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Gifting For Permanent Art
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”...
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Decommodification, Decentralization and Direct Democracy
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...
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The Burner Behind the Holodeck
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...
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Can LSD Make You A Billionaire?
“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...
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Burning Man Hacked!
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...
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Google Employee Creating Burning Man Musical
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...
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Bass Versus Burn
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...
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Horizontal Collusion and Other Alternative Universes
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...
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Did We Just Get Cyber Attacked? [Updates]
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...
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Google Earth Brings You Burning Man 3D
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...
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Burning Man Kicks Off Outside Lands Hackathon
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...
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A Permanent Utopia?
In NYMag, Nellie Bowles reports that BMOrg have their sights set on a permanent community, and once again will be bussing investors from First Camp out to the nearby Fly Ranch property. Burning Man’s...
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Art, Burning Man, and the Maker Movement
Shipwreck by Georgia Rose Collard-Watson There’s a new story over at Boing Boing from NK Guy, Burning Man: The Art of Maker Culture . NK recently published “The Art of Burning Man”, (adding to the...
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Rethink Waste, and Help Save a Promising Green Technology
John Perry Barlow, left, in a panel discussion with Larry Harvey at Black Rock City John Perry Barlow has been a fixture at Burning Man since 1994. That makes him a founder in my book. Recently he...
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Party Like It’s Star Wars [Updates]
Image: Sharara, via Facebook Star Wars. Desert camping. Talks on topics aligned with Leave No Trace and Self Reliance. A nod to the Davos World Economic Forum. Sharara, Arabic for “spark”, has it all…...
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Can Burning Man and Transhumanism Change the World?
Science fiction and dick jokes at the Burning Man Global Technology Leadership Conference. Nano-tech brain drugs that connect brains together. Jacking the internet directly into the back of your skull....
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Don’t Sneak In! 2016
We just received this tip-off from Anonymous Burner: from private gate FB group where people sneaking in to burning man are being discussed: Gate are really gunning for people trying to sneak in this...
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Burning Man’s First Technology Guru Fighting #fakenews
The blockchain offers a new world of possibility, not just for crypto-currency or providing disaster relief, but also for truth – something I am extremely interested in. It seems I’m not the only one....
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Burners.Me Now Synched To SteemIt and Sharpay
About a quarter of all sites on the World Wide Web run on WordPress, a phenomenal achievement from Billionaire 2 commas Burner Matt Mullenweg – although it is eclipsed by Burning Man chief technology...
View ArticleStewart Brand Livestream: 50 Years of Whole Earth Catalog
Live today at 6:30pm PST. Tune in via this page. Re-blogged from Reinvent.Net Fifty years ago the Whole Earth Catalog burst onto the cultural scene and helped set in motion waves of innovation that...
View ArticleSnapChat CEO’s “perpetually topless” GF is a Burner
This story has been doing the rounds of the Interwebz today, after Gawker ran yet another hit piece on LA-based SnapChat CEO (and Ivy League fratboy) Evan Spiegel, whose girlfriend has photos of her...
View ArticleBurning the Systems
Ticketfly is coming in, with a new ticketing system, selling vehicle passes as well as tickets. Burning Man’s bazaar marketplace has been taken down, to be revamped in some unknown way, presumably...
View ArticleElon Musk: “Burning Man IS Silicon Valley”
Mike Judge is one of this country’s comic greats. As well as Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, he made the classic movie Idiocracy. Now he’s back with a terrific new show on HBO, a sardonic...
View ArticleBurner Kindles Fire
Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is surely one of the smartest people on the planet. He is also a Burner – one worth $30 billion, who made a lazy $128.5 million today. Burning Man obviously made a...
View ArticleThe Grand Burners.Me Ho-tell
This is the 1000th post on this blog, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect a bit. The official Burning blog has 1,771 posts. Their first two are from September, 2001, and liken the...
View Article60% Veterans [Updates]
This is going to be one of those long posts with words and graphs and maths and stuff. Ain’t no place for haters here. You might want to keep browsing if you’re looking for happy frou frou stories. If...
View ArticleNew Way To Get Face Value or Free Tickets
Burner Map is a tool that lets you indicate where you’re camping, so that your Facebook and other friends can find you. So far 48, 476 people have used it (over several years). Now they have announced...
View ArticleTech Industry Invented Sex, Burning Man, and San Francisco
SF Weekly’s The Snitch has a “Fauxpinion” piece by Benjamin Wachs, a “literary chameleon”. Funnily enough, he wrote the same book as another chameleon, BMOrg’s Caveat Magister. Caveat is the author...
View ArticleDemonstrating How the Principles Mesh
Burning Man has always hosted a large number of nerds. As time goes on and technology becomes more pervasive and sophisticated, new capabilities are unlocked for the citizens of Black Rock City. Some...
View ArticleBurners.Me interview on KGO Radio
San Francisco’s KGO news radio interviewed me today about the anti-rich, anti-tech, and dare we say, anti-Burning Man sentiment that seems to be sweeping the media this week. I should have recorded the...
View ArticleLook Out for The Judge!
…Mike Judge, that is. If you haven’t seen his new show Silicon Valley check it out, it’s hilarious. The show brilliantly skewers Silicon Valley and the Bay Area hipster/tech culture, while also giving...
View ArticleFTP: Now That’s What I Call A Burn
Hope Sergei and Larry and Eric and all the rest of the Googlers and Nooglers are having a spiffing time out on the Playa. For everyone else, there’s this:
View ArticleWhat Do Google and Gangsters Have In Common?
The idea that Google and Gangsters have some things in common is cautiously expressed in a fascinating article from Makeshift Magazine, which quotes from a book “The Misfit Economy”. Forbes introduces...
View ArticleNaked Capitalism Bursts the Bubble
A great story from Naked Capitalism by Lambert Strether: Has the Burning Man Bubble Burst? It’s worth reading in its entirety, they’ve broken down the Tin Principles. Even if you don’t agree with their...
View ArticleSilk Road Move Over, a New Bazaar Is In Town
WIRED magazine has a report on Agora, the new online drug bazaar “marketplace of anything”. It is based on Agorism, a philosophy that a free, stateless society can be achieved via disruptive market...
View Article“If You’re 35 And Poor You Deserve It”
So says Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.com, which went public last Friday in the biggest IPO in history. His stock, whose largest shareholder is the Billionaire Burner-founded company Yahoo, had a...
View ArticleCreating God In The Digital Age [Updates]
We’re building an artificial god. A digitally constructed consciousness simulator, with sensors absorbing all the world’s data, monitoring and tracking our every move, connected to hundreds of acres of...
View ArticleEllo is AfrikaBurn, Twitter is Burning Man
The UK’s Telegraph has an article comparing Burning Man with the rise of the social media network Ello (I’m @zos). It seems social media has become full of squares and obsessed with monetization; so...
View ArticleSaving The World With Apps
This year Open Garden’s Firechat smartphone app debuted at Burning Man. Although it was just another of dozens of uses for smartphones at the festival, it seems its peer-to-peer networking may become...
View Article“I’m Up For A Sherpa Myself”
CBS News did a video story on “Silicon Valley Elite Accused of Ruining Burning Man”. Larry insists that they’re not, that people have been saying “Burning Man is ruined” since the beginning, and in...
View ArticleDeep History of Drugs
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...
View ArticleGeeks On Ice [Update]
Slashdot brings us a story about An Algorithm To End The Lines For Ice At Burning Man: Any gathering of 65,000 people in the desert is going to require some major infrastructure to maintain health and...
View ArticleBehind The Scenes At A Sound Camp
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,...
View ArticleAirBnB CEO on the Sharing Economy
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...
View Article2014: Year of the Silk Road 2.0
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”...
View ArticleWhat’s In My Baggie?
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...
View ArticleA Carnival of Smoke and Mirrors
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...
View ArticleWhat’s In A Name?
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...
View ArticleGifting To Create a World of Plenty
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...
View ArticleSubmission to NZ Venture Capital Fund Bill
Today I was invited by the New Zealand Parliament to address their Finance and Expenditure Committee about my submission to the 2019 Venture Capital Fund Bill. Here’s my submission: There were a dozen...
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