE about someone in their community, and have no concern whatsoever to correct it, or provide any evidence of their claims. They barely speak to the riff-raff, preferring to trot out their volunteers to cop the flak and their media team to dispense the spin. It takes months to get anything that even remotely looks like a straight answer from them. Many of their people are made to sign non-disclosure agreements and prevented from commenting on social media.

I share my opinions here, sure. That’s the whole point of a blog. I discuss what people are saying on the Internet about Burning Man, I chime in on the conversation with what I think about it all. I know that not everyone agrees with my opinions: I never asked them to, or expected them to. Does that mean I don’t have a right to express them, just because some don’t agree? Of course not. Freedom of speech still means something in the USA – a country I have a visa to live and work in because of investing in startups and creating jobs. This site is coming up on 1400 posts, and I stand by pretty much all of them. About 10% were written by others, so I can’t include those – but I am still proud of them, and glad to have shared them.  Many of our detractors say that we publish misinformation, to which I reply “please provide an example”. So far, none of them have been able to produce any examples. Seriously – out of 1400 posts, you can’t provide ONE? So is it really misinformation, or is that just an unfounded slur? Sure, I publish rumors and speculation: but I tell you when it’s that. I treat my readers as smart enough to make up their own minds. Over 90% of our articles are positive, but they’re not the ones that get the most shares – leading to a situation where people who don’t even read this blog, complain about how negative it all is because that’s what’s showing up from Burners.Me in their Facebook news feed. The ratio of positive and entertaining posts is even higher than 90% on our Facebook page.

As for “trolling” and “sock puppets” – it’s something I deal with a lot, but have never employed myself. Why would I? What would the possible motivation be? I already have my own, massive audience. Why would I go to the trouble of researching and fact-checking everything I write, if I was just going to make unfounded attacks under multiple false identities on other peoples’ sites? How does that benefit me in any way? On the other hand, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see what the motivation would be for BMOrg and their cadre of loyal volunteers to cast aspersions about me under fake names, and try to address facts and figures with lies and smears.

This site has more truth about Burning Man than any other on the Internet. Don’t believe the smear campaign: we do our homework, we publish references to our claims, we deal in FACTS. Even if the truth is sometimes not what the sparkle ponies want to hear.

Would Burning Man have stopped their Donation Tickets program, if we – thanks to leaks from our own loyal readers – hadn’t exposed it? I highly doubt it. Hopefully there will be more positive changes to come in the future. Maybe they will up the efficiency of their charity, and do more good with it. Maybe they will consider making ethics, integrity, and honesty part of their corporate culture.

Like many of my endeavors, Burners.Me has been successful. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WordPress, we have nearly 120,000 followers. Our audience is spiking again over the last couple of days thanks to all the publicity, which I doubt was Danger Ranger’s intention in attacking me. I don’t profit from this site in any way, it is totally free, and totally brought to you at my expense.

This year we set new traffic records. A single post I did on Facebook went to nearly 1.2 million people; the same story on the web was viewed by more than a million people over 2 days. In August, 1,512,864 people visited this site. We had the #1 most read story and #1 most seen blog on WordPress, out of 42 million. We’re regularly in the Top 100 of both categories. We’ve been quoted as a credible source by the New York Times, among many others. We’re usually reaching more than 1 million people per week on Facebook. They can smear me, but they can’t shut me up – and a lot of people are doing their own research, looking into the facts for themselves instead of blindly accepting the corporate spin, and waking up.

Where do we go from here? I still plan to write about Burning Man, and Burner culture. The more they attack me, the more I get motivated to expose. I’ve heard they have an “Access Control List” of people banned from the event, and some online critics are on it. If it includes anyone, I’d think it would be me – punished without trial or recourse, guilty of nothing but loving the event, and wanting its management group to be accountable for their words and actions.

BMOrg to me is looking increasingly desperate, a formerly great lion thrashing around in its death throes. Maybe they can pull a rabbit out of a hat, salvage their crumbling credibility, and preserve the awesomeness of this culture through their transition. Or maybe, like many startups, the money comes in, the Founders become less relevant, and the soul goes away. Maybe the long awaited transparency will come, and Larry & Co will look like saints. Or perhaps the skeletons will pile up in the closet until the “fetid ossuary” (thanks Reb!) can no longer be contained. Perhaps there will be amusing, Cacophonist pranks on the Playa against First Camp; or perhaps there will be anarchist attacks and criminal assault and destruction of property against anyone with a flash RV. Maybe they can grow and improve the culture, through Regionals and acculturation of virgins. Maybe veteran Burners were never meant to continue being part of Burning Man anyway, and it will be no great loss to the culture without them – bringing the Principles to virgins will make the world better, than letting the people who’ve made the party what it is keep coming back for more. Maybe enough veterans will be interested in preserving what we’ve all made together, to start something fresh and new, fair and open.

Elon Musk said “Burning Man IS Silicon Valley”, and that to me is the more interesting story. What’s the real history of Silicon Valley, and how does Burning Man fit into that? How do drugs and cults fit into that? Where is technology going, now that Google is becoming SkyNet, and the government is intruding into our private lives in ways we’ve never before imagined? What hope is there for humanity, in the Age of Artilects, cyborgs, and transhumanism?

Pile onto the Burners.Me hate parade if you want. If you want to be that guy, then slander my professional identity, steal my private photos to paste all over the Interwebz, dredge up whatever dirt others have published and post links to it. It’s nothing I haven’t encountered before, I’ve dealt with plenty of lawyers and been in plenty of lawsuits. Heard plenty of fat jokes. Unfortunately, it’s something that goes with the territory, as I think most successful people can tell you. The world is full of jealous and petty people, who if they can’t achieve anything themselves, want to point the finger of blame outwards towards others. If someone drives past them in a shiny Ferrari, these people say “look at that asshole”. I still believe Burners are different. While I’m no longer drinking the Kool Aid BMOrg are pissing into our mouths, I do believe in Burners. Burners are some of the smartest, coolest, funniest, most talented people in the world. If anyone can make the world a better place, it’s Burners. Thanks for all your support, and I hope together we can make this site more interesting and positive in the future.

- Zos

Follow Burners.Me on Twitter

Follow my professional career on Twitter

Read more at Wikipedia and LinkedIn

Lease an up-cycled shipping container from ekovillages.com

Donate to the charities I support:

Reallocate

Operation Dignity

Sea Shepherd Society

Wildlife Warriors

It’s nice to be able to write a positive story about goodness. Free goodness coming to this community and the world, thanks to the generosity and innovation of Burners.

One of the great things about Burning Man is if you need something, the community will often rally to provide. Not everyone can afford a Private Concierge to arrange their camp, designer costumes, or a $1000 scalper ticket. Some Burners are left to be radically self-reliant. Others are happy to help whoever they can.

The Wolf and Snorky, Burning Man 2010

When I first went to Burning Man in 1998, I rushed back to Australia and told my friend Snorky all about it. “Sounds great man”, he said. “Can’t wait to go one day”. That day finally came in 2010. Burner Snorky hit the ground running, he was ready for Burning Man before he was born! The only difference being a virgin made, compared to the next year, was more people wanting to give him stuff.

His Burning Man experience inspired him to use his other experience: his background of being an Internet guru from the “Dot Com days” to create Mass Mosaic: a free service where anyone with wants can connect with anyone who has something to share. Maybe you can trade, maybe you can gift, maybe you can barter or sell. They are trying to remove scarcity from the sharing economy, and replace it with abundance.

Burning Man has always been an experiment in civilization without economy. The so-called “Gift economy” combines giving people things they didn’t know they wanted, and generously helping out Burners in need.

Mass Mosaic have now created Burners Exchange (any type of exchange) and Burners Gifting (gifting only), special mosaics just for Burners. It’s totally free. It helps Burners who Have something to offer, connect with those who Want something. Transactions can be gifts, trades, or for money.

Snorky describes it like this:

Burning Man teaches us that everybody is abundant in something and when that is brought to the playa, we see that really anything is possible. Mass Mosaic brings that energy beyond the playa. When everybody lists what they want and have and how they are open to exchange it, then the abundance of what is often peoples hidden value is brought to the forefront. Mass Mosaic has created a special group for Burners to exchange within. Burners aren’t limited to exchanging within that group though, they can create their own groups and exchange with anybody on the site too.

Abundance for all – sounds good to me. Try it now.

Mass Mosaic’s co-founder Snorky says:

We all are constantly exchanging with the world. From breathing air to getting gas for our cars, exchange is needed to sustain. The natural world can help us understand the fundamentals of this exchange. In nature, exact right amount of resources are exchanged for survival without the friction of money or social structures. At Burning Man, not having many of our modern comforts (i.e. being in nature) allows us to live very closely to the natural principles of exchange, and move with their ebb and flow.  It unlocks an animalistic and tribal attunement in the process.

Burning Man reminds us, through the gift economy and the collective ethos, that exchange is about much more than making money. This unlocks a new dimension of potential that expresses itself as abundance, happiness, and cultural flourishing.

Part of the way that Burning Man helps us exchange is by removing the “zero-sum” dynamic, whereby the person with the resource charges the maximum possible and the person in need parts with as much money as they can bear. This essentially cancels out what otherwise could be a synergistic experience.

Mass Mosaic uses the same principles in nature and like Burning Man facilitates exchange with the environment in a more advantageous way for all parties. But Messed Mosaic goes further by allowing every type of exchange that’s possible in any tribe. The website allows gifting, borrowing, sharing, trading, renting, buying, selling, collaborating, reusing and open exchange. The holistic result is that everyone has far more opportunity to live abundantly.

Mass Mosaic models how exchange has happened with humanity since the beginning of time. There wasn’t always money! These means came to serve in need and have become overused in the process.

Burning Man teaches us about the village economy but in the context of a modern society. In the village, your relationships were the most important part of your survival – not your financial resources!

Another lesson from Mass Mosaic and Burning Man is that ownership is decreasing in importance. It’s the realization that all we are really after is the benefits of owning something, not the ownership itself! When you have the benefits without the maintenance, expenses, and other responsibilities that come with ownership, you are able to live more flexibly and economically.

Perhaps all we are seeking to learn is that we are complete. We are seeking to learn that the world loves us and supports us. We are seeking to learn that our communities well-being is inexplicably tied to our own. Perhaps we are seeking to learn that we are all one, expressing our individuality like an infinite mosaic of color that make up one big picture.

The structure of community is deeply connected to how easily that community sustains and thrives. It’s time we proactively design and define this structure so it is not dictated by the existing biased systems that rely dominantly on capitalism as a means to live healthy and happy lives. Both Burning Man and Mass Mosaic do this in a way that is proving relevant on larger and larger scales. 

To further this experiment, Mass Mosaic has created different groups and hubs for Burning Man on their website with the hopes that it helps the Burner Community live abundantly on and off the playa using its principles. Check it out at [link]

Co-founder Rob Jameson says the system is modelled on “tensegrity“, a word coined by Buckminster Fuller

Tensegrity is a complementary pair of forces. One is continuous pulling in and the other discontinuous, pushing.

This can be seen all around us in the physical world. From wheel rims to bridges, there are examples of tensegrity structures all around us, often as strongest structures and systems we build. Another example of tensegrity structure is a geodesic dome. The struts connect in a series of triangles so that the discontinuous pushing and continuous pulling makes the dome get stronger as more weight is added.

Wants and Haves projected on a building at the O+ Festival in Brooklyn

…It is a shame that the mainstream society believes that in order to be productive, the requirement is to work 40 hours per week. The entire point of technology is to leverage its capability so that we can thrive together more easily. This does not mean that machines should replace us, but rather that a job that used to take someone 1000 hours to do, now takes someone one hour to manage and the machine can do the rest automatically. This is the nature of progress, and our lives should have less restriction because of it. 

…We are beginning to see tensegrity models gain traction in society. Burning Man is a great example, which relies dominantly on the gift economy to exchange in a pop-up civilization. The gift economy is a simple type of tensegrity economy. It’s clear from the Burning Man events, which arise from nothing in the middle of the desert, that this model can produce tremendous cultural and social value.

Burning Man is the beginning of the shift, and eventually will be far surpassed by models that are more deeply connected to the principle of tensegrity, rather than a specific embodiment of it (like gifting economy).

New York-based Mass Mosaic recently won a place in Startfast, an East coast startup incubator and accelerator similar to San Francisco’s famous YCombinator. The idea behind their software is a world of plenty and abundance. Try out their Beta version and tell us what you think. I can see this idea being very useful to Burners.

Their CTO has some good words to say on workplace diversity and Radical Inclusion at SC:

I am not an expert on women in technology. I am an expert on technology. However I can say that for many of us, simply being female in technology often forces you to champion the cause. I have been asked to speak about women in technology at technical conferences (versus talking about technology at technical conferences) because the assumption is that being female, I would want to present on that issue.

When I evaluate potential jobs, I consider what impact that may have on the perception of women in technology, and when I get up to speak at conferences, I always have the nagging feeling that my performance on stage may directly impact people’s perception of all women in tech since they don’t see enough of us up there to have a broader view.

Whether I truly felt confident or not, I presented myself as very self-assured in almost every situation, which is different than many women, who are taught from an early age that being too confident, too self-assured, is unladylike. This self-assuredness leads to labels like “bossy,” and another one that starts with a “b” that SC Magazine won’t print. The same characteristics encouraged in young men are often considered problematic in young women. Maybe this played a part in my experiences. Maybe not. I know confident women that still had a much harder time than I did.

Technology is competitive, and I’ve seen this industry chew up and spit out men who lacked this perceived level of confidence, too. I don’t think that’s the whole story, but it may play a part, and it’s important to realize that being perceived as “tough” or “thick-skinned” often isn’t enough, nor should it be required. Would you rather have the most self-assured employee or the most talented? 

…It’s time to realize that diversity in technology matters because the most arrogant person in the room isn’t always the most talented, and overlooking those people who don’t fit our arbitrary notions of what “real” techies look like severely limits our talent pool. When done right, technology is intensely creative, and diverse communities thrive because of, not in spite of, the variety of experiences we all bring and the passions that drive us. 

Limiting our choice of candidates is what truly weakens us. This isn’t about holding hands and singing campfire songs, and it’s not about filling quotas. This is about growing up and recognizing that when you want to hire people smarter than you, sometimes they’re not going to look or act like you. 

Read more at SC magazine.

Amanda Palmer is one of the Dresden Dolls

Recently, Mass Mosaic teamed up with Amanda Fucking Palmer, who wanted to promote her book The Art of Asking. She was looking for an easy way that people who had read the book could pass it on to others who wanted to read it, but couldn’t afford it. Mass Mosaic fit this need so well, but also opened an unexpected new market: people who bought the book for complete strangers, just because they wanted it. Within a couple of hours, Amazon completely sold out of Amanda’s book, as people all started Gifting it all over the world.

Mass Mosaic has described the explosion of Gifting The Art Of Asking in this heart-warming blog post.

I helped out and gave some Kindle editions of the book to people in different countries who wanted it. One of them blogged about it here.

It feels good to give. Mass Mosaic is an invention that promotes kindness and helping others – isn’t this what it’s all about?

Try Burners Exchange or Burners Gifting for yourself, or use Mass Mosaic to give someone a book or a Christmas miracle. To add to the mosaics, you have to sign up with Mass Mosaic, login and click the Join Mosaic button.

photo by Liz Hafalia, SF Chronicle

At least we know there’s one BMP Director who gets it. Leo Villareal has been a Burner since 1994, and is the founder of Disorient. If there is a “spectrum of camps” like BMOrg says, then Disorient is clearly on the good end of the spectrum. They provide a major sound stage with many DJs, as well as several areas of their camp that are open to all Burners. They bring multiple art cars, which give rides to the public; and they gift an Art Car Wash every year which every art car can participate in. Everyone who camps with Disorient is expected to volunteer some of their time at the burn in multiple shifts, to give back to the community. While they charge dues, it is in the hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands, and no-one in the camp is trying to make a profit. Those who stay longer to break down and pack up get a discount on their dues, but even those hard workers still pay to be a part of a camp.

Leo is also an accomplished artist. He’s the first Burning Man artist to have an exhibition of his interactive works at a major art museum (the San Jose Museum of Art).

Wikipedia:

Villareal has permanent installations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, as well as in the private collections of contemporary art collectors CJ Follini. His work has also been on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Madison Square Park in New York City, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Oh, and if you’ve been anywhere near San Francisco in the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen one other little piece he’s done: an $8 million commission he got to build the largest electronic sculpture in the world, The Bay Lights.

image: James Ewing/Illuminate The Arts

The Bay Lights were only ever intended to be temporary, and have already lasted longer than the original plan. They have become a beloved feature of the San Francsico skyline, and have had a measured boost on the city’s tourism and the trade of businesses along the Embarcadero waterfront.

Good news, Burners! The Bay Lights could be here to stay. Thanks to the generosity of a number of donors, if the project can raise another $293,000 before the end of the year, Caltrans has agreed to pick up the maintenance tab and keep the installation on the Bay Bridge – permanently.

Illuminate The Arts CEO Ben Davis says:

Dear Bay Lights Lovers, There’s good news and even better news. The Good News: If we raise four million dollars in gifts and pledges by the end of this year, we keep The Bay Lights forever. This is a one-time raise of $4m, made possible by Illuminate The Arts’ break-through agreement with Bay Bridge officials. With that money, ITA will install a new set of LEDs – expressly engineered to withstand the harsh environment of the San Francisco Bay.  We would then gift these new lights to the Bay Area Toll Authority and Caltrans, in exchange for their on-going stewardship. The Bay Lights would become a permanent fixture of the Bay Bridge, just as the 50th Anniversary necklace lights did in 1989. This means, Leo Villareal’s temporary masterpiece will become a permanent work of public art, establishing a global icon that lets the Bay Area shine around the world in perpetuity. The Even Better News: Thanks to a $2 million challenge grant from Bay Area philanthropist Tad Taube, every new dollar raised will be matched until the $4 million goal is reached. Tad’s inspiring gift has already helped spur another $1.7m in private gifts. That means we have only $293,000 left to raise. If you love The Bay Lights, now is the time act.    MAKE A TAX-FREE DONATION NOW Here are some other recent media highlights:  Featured in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, ‘”Bay Lights” get offer of permanence from bridge officials” Read Here  San Jose Mercury News features “Bay Bridge light sculpture to shine on with big donation” Read Here   San Francisco Chronicle Editorial, “Keep the Bay Bridge lights Shining” Read Here Thank you for your continued brilliance,   Ben Davis Founder and CEO, Illuminate the Arts

Tad Taube is an 83-year old former USAF officer, who escaped the Nazis and became a real estate and tech magnate and major philanthropist. He is connected to the Koret sportswear empire that was sold to Levi Strauss, and runs charitable foundations worth more than $500 million that gave away $26 million in 2012. He’s challenged the community to match his gift to the Bay Lights, many other donors have stepped up, and we’re almost there.

Every little bit helps – a mere $4 from everyone who went to Burning Man this year, would be enough to keep the Bay Lights going forever. Click here to donate.

Why doesn’t the Burning Man Project step up too, and provide a financial contribution to support the biggest and most famous piece of Burner Art being shared with the world forever? Seems like giving $10,000 to this would be more directly relevant to their mission of spreading Burner culture than $10,000 to the Exploratorium.

If Burners want to donate to help promote the art and culture of Burning Man worldwide, making this amazing installation permanent seems like incredible bang for our buck. It’s permanent, internationally renowned, and has already been enjoyed by more than 25 million people. The Bay Lights puts a permanent Burner stamp on the city’s skyline.

The documentary Impossible Light, about the dream that led to the Bay Lights’ Creation, makes a nice Christmas stocking stuffer for your Burner friends.

EndAllDisease has a lot of very interesting content, including this article about how Bitcoin is going to revolutionize all forms of electronic interaction. It is a societal change potentially as big as the Internet itself, one that contains the hope for a new type of transparent dialog between the rulers of our civilization and We the Burners. Whoever those rulers may be…

If all the mechanisms of a transaction are gone, so that it appears invisible, is it Decommodified? Did it happen on-Playa, or in cyberspace – a different place entirely?

Burning Man now accepts donations in Bitcoins and in 2014 sold its first ticket with Bitcoin.

CEO Marian Goodell said:

“Accepting Bitcoin for donations is an experimental first step. We plan to explore other possibilities in the future, including expanding Bitcoin to the ticket-buying process.”

There is a Camp Bitcoin, which was profiled as part of Re/Code’s excellent on-Playa coverage by Nellie Bowles. Peter Hirshberg, who was part of The Founders Speak event in New York, recently wrote a chapter on Burning Man in the book From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society.

We accept Bitcoin http://t.co/sTMz4uWqWU—
Danger Ranger (@danger_ranger) May 07, 2013

re-blogged from: Endalldisease.com (emphasis ours):

Blockchain Technology’s Annihilation of Social Networks, Banks, Governments and The Coming Digital Anarchy

Burnersxxx:

The whole article is very thought-provoking and worth reading in its entirety.

You can find out more about Ethereum at their web site and in this White Paper.

It’s no longer just Google, Elon Musk, politicians and the military that are looking to Burning Man for creative inspiration. It’s also Microsoft, too. The HoloLens, their latest immersive virtual reality world, adds on to XBox and competes with Facebook’s $2 billion Oculus Rift and Google’s $550 million Magic Leap. And it’s being brought to us by a Veteran Burner.

Business Insider brings us the story of Brazilian Alex Kipman, “inventor”, Burner, and top-rated nerd.

Fast Company named him one of the most creative people in business in 2011, and TIME named Kipman as one of its top 25 nerds of the year. 

…Kipman’s daily routine at Microsoft is very different from your average workday. In between critiquing secret projects and attending brainstorming meetings, Kipman blocks off several hours a day for “creating,” according to Fast Company.

APMicrosoft’s Joe Belfiore (left), Alex Kipman (middle), and Terry Myerson (right) trying the HoloLens.

Although he’s spent most of his life creating technology, his favorite conference to attend focuses on art rather than tech. Kipman told Fast Company that he gets a lot of inspiration from attending Burning Man. 

Microsoft –  What it’s like to use the HoloLens.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-alex-kipman-hololens-kinect-2015-1#ixzz3QRwGiwlO

From Fast Company:

What conference or gathering do you find most inspiring?

Burning Man. I have gone for many years. Met the most inspiring people, art and environment and it’s about as cleansing creatively as you can get. Few things in life give you an opportunity to leave everything behind and go back to a primitive, analog and non-technologic state. This is a source of creativity like no other.

…Software is the only art form in existence that is not bound by the confines of physics. You are only ever bound and constrained by lack of imagination. I love that!

Perhaps Burn2, the Burning Man cyberspace Regional in Second Life, will team up with XBox for some killer content. The future sure is going to be different.

image source: PhoneArena

Related posts:

Burning The Cyber Man

Creating God in the Digital Age

Filed under: Tech Tagged: 2015, 3d, augmented, google, hololens, immersive, magic leap, microsoft, oculus rift, tech, virtual reality, xbox

“Shitty Acid” by Brian Lewis Saunders

Who wants to be a billionaire?

Just eat acid. That’s all you gotta do. If you believe CNN, that is…

Cult leader Lifestyle Guru Tim Ferriss shares his thoughts on using drugs to expand consciousness as an acceptable way for the tech industry to solve problems.

“using smart drugs is like pouring gasoline on the fire. Hallucinogens used very very intelligently help you decide where to put the fire”

Silicon Valley are now promoting hallucinogenic drugs on CNN. Is it time to legalize yet?

“psychedelics have a rich history in Silicon Valley. One of the most iconic users? Steve Jobs” 

Other iconic users include Douglas Englebart (inventor of the mouse and desktop interface), John Gilmore (co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the MAPS association for psychedelic studies), and Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL).

The Billboard Liberation Front was one of the San Francisco groups that fed into the early Burning Man. This art piece was produced by John Gilmore, and “dropped” in 1995

Author Ryan Grim sees Burning Man as the latest incarnation of Silicon Valley’s desire to be inspired by hallucinogens.

Burning Man co-founder Danger Ranger, contributed to Mondo 2000’s Berkeley party house and got wired with WIRED. He attributes hanging around with this crowd (with their Stanford chemistry lab supply) as providing valuable “connections” to Burning Man that brought the tech crowd in to join up with the Cacophony Society’s Merry Pranksters. WIRED beat the drum for the tech industry with their Bruce Sterling cover story in 1996. Danger Ranger joined the Burning Man Project in 1990, prior to that with John Law he was a co-founder of the Cacophony Society, which grew out of their earlier involvement in the Suicide Club, which also begat the BLF. The Billboard Liberation Front “dropped LSD” in 1995, sponsored by Gilmore as the project’s Creative Director. First a giant neon ad for LSD, next to the freeway, ironically high-jacked by art guerilla cyber punks; next, a cover story on WIRED with a neon glowing Burning Man and a Mad Max-themed video from Dr Dre.

Even LSD mega-promoter Timothy Leary got all Cyberdelic, saying that the PC is the LSD of the 1990’s and admonishing Bohemians to “turn on, boot up, jack in“. Presumably, in the 21st century the LSD of the Teenies is going to be Oculus Rift and the Burner-built Microsoft Holo Lens, where you can plug into Burner-built Second Life to attend Burning Man virtually at their Burn2 Regional.

From Wikipedia:

Timothy Leary, an advocate of psychedelic drug use who became a cult figure of the hippies in the 1960s, reemerged in the 1980s as a spokesperson of the cyberdelic counterculture, whose adherents called themselves “cyberpunks”, and became one of the most philosophical promoters of personal computers (PC), the Internet, and immersive virtual reality…

In contrast to the hippies of the 1960s who were decidedly anti-science and anti-technology, the cyberpunks of the 1980s and 1990s ecstatically embraced technology and the hacker ethic. They believed that high technology (and smart drugs) could help human beings overcome all limits, that it could liberate them from authority and even enable them to transcend space, time, and body. They often expressed their ethos and aesthetics through cyberart and reality hacking.

R. U. Sirius, co-founder and original editor-in-chief of Mondo 2000 magazine, became the most prominent promoter of the cyberpunk ideology, whose adherents were pioneers in the IT industry of Silicon Valley and the West Coast of the United States 

io9 has a list of 10 great inventors who took drugs. At least 6 of the 10 were trippers:

6. Steve Jobs — LSD
LSD was a big deal for Steve Jobs. How big? Evidently, Jobs believed that experimenting with LSD in the 1960s was “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” What’s more, he felt that there were parts of him that the people he knew and worked with could not understand, simply because they hadn’t had a go at psychedelics. This latter sentiment also comes through in his recently-published biography, wherein Jobs goes so far as to associate what he interpreted as Bill Gates’ dearth of imagination with a lack of psychedelic experimentation:

“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

“He’d be a broader guy,” Jobs says about Gates, “if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”

5. Bill Gates — LSD
Which is funny, because Bill Gates totally did experiment with LSD, though an excerpt from a 1994 interview with Playboy reveals he was much less open about it than Jobs:

PLAYBOY: Ever take LSD?
GATES: My errant youth ended a long time ago.
PLAYBOY: What does that mean?
GATES: That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently.
PLAYBOY: One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye.
GATES: [Smiles]
PLAYBOY: Ah, a glimmer of recognition.
GATES: That was on the other side of that boundary. The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don’t think at this age I could. I don’t think you’re as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work.

Francis Crick — LSD

Francis Crick — of the DNA-structure discovering Watson, Crick, and Franklin — reportedly told numerous friends and colleagues about his LSD experimentation during the time he spent working to determine the molecular structure that houses all life’s information.

In fact, in a 2004 interview, Gerrod Harker recalls talking with Dick Kemp — a close friend of Crick’s — about LSD use among Cambridge academics, and tells the Daily Mail that the University’s researchers often used LSD in small amounts as “a thinking tool.” Evidently, Crick at one point told Kemp that he had actually “perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.” 

Read the full list at io9.com.

As the Guardian points out, many people tried acid, but only one became Steve Jobs. Similarly, although many Burners take acid, less than a tenth of one percent are Billionaire Burners.

Taking LSD can make you lose your mind, like Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett who was a frequent acid tripper, and never recovered from one particularly large dose. In her brief article Operation Chaos, Mae B Russell  suggests that rather than coincidence, this may have been a deliberately engineered capability of the drug which was developed during World War II as a chemical weapon. LSD was researched by the military/intelligence complex for many decades, distributed for in hundreds of millions of doses (often gifted), and synthesized into many more variants than just “LSD-25″.

The whole acid scene began in Silicon Valley, and disseminated out of the Bay Area into Hollywood and then the rest of the world. How many of San Francisco’s Summer of Love Sixties hippies became billionaires? There are definitely a few. For every self-made billionaire in the Bay that did drop acid, there are many more who did not. Acid cannot make you a billionaire any more than going to Burning Man can make you a billionaire.

Mondo 2000’s original cyberpunk R U Sirious now looks back on the cyberdelic revolution rather ruefully:

Everything from Wetware to Techno Erotic Paganism image: Gord Fynes/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Anybody who doesn’t believe that we’re trapped hasn’t taken a good look around. We’re trapped in a sort of mutating multinational corporate oligarchy that’s not about to go away. We’re trapped by the limitations of our species. We’re trapped in time. At the same time identity, politics, and ethics have long turned liquid. […] Cyberculture (a meme that I’m at least partly responsible for generating, incidentally) has emerged as a gleeful apologist for this kill-the-poor trajectory of the Republican revolution. You find it all over Wired – this mix of chaos theory and biological modeling that is somehow interpreted as scientific proof of the need to devolve and decentralize the social welfare state while also deregulating and empowering the powerful, autocratic, multinational corporations. You’ve basically got the breakdown of nation states into global economies simultaneously with the atomization of individuals or their balkanization into disconnected sub-groups, because digital technology conflates space while decentralizing communication and attention. The result is a clear playing field for a mutating corporate oligarchy, which is what we have. I mean, people think it’s really liberating because the old industrial ruling class has been liquefied and it’s possible for young players to amass extraordinary instant dynasties. But it’s savage and inhuman. Maybe the wired elite think that’s hip. But then don’t go around crying about crime in the streets or pretending to be concerned with ethics

For a true “rich history of psychedelics in Silicon Valley”, a good introduction is John Markoff’s “deliciously scandalous” book What The Dormouse Said:

technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960’s: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center. Before there was Xerox PARC, which most people know about, and before the two Steves (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) in the garage creating the Apple computer, many of the technologies that became the personal computer were developed in these two laboratories on either side of the Stanford campus during the 1960’s. I tried to capture that work and the environment in which it took place, which was deeply influenced by the 1960’s counterculture and by the anti-war movement. [Source: Ubiquity]

image: Trey Ratcliff/Flickr (Creative Commons)

image: Kordite/Flickr (Creative Commons)

image from WIRED

The news of hackers exploiting a “back door” in BMOrg’s new ticketing system broke last week on Reddit. We covered it last Wednesday in Ticket Hell. Now, the story has been picked up by a broader media audience, with stories in WIRED, Computer World, Paste Magazine, CBS Local, and SFist.

WIRED:

Burning Man has practically gone mainstream. The once-fringe desert camping festival is now cultural fodder for The Simpsons and Taco Bell commercials. Celebrities and CEOs routinely attend. So it’s no surprise that 40,000 Burning Man tickets sold out in less than an hour last Wednesday when they went on sale.

But software engineers in Silicon Valley hacked into the Burning Man ticketing system powered by Ticketfly to cut to the front of the queue. Who needs luck when you have engineering skills and you’re willing to use ‘em for your advantage?

…Several engineers and web developers on a Burning Man Reddit thread speculated that hackers were able to create this backdoor after discovering a few lines of JavaScript code on the ticketing website that gave preeminent access to tickets three minutes before they officially went on sale at noon on Wednesday.

“They left code in the page that allowed you to generate the waiting room URL ahead of time,” said Michael Vacirca, a software engineer at a large defense corporation. “If you knew how to form the URL based on the code segment then you could get in line before everyone else who clicked right at noon.”

Burning Man admits the error and says those hacked tickets will be put back up for grabs during the scheduled last-minute sale in August.

[Read the full story at WIRED]

It’s interesting to watch the corporate spin machine in action. Rather than any sophisticated hacking being required, simply entering your code directly into TicketFly seems to have worked. According to hundreds of Burner comments on the Interwebz, clicking the emailed link ten minutes after noon pretty consistently got Burners in to buy tickets immediately, whereas clicking the link a few seconds after noon led to many Burners being stuck in the queue for 90 minutes with no success.

To me, these are the real issues here: it was definitely not First Come, First Served, and it was trivially easy to bypass the queue – multiple methods were used, and most did not require the ability to write code or hack into systems. The focus on these “200 hacker tickets” is smoke and mirrors around the obvious explosion in the number of tickets being listed on the secondary market. Even BMOrg are now encouraging Burners to get tickets and vehicle passes “on the open market”. With software to automatically buy as many tickets as you want from TicketFly selling for a mere $750 – about the profit margin for a single ticket right now – it seems that there continue to be some serious issues with BMOrg’s ticketing system.

Who would have thought they could make it even worse than the lottery? As BMOrg proved with their Spark movie, perceived ticket scarcity makes a nice story for the media.

WIRED:

The way this year’s sale operated, however, didn’t help to dissipate the resentment. Those interested in purchasing tickets were placed in an online queue as each sale was processed and given a time estimate as to how long they would be kept waiting before they could purchase tickets. The time estimates kept shifting, going from an 24 minute wait, to 46 minutes, back down to 18 minutes, to then “more than an hour,” which might as well have read, “abandon all hope ye who enter here.” At one point, the line was inexplicably “paused” for several minutes, causing another nerve-wracking moment on social media.

This drastic, back-and-forth change in wait times gave those in line the illusion that somehow hackers were cutting in front of them and bumping them out of scoring tickets. Burning Man’s social media team responded by saying that the wait times fluctuated based on how long it took each buyer to complete the purchase. It surely didn’t qualm any anxiety to have used such an unpredictable factor as a counter, instead of a fixed number (“There are 39,999 people in front of you trying to buy tickets”).

See the comments from ZOrg in Emotional Roller Coaster From Hell about why this theory of wait times fluctuating because of some people taking a long time to complete transactions doesn’t add up.

WIRED:

This is not the first time Silicon Valley has been criticized for tampering with Burning Man’s ideals and processes. Last year’s festival garnered unflattering feedback from Burning Man die-hards after venture capitalists, executives and celebrities descended on the desert with air-conditioned camps, personal assistants and other VIP-perks. In recent years, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have all scored tickets to Burning Man.

It seems like now, Silicon Valley is leveraging more than its money to get in front of the line.

[Read the full story at WIRED]

Way to shift the blame to your customers, BMOrg. “Silicon Valley is using its technical might to cheat the system and get Burning Man tickets”: it sure makes a great angle for a story, compared to “some people typed the code into TicketFly”.

Actually it’s BMOrg’s leadership that has been criticized for tampering with Burning Man’s ideals, not Silicon Valley. No-one gives a flying fuck if Zuck brings his P.A., but many Burners do care when some on the Board of Directors are selling $17,000 hotel rooms like it’s some sort of Mega-AirBnB in the desert, and getting an unlimited supply of tickets for their customers and sherpas.

Cancelling 200 tickets will do nothing to fix the problems that occurred in the Directed Group and Individual ticket sales. There is no evidence that it will hurt scalpers, indeed it may even punish some Burners for being radically self-reliant. BMOrg have said they will void these tickets and add them back to the OMG sale – so now there are 1200 tickets left, for 60,000 Burners to attempt to buy in milliseconds on August 5.

A couple of weeks ago we brought you news of Burning Man: The Musical – a new Kickstarter project. It seems the idea is ramping up fast, with a big profile from the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The man behind the idea has never been to Burning Man. Does that make him a pre-Burner?

The musical is the brainchild of Matt Werner, a 30-year-old New York City-based Google employee who has never been to Burning Man. This year will be his first.

The Oakland, Calif. native — a former “hacker house” resident and a friend to many Silicon Valley hipster techies — admits that he sees the irony: A virgin Burner orchestrates a musical version of the world’s favorite desert Utopian festival that he has never been to.

His own story seems to be a little bit reflected in the plot of the unborn musical. The story line focuses on a 25-year old techie named Joe who lives in San Francisco and commutes down to Silicon Valley.

Joe goes to Burning Man one year and it disappoints initially.

Who wants to dance with a sparkle pony, right?

“His lofty ambitions to network with high-powered executives are not met. Between getting dumped by his girlfriend, dancing with sparkle ponies, and nearly dying while on a vision quest in the desert, he reaches a real low,” according to Werner’s web page.

“In the midst of this low, the acceptance, connection, and playfulness he experiences at Burning Man make him start to question his past life of ambition and power in Silicon Valley. The sharing economy and free spirits he meets in the desert make him wonder--is his real mission in life just to make money? Or is it maybe to authentically connect with others and help others?” the synopsis reads.

The RGJ asks the hard-hitting questions:

Q: Are you going to be critical at all of Burning Man and its direction? Is this just about a trip to Burning Man, about Burning Man? Or is it about Burning Man and its direction today?

I’m using “Book of Mormon” as a model. It does satirize the Mormon faith, but it does celebrate it too. It’s laughing with them, and not at them. It is going to be a satirical piece. It’s going to be a musical comedy. I mean, people recognize the absurdity of the festival. It is going to be a celebration of the values, and about the conflict between Silicon Valley and Black Rock City.

Q: Which side of that conflict are you on?

For me, I live in multiple worlds. I’ve worked at Google for five years, but I’m going to go to Burning Man. What is interesting to me, this notion of utopia. Some people I know, they believe that technology will solve all the world’s problems. Then there’s this other version of utopia, where we’re really in tune with ourselves. What I think is fascinating is seeing these worlds collide. I’ve lived in both of them. I used to live with these Russian programmers living in this “hacker house” pad. But we’ve had these really deep, meaningful conversations about all of this. Some of the media depictions have really hammed up the influence of these guys.

Q: So, do these techies come back changed people? Can you be a Google guy, or a tech savant, and be a true Burner too?

If you’re a billionaire, can you really say you’re a Burner? I really don’t know. Working at Google, the co-founders, they’ve all been to Burning Man. Some of the Silicon Valley people that go — some of the guys, they’re going to hook up with girls, and do drugs, and dance. There’s others who are radically transformed, and who do decide to find other work. I don’t have a statement I am trying to make: Silicon Valley, bad; Burning Man, good, or vice versa

[Read the rest of the story at the Reno Gazette-Journal]

There’s a conflict between Silicon Valley and Black Rock City? Could’ve fooled me. But perhaps that is the ironic premise for this Big Farce. Donate here if you want to find out.

Students Viet Tran (L) and Seth Robertson with their invention, a sound extinguisher, at the Fairfax Campus. Photo by Alexis Glenn/Creative Services/George Mason University

Two students at George Mason University have come up with a remarkable invention, which could be a game-changer in the eternal war of hippies vs ravers. You want us to turn the music off? Well maybe we’ll just turn your fire off!

From factmag:

By blasting a fire with low frequencies between 30 and 60 hertz range, the extinguisher separates oxygen from fuel, explains inventor Viet Tran, who built the device with fellow student Seth Robertson. “The pressure wave is going back and forth, and that agitates where the air is. That specific space is enough to keep the fire from reigniting.”

The pair faced plenty of opposition to their project initially because they’re electrical engineers, not chemical – several faculty members refused to act as advisers on the project. Eventually their professor Brian Mark agreed to oversee their work and not fail them if the whole thing flopped, said Tran.

Some further details from the Washington Post:

They weren’t at all sure that it would work

“I honestly didn’t think it would work as well as it did,” Tran said.

And neither did their professor

“My initial impression was that it wouldn’t work,” Mark, their adviser, said. “Some students take the safe path, but Viet and Seth took the higher-risk option.”

They MacGyver’d it

Image: Evan Cantwell/GMU

the goal was to create something portable and affordable like a fire extinguisher that would generate the sound wave at the correct frequency, which they were able to do with the help of an oscilloscope that measured the waves. They connected their frequency generator to a small amplifier and linked the amplifier to a small electric power source. These are hooked up to a collimator that they made out of a large cardboard tube with a hole at the end, which narrows the sound waves to a smaller area.

They tried ultra-high frequencies, such as 20,000 or 30,000 hertz, and could see the flames vibrating but not going out. They took it down low, and at the range of 30 to 60 hertz, the fires began to extinguish…the trial-and-error began. They placed flaming rubbing alcohol next to a large subwoofer and found that it wasn’t necessarily all about that bass, musically speaking, at least. “Music isn’t really good,” Robertson said, “because it doesn’t stay consistent.”

The next level of testing will determine if it can put out large structure fires.

So how does it work?

The basic concept, Tran said, is that sound waves are also “pressure waves, and they displace some of the oxygen” as they travel through the air. Oxygen, we all recall from high school chemistry, fuels fire. At a certain frequency, the sound waves “separate the oxygen [in the fire] from the fuel. The pressure wave is going back and forth, and that agitates where the air is. That specific space is enough to keep the fire from reigniting.”

Like the Internet and SIRI, the technology is straight out of the Pentagon’s secret research division.

In 2012, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency conducted a project on “acoustic suppression of flame” and found that it worked on small levels but could not determine if it would work at “the levels required for defense applications,” the agency said.

One of the students works for the Defense Department…coincidence?

Robertson has been working at the Defense Department and has been offered a job with the Air Force. Tran has interned at a Dulles, Va.-area aerospace firm with a promise of a job after graduation.

This could be a great solution for fire-fighting in dry areas, like Nevada, drought-stricken California, or the new frontier of space:

Although the students originally envisioned their device as a tool to attack kitchen fires and to eliminate the toxic monoammonium phosphate used in commercial fire extinguishers, they can see more uses: in confined areas in space, or wide areas outdoors, such as forest fires. Not having to use water or foam would be a bonus in many situations.

Read the full story at the Washington Post.

Fire truck of the future?

Are the algorithms working for us? Or against us? Automatic colluding bots are a much bigger problem in your life than you’re probably aware of. This episode of the Keiser Report offers a solution to fight the system – with itself. Max interviews David DeGraw, one of the Founders of the #occupy movement who coined the term “the 99 Percent”. They discuss the Revolution that Russell Brand and Ron Paul have been trying to kick off. David is trying to create a “psychological underground railroad” to help people navigate the propaganda system.

18:18 ” it’s about empowering people to follow their passions and do what they love. People are so dominated by fear. They are so mentally enslaved. They are thoroughly propagandized and embedded in the fear-based consciousness”

At 20:00 Max pitches his idea. A truly brilliant idea.

http://www.maxkeiser.com/2015/04/kr751-keiser-report-fighting-algorithmic-bots/

Who’s to blame, if computers did it?

In a holocracy do-ocracy, and volunteer oligarchy…who’s responsible for the decisions? Are the ticket algorithms responsible for the 40% virgins, or their programmers? Or hackers? Maybe no-one is responsible, it’s all just chaos, computers acting randomly…

Have you set up your Burner Profile yet?

Russell Brand’s current affairs show The Trews is well worth subscribing to on YouTube, as is the Keiser Report which also airs on RT. Here’s a recent interview with him about his ideas for non-violent Revolution, and speaking truth to power and the “invading forces” like Amazon, Starbucks, and Google. It’s rather long, but it’s quite interesting. There aren’t that many people putting themselves out there on the world stage and expressing original ideas, that don’t involve purchasing something.

“Whenever power concentrates it creates a dickhead” – classic.

You may also want to consider this Situationist conspiracy theory which paints Russell Brand as a pied piper, confusing and diffusing the occupy movement with the 60’s radical tactics of the Society of the Spectacle. In the interview above, he does bring up Adbusters at 40:00 as an organization he admires and follows.

The last few days have been pretty hectic in the financial world. You may have heard some of this on mainstream media.

Zero Hedge asked “Is This What The First World Cyber War Looks Like?”

Alarmist? I don’t think so. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Here is my interpretation of what just happened:

July 5:

Greece voted “NO” to their bail-out, meaning they will most likely leave the European Union and issue their own national currency. Other countries may follow suit, “falling like dominoes” due to their banks’ exposure to Greek debt.

A major hacker group “Hacking Team” themselves got hacked. More than 500 GB of emails, financial and other data was leaked to the Internet. They revealed that the company had sold hacking tools to the FBI, DEA, and Department of Defense; as well as to the governments of Mexico, Australia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Spain, and many others.

July 7:

The Intercept published documents about the Hacking Team corporation that was selling its secrets to 3rd world despots, as well as G20 countries and alphabet agencies. They revealed Zero-Day Exploits in Windows and Flash, which could be a major vulnerability across the entire Internet.

The zero-day vulnerability affects all major web browsers, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox as well as Apple’s Safari.

[Source: Hacker News]

Such exploits need to be exploited immediately, before the companies who created them (either accidentally, or deliberately) can scramble to fix them.

The Chinese stock market tanked and trading was suspended. It has dropped more than 30% from its high a month ago. China implemented trading controls, freezing out $2.6 trillion of shares – about 40% of the country’s market capitalization.

Chinese equities have lost more than $3.5 trillion of value in less than a month as traders liquidated leveraged bets at an unprecedented pace. Foreign investors extended a record three-day exodus on Wednesday…On the Shanghai exchange, 365 companies suspended trading, equivalent to 33 percent of all listings. A further 992 were halted in Shenzhen, or 56 percent of the total.

[Source: Bloomberg]

China has been following the “Wall Street 1929 Crash” playbook with this one:

Time magazine publishes a story How Real Is The Threat Of a Cyber Attack, warning that a “black swan” cyber attack could really destabilize the world economy over the next, ummm, year – and the government has been consistently surprised by cyber attacks recently. This blames the Chinese as the most sophisticated group of cyber hackers.

Just before midnight, Anonymous tweets “I wonder if tomorrow will be bad for Wall Street”

July 8:

8:22am Bloomberg, CNet, TIME, and many others pick up the story: Attack on Power Grid Could Cost $1 Trillion

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was shut down for 5 hours due to a “glitch”, only opening in time for the last hour of trading.

Amazing how they can diagnose that so quickly. Especially given that by definition, “hacking” is intruding into internal technical systems.

A trader on the floor described the situation as unprecedented:

In my time in the capital markets or working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, I have never seen a complete halt of the markets due to technology problems.  Even 9/11 cannot be considered a halt because the markets never opened that day.  This is extraordinary.
 
There was no clue, or early indication that this would happen. The music just simply stopped playing.  There is no panic on the part of the trading community and right now we are just ensuring that we are prepared when the market re-opens… Most of the volume in this market (and most markets, for that matter) happens in the first half hour and last half hour, so the NYSE is scrambling to get us back on line for a close of the market.

[Source: Yahoo Finance]

The Wall Street Journal web site was taken down by hackers.

Zero Hedge, one of the world’s most popular financial commentary sites, was shut down. Their servers are located in Zug, Switzerland.

United airlines was shut down worldwide, affecting nearly 5000 flights.

The computer problem in the airline’s reservation system caused the FAA to impose what is known as a ground stop at 8:26 a.m. ET, meaning United flights were not allowed to take off. It lifted the stop for feeder airlines that fly under the name United Express about 15 minutes later, but it took until just before 9:47 a.m. for the ground stop to be lifted for United flights.

The computer problem had forced United to hand write tickets for passengers at multiple airports. But Record said the lack of a reservation system meant that the airline was not able to check to confirm that passengers were not on a no-fly list or that everyone on the flight was supposed to be there.

“Because of the safeguards and the backups built into the reservation system, once that goes down, everything has to stop,” Record said.

[Source: CNN]

Power was shut down in Washington DC, affecting 2500 people in the home town of Homeland’s Carrie Mathieson.

Earlier today, Anonymous tweeted this:

Was this just a one off, or has it been brewing for a while? How do we know “Anonymous” is really behind this, and not a state actor?

Going back a little earlier in the year, we can see the build up to this “First Cyber War” being seeded in the media. In particular, software pioneer, cyber-security expert, and hacker of entire countries John McAfee has been sounding the alarm.

A couple of months ago, seemingly out of the blue he started writing a column about hacking – his stories are excellent and he’s quite a character, follow him on Facebook. His most recent columns seem to have been “priming the pump” for today’s events. Prescience? Inside track? Or just a series of lucky guesses?

The first big event of the year was the infamous Sony hack – which led to racist emails between senior Sony Execs circulating.

Then we had the “next level” Sony hack – the one blamed on North Korea, timed to come out at the same time as a comedy film about assassinating the leader of North Korea.

June 4

McAfee wrote about the most damaging hack in history: Adult Friend Finder, 15 million records. There were senators and governors and their staffers in the list, using their own names and official email addresses. There were also church leaders and celebrities.

June 8

McAfee’s next column Four Million Ways To Lose Your Secrets is about how the Office of Personnel Management got hacked, the intruders stole 4 million detailed records. This includes comprehensive and highly sensitive information that is collected as part of the application for Top Secret and other security clearances. This was blamed on the Chinese government.

June 25

McAfee said the OPM hack was smokescreen for a much bigger problem: 24 major hacks in the last 30 days. None of these appear to be linked to Anonymous.

From Silicon Angle:

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack has acted as a smokescreen to mask a far broader problem that has occurred in the past 30 days. Here’s the full story in headlines (those in italics are included for completeness only and are not counted in the 24 hacks.):

April 7th 2015 – Russians Hack White House Computers and Even Access President Obama’s Schedule – New York Post

May 22nd 2015 – Adult Friend Finder hack exposes millions of sex seekers – SiliconANGLE #GetMcAfee’d

May 26th 2015 – 104,000 records taken from IRS Website – CNN

May 29th 2015 – IRS Blames Russia For $50 Million Hack  – Engadget

May 27th 2015 – Kentucky GOP Website Hacked – GovTech

June 1st 2015 – 1.25 Million records from Japan’s Pension System Hacked – Japan Times

June 4th 2015 – U.S. agency handling security clearances hacked – SiliconANGLE

June 5th 2015 – Records of 4 million Federal Employees Exposed in OPM Hack – NPR

June 15th 2015 – US Officials Now Say 14 Million Records Taken In OPM Hack – NPR

June 23rd 2015 – OPM Hack 4 Times Larger Than Reported – 18 Million Records Now Reported Taken – CNN

June 23rd 2015 – John McAfee predicts OPM number will reach 30 Million – SiliconANGLE

June 4th 2015 – Russia Hacks German Parliament – Business Insider

June 8th 2015 – US Army’s Website Hacked By Unknown Intruders – NBC News

June 8th 2015 – 70% Of U, S. Businesses Hacked In Past Year – Property Casualty 360

June 10th 2015 – Arizona Vehicle For Hire Licensing Agency Hacked.  Computers Still Down. – Arizona Central

June 10th 2015- Kaspersky Labs Security Company Hacked – CNET

June 10th 2015 – Apple iCloud Hacked.  Millions of Passwords Targeted – IBTimes

June 11th 2015 – Indiana Health Software IT Firm Hacked – Modern Health Care

June 12th 2015 – New Data Reveals 96% of UK Corporations Have Been Hacked – Information Age

June 13th 2015 – TV Giant Canal+ Has Been Hacked – Torrent Freak

June 15th 2015 – Newly Disclosed Hack of Homeland Security Exposes Records of 390,000 Employees, Contractors And Job Applicants – Newser

June 16th 2015 – North Dakota Workers Comp Insurer Hacked – Business Insurance

June 16th – LastPass Revealed That The Master Passwords For Its 7 Million Users May Have Been Compromised In Hack –Forbes

June 16th 2015 – Computers In House of Congress Hacked: – Breitbart

June 16th – University of Baltimore Website Hacked – WBAL-TV

June 17th 2015- Canadian Government Computers Go Dark After Cyber Attack – BBC

June 20th 2015 – Microsoft Website Dedicated to online Privacy Gets Hacked – ArsTechnica

June 22nd 2015 – Polish Airline Hack Attack Leaves 1,400 Passengers Stranded – CNBC

June 22nd 2015 – U.S. National Archives Says It’s Data Was Hacked – NextGOV

June 22nd 2015 – The NSA Hacked Into Popular Antivirus Software To Track Users And Infiltrate Networks – TechTimes

June 22nd 2015 – Script.CC. Hacked, Large Number of Bitcoin Stolen – NewsBTC

June 23rd 2015 – Britain’s National Health Services Hacked – Mirror

What can we make of the above headlines?

The first thing that I noticed was the complete absence of the type of hacks that appeared in the news in the previous year.  Nothing similar to the Target Corporation, Nordstrom Inc. and long string of other retail hacks; no mention of credit cards; no mention of individual financial loss.  All the mentioned hacks had to do with Political and Government personnel, or with gaining access to the deeper layers of individual lives – going way beyond mere financial data which is in constant flux.

The data taken focused on the more permanent aspects people’s lives.  For example, medical data was targeted in nearly 20 percent of the hacks (Japan’s Pension System, Indiana Healthcare Software, North Dakota Workers Comp, Britain’s National Health System).  The OPM hack, by far the most devastating, focused on the intensely personal data collected during the process of vetting people for secret security clearances.  This data included everything required to determine a person’s fundamental character.

Given the above, we can predict the following with a high degree of accuracy:

1. More hacks of medical data within multiple states (and countries) will soon be reported.
2. Reported hacks within the U.S. Government will spread to a number of other Government agencies.
3. As currently known hacks unfold, they will significantly worsen.

People may be astonished by the increasing frequency of the number of hacks

[Source: Silicon Angle]

.

July 8

In a story this morning in IB Times, which doesn’t mention today’s attacks, McAfee said the leaks portends a grim future of global cyber war. One which we are already in.

Nothing to see here, sheeple, move along. As long as CNN tells you everything’s fine, it’s fine.

Burners have always been preparing for a post-apocalyptic, post-economic civilization – that time might be coming sooner than we think.

I don’t want to give a spoiler alert for the end of the new season of Orange is the New Black, but for anyone who’s seen it, I’m kind of imagining that…if the system shut down, and no bank accounts were working, that would probably seem fine for a moment. Eventually, reality would set in.

Wonder what is going to happen tomorrow: will the markets just shrug and move on? Will The Powers That Be continue to deny vehemently that it was a hacker attack, without even investigating?

[Update 7/9/15 5:41pm]

In today’s news, the OPM hack has now been increased to 22.1 million people’s records stolen, 1 in 15 Americans.

Officials have concluded that the larger breach, which targeted background investigation records kept by OPM, included Social Security numbers, information on family members and other contacts, as well as health and criminal records. The data haul also included an estimated 1.1 million fingerprint records.

In total, hackers are thought to have netted records on 19.7 million people who applied for background check investigations with the federal government, and another 1.8 million people including spouses who did not apply for a background check but whose information was included in the forms. Anyone who applied for a background check from 2000 on is likely to have had their information compromised…

Among the forms used in federal background checks is the Standard Form 86, an 127-page document that delves into intimate questions about prior brushes with the law, drug use, psychiatric health, and info on friends and family members. It requires the applicant to put his or her Social Security number on nearly every page of the document.

China was named as “the leading suspect” in the breach last month by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper…Officials did confirm on the call that both attacks were the work of “the same actor” who gained access to the OPM system probably starting in May or June of 2014 with a contractor’s stolen username and password. 

 [Source: NBC]

It sure seems like a lot of hacker related stuff was launched yesterday. In the Washington Post, DARPA announced a “Cyber Grand Challenge”, noting that we’re losing the cybersecurity war.

Image: DARPA/Facebook

DARPA initially started  with more than 100 teams when it began the program a year ago, but the field was quickly whittled down. On Wednesday, it announced the seven finalists chosen to compete in the competition next year. They are an eclectic band of cyberwarriors, ranging from academics representing major university computer science programs  to well-known hackers and defense industry heavyweights.

[Source: Washington Post]

[Update 7/9/15 7:24pm]

The White House and the FBI might be saying “no cyber attack”, but John McAfee thinks it was. I’m more inclined to go with the billionaire domain expert on this one, rather than the hasty diagnosis by political mouthpieces.

At around the same time that the NYSE went down, the Wall Street Journal’s website went offline, as did that of popular financial blog Zero Hedge. United Airlines also experienced a “network connectivity issue” which impacted almost 5,000 flights worldwide.

Given the criticality of technology to United Airlines, let’s assume for a moment it has a daily reliability rate of 99.9%, meaning it has a system failure once every 1,000 days – which equates to once every three years. Now, let’s assume the NYSE and the Wall Street Journal also have a daily reliability rate of 99.9%.

If these events were truly random and independent, then the frequency of all three of these events happening on the same day is once in a billion days (or if you prefer to count in years, almost 2.8 million years).

Coincidental failure is possible, sure, but it does seem highly unlikely. If you add Zero Hedge to the mix, then the probability of all four events happening on the same day rapidly approaches zero.

If we throw in the near simultaneity of the NYSE and the Wall Street Journal issues (happening within minutes of each other), then it is more likely that your car, using quantum probability effects, would leak out of your garage and show up instantly in my driveway an ocean away.

It is certainly possible, but no one in their right mind would bet on it.

[Source: IB Times]

The Financial Times commented on the attacks, and was rather dismissive of the official denials. They call for a new Agency to manage cyber defense, or just take it out of the hands of the USAF and give it to Homeland Security. That way, the same TSA goons groping you at the airport, can be looking up all your personal records in the Cyber databases too.

On paper, there is no shortage of resources; earlier this year, for example, President Barack Obama earmarked $14bn for the cyber fight. But the key problem now is not so much a lack of cash — but co-ordination: as fear spreads, a bewildering alphabet soup of different agencies and task forces is leaping into cyber battle, often with little collaboration. The institution that is supposed to be in charge of security threats is the Department of Homeland Security. But its skills are viewed with scepticism by military officials. The Pentagon has its own cyber warriors, as do America’s intelligence agencies.

The White House has tried to force these bodies to work together. Separately, civilian agencies such as Nuclear Regulatory Commission started holding discreet meetings with each other last autumn on cyber issues too. But collaboration across sectors is patchy. “The level of readiness in different agencies varies enormously,” admits a senior Washington figure at the centre of these efforts. Add in private sector bodies and the picture is even worse: not only is the Pentagon wary of sharing data with, say, the Chamber of Commerce, but companies are often terrified of revealing attacks to each other.

Is there a solution? One sensible response might be to create a new agency to provide a central focus for the cyber fight. There is precedent for that; most Washington regulators emerged in response to a new threat. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, was created after the 1929 stock market crash; the Food and Drug Administration appeared after scandals over dangerous medicines. A second option might be to relaunch the DHS to focus on the cyber fight. It could, for example, be named the Department of Cyber and Homeland Security.

[Source: FT]

7 hackers from L0pht raised the alarm about this to Congress in 1998, saying that any one of them could take down the entire Internet in about 30 minutes. [Source: Washington Post]

[Update 7/9/15 10:45pm]

A detailed post-mortem at Zero Hedge.

So, to summarize, the NYSE has a disaster recovery center which… they choose not to use because it is an inconvenience to clients who would rather be unable to trade!

Maybe there was a different angle altogether: with China crashing and halting 70% of the market, the US had just one response:

The Chinese stock market surged again today, after the government threatened short sellers with arrest. This may merely be a “dead cat bounce”, a reflexive response from the market when technical indicators show it as massively oversold.

It raises the prospect that the motivation of the hackers may not have been to destroy, but in fact to profit from wild swings in the stock market. The use of derivative instruments like Put and Call options can create massive profits from swings of only a few percentage points. Certainly, Anonymous would have been in a position to take out such trading positions before making their threat – and, it looks like, executing their plan.

[Update 7/11/15 2:04pm]

Financial Times: US Agency Head Resigns Over Cyber Attack

Google Earth For Pirates

This is pretty cool. You’ll need to install Google Earth, and enable 3D buildings. Then open this KML file.  Zoom in to ground level and hold down the arrow keys, you can walk through Burning Man in 3D. You really get a sense of how vast it is when you see The Man in the distance and head towards it. It is from Cargo Cult, Burning Man 2013, although the particular day the image was taken is unknown.

From the Google Earth Blog:

You can also type “Black Rock City NV” into Google Earth’s search (no need for any KML file). The satellite imagery is becoming more detailed every year, and this is just what is being released for free to the public.

Creepily, all the people are missing from the city. Wonder if there was some behind the scenes facial recognition going on, as all the Burners were slurped out by the Artilect in between its trippy dreams.

Last weekend as part of the build up to the Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, they threw a Hackathon at Weebly’s playful office in the Financial District. The idea was to make something that would enhance the experience of artists and fans at Outside Lands. I love this idea – a festival that can improve, based on ideas and input from its patrons. Call it Radical Community Reliance.

From Fest300:

This past weekend at the third annual Outside Hacks Hackathon, over 200 developers, designers, and technologists of all kinds gathered at the San Francisco headquarters web hosting company Weebly for the mission of “building something that enhances the experience for artists and/or fans at Outside Lands .”

For the uninitiated, a hackathon is an intense competition where teams of coders attempt to build an app, feature, or program in a limited amount of time (usually between 24 and 48 hours). Outside Hacks allotted its participants a total of 24 hours. One of the organizers of the hackathon Travis Laurendine says “Hackathons are like dance marathons, it’s like a sleepover party, except no one is sleeping.”

At the end of the long and hyper-intense 24 hours – which left many of the coders exhausted – the judges chose the app Dave Sent Me as the Grand Prize Winner. That includes a $5,000 cash prize, an Outside Lands VIP experience, and perhaps most importantly the integration of their app technology into the Outside Lands app.

Dave Sent Me is described as a “personalized Outside Lands schedule recommender.”

Outside Hacks Organizer and “Entre-pee-neur” Travis Laurendine

New Orleans Burner Travis Laurendine is one of the geniuses behind AirPnP.

According to Fest300, Burning Man was involved in Outside Hacks too, kicking off the event with an address by social alchemist Bear Kittay.

…the symbiotic relationship between technology was a running theme for the weekend and its presence was as noticeable as the sound of hundreds of fingers hitting keyboards and the smell of pizza fueling the coders.

In the opening remarks, artist and social alchemist for Burning Man Bear Kittay addressed the hackers by saying, “We’ve got to remember that the intersection here between entertainment and technology is a really relevant space. It’s been separated for a really long time, but it’s not often we get together with all these brilliant engineering minds to solve some big problems right at the precipice of music and technology. Think about what a really disruptive tool you could create can be, that could really help to transform the way music and technology worlds come together.”

Travis Laurendine, who has witnessed the hackathon significantly grow since its inception in 2013, points out that, “Art is often enabled by technology. A lot of art is dependent on technology. Technology has led us to new art forms. A lot of these people who have the mind for art also have minds for tech, and vice versa. That’s why so many incredible developers are also musicians, because they have the mind for it.”

The incredibly diverse and youthful participants in the hackathon were all united by their passion for music and their drive to make music a better experience for listeners and artists alike. Greg Cerveny, a founder of music startup Groove and one-man team, created his app Dance Commander to facilitate dance parties at the festival by people holding up their phones open on his app displaying a dancing stick figure, thus inviting other festival goers to join in on the dance party. Cerveny says his goal was to give “someone a more awesome time or a really awesome experience because they engaged in a dance social circle.”

[Source: Fest300]

Burning Man has been involved with a hackathon before, a “Burner Hack” conference being held at [freespace] in 2013. It’s not clear if anything was produced from this to help Burners. The event was linked with hacking again this year, with news that at least 200 people pushed to the front of the ticket queue by “routing around” the Ticketfly/Burning Man custom system. In a recent Medium story “Burners Don’t Hack Uber, People Do”, they described a smartphone app called “Burner” that is being used to hack Uber to get free credits.

The intersection of music and technology is a really relevant space. So is Burning Man in that space? Are we really at the precipice – what does that even mean?

Outside Lands is coming up in a couple of weeks. The lineup includes Elton John and Billy Idol.