The Trouble With Burning Man Is That It Worked - Rewrite
I spend a lot of time contemplating how social scenes and creative mileaus change. Paradox Pollack recently wrote an article on Medium, "The Trouble With Burning Man Is That It Worked" which brings anecdotes from his real life, and the original perspective of someone who is experienced.
It's also clearly written by AI. The main thing I mind about that is that the style is punchy in a way that isn't earned. The excessive line breaks convey a tone of being very impressed with what's being said, as though to stop after every utterance to look the reader in the eye and say "Bam!" "Quotable!" "Laid it down!" or "Preach!" It's not just that it's an AI tell; that would be fine, I guess; but that it's distracting.
I don't mind AI-generated content in general nearly so much as I dislike AI slop. It's clear when a human used one prompt and then just accepted whatever they got with no further refinement passes. It's a lack of taste.
The following is the same article, re-written by AI six times, each time to correct specific issues. Issues such as "not X but Y". Or setting up a dumb sentence to make the following sentence sound clever for denying it. Or the way Pollack's version comes up with a faux-deep "Paradox Principle" and keeps referencing it to establish it like some kind of branded thesis, as if it's a big discovery. Pollack makes good points under all the mic-dropping, so here it is. See what you think of the style change. And more importantly, I hope Pollack's own idea will be more visible.
The Trouble With Burning Man Is That It Worked
In 1993, John Law drove Paradox Pollack out toward the desert and left him at Trego Hot Springs with a gallon of water, the shade of one shitty tree, and the reassuring information that his circus crew would probably materialize eventually. There were no Ten Principles then. There was heat, uncertainty, inadequate infrastructure, and the practical problem of what he was going to do next. That story suggests a different way of understanding the familiar claim that Burning Man lost its soul. Many of the things people now dislike about Burning Man didn't simply replace what had once made it valuable. They developed from things that worked.
The original culture didn't come from the Ten Principles. The principles came from the culture. The desert encouraged self-reliance because people had to solve problems for themselves. Participation mattered because there was not much point in going all that way to remain an observer. Gifting, communal effort, and immediacy developed under the same conditions. Eleven years after that afternoon at Trego, Larry Harvey gave names to qualities already recognizable in the culture. He described the principles as observations about what had developed, not commandments from which the culture had been designed. That was useful: a culture that grows beyond the people who remember its beginnings needs some way to describe what it is doing. Personal transmission only goes so far, and abandoning new participants at hot springs with inadequate water isn't a scalable educational program.
But description changes a culture. Once self-reliance, participation, gifting, and immediacy have names, people can deliberately reproduce them. They can also reproduce their recognizable forms without reproducing the circumstances that gave rise to them. Someone can learn what Radical Self-Reliance is supposed to look like without having to solve very many problems alone. Commercialization comes later in the sequence. Burning Man first became good at recognizing and transmitting the qualities that made it distinctive; once those qualities became legible, they could be organized, represented, imitated, and sold.
Cacophony had approached things differently. It created situations in which ordinary expectations became less reliable. Authorities, schedules, transactions, and conventions loosened their grip, and people had to decide what to do with the resulting uncertainty. Some participants became interested in what could be built in that space. That interest led into Desert Site Works, Ape Theater, and later Pepe Ozan’s operas, which used Tarot, Kabbalah, performers, initiators, invented cosmologies, and a great deal of borrowed mythology. Some of it was inspired, some ridiculous, and some culturally irresponsible in ways that are easier to recognize in retrospect.
The more important mechanism was the way people could prepare together for an experience, take differentiated roles, bring other people through it, and eventually prepare some of those people to take roles themselves. Eight people might prepare, then eighty participate, then hundreds. Some of the participants became capable of helping create the next iteration. That is different from simply making an audience larger. A crowd can share a powerful experience without learning very much about how to create one, while coordination asks different people to do different things while remaining responsive to one another. A jazz ensemble gives a mundane example: its players can improvise together because they have already learned things separately. The interest in initiation was less about belief or obedience than about whether preparation could make people more capable of doing something together. There were obvious dangers in that approach, since ritual can prepare people and manipulate them, coordination can support collective intelligence and armies, and identity can provide a role from which to act or a substitute for further development.
Burning Man eventually found a much simpler idea that traveled extremely well: No Spectators. The idea escaped the ritual context and became part of the general culture. don't wait for somebody else to supply the experience. Make something. Build something. Feed somebody. Invent a game. Construct a little place beneath three umbrellas and invite a stranger into it.
In 2015, Jason Norelli and Coyote put Pollack in an old ’77 Buick with the top down and drove him around. They didn't show him monumental art. They showed him people. Somebody had made miniature golf. Somebody had built little bars around poles beneath spirals of umbrellas. A couple in their fifties had brewed something and wanted strangers to taste it. Everywhere they went there were versions of the same interaction: someone had made a place, and someone else was being invited into it. Jason and Coyote kept saying, “See? It’s exactly like it was.” It was not exactly like it was, but they were pointing to something real. There was no Mystery School involved, no Tarot, no priest, no manifesto. People who had never met the founders had learned a gesture the early culture had developed: make something for other people and then make room for them. Whatever else had changed, something important had been transmitted successfully.
If Burning Man has an unofficial Eleventh Principle, it may be Radical Convenience: Radical Self-Reliance, but somebody erected the yurt. Decommodification, after an astonishing week of shopping. Immediacy, photographed from six angles. Radical Self-Expression, available in your size. Participation, with staff. Radical Inclusion, please respect the camp perimeter. Gifting, preferably at a production value sufficient to show that one has transcended mere money.
The joke works because money can buy more than comfort at Burning Man. You can buy exemption from situations that would otherwise require you to learn or negotiate. You can pay someone else to handle shelter, food, transportation, and infrastructure. An increasing amount of what once required preparation, improvisation, cooperation, or tolerance for uncertainty can be purchased in advance. Even self-expression can be assisted by a commercial system supplying clothing, equipment, aesthetics, and objects associated with a recognizable Burner identity.
That doesn't mean that deprivation is intrinsically valuable. The point of leaving Pollack under one shitty tree with a gallon of water isn't that suffering improves people. Hardship often just makes people tired, stupid, or dangerous. What mattered was that the situation required a response and there were not many ways to pay somebody else to provide it. At the same time, Burning Man produced people who became very good at responding when practical problems appeared elsewhere. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, participants leaving the Burn went south into the disaster zone. What began as an improvised response became Burners Without Borders. Volunteers helped rebuild a destroyed Vietnamese temple in Biloxi and then worked in Pearlington, Mississippi. Burners Without Borders says that over eight months volunteers contributed more than a million dollars’ worth of reconstruction and debris removal. This was happening during the same period in which Burning Man was becoming increasingly capable of insulating some participants from practical necessity.
A much less practical version of the same question appeared that year after Katrina, when Daniel Pinchbeck seized the microphone at Center Camp. A punk performance curated by Raspa had just taken place when Pinchbeck came onto the stage after March 4th’s marching band mosh pit. He was altered, furious, grandiose, brilliant, and impossible. He wanted to stop the Burn, keep everyone in the desert, reinvent money, write a planetary constitution, and redesign civilization. Security moved toward him, tackled him, and was about to put him in drunk tank quarantine when Pollack intervened. The situation had its own irony: an institution devoted to radical expression had encountered expression it had not scheduled. Pollack led Pinchbeck out of the spotlight and sat with him in the dust.
A breakdown isn't automatically a revelation, and disrupting a program does not make what someone says meaningful. But underneath the drugs, fury, insults, and planetary schemes was a serious question about what participation was for. Burning Man had become very good at telling people not to remain spectators. If that lesson succeeded, what were people supposed to do with the resulting agency? Pinchbeck’s answer was to apply it immediately to civilization as a whole. Burners Without Borders gave a narrower answer: participants went where there was work to do and brought whatever practical capacities they had developed. The event didn't have to become government in order to matter outside itself. Someone who had learned to build things, organize people, tolerate uncertainty, or regard an unfinished situation as something they could affect could use those capacities somewhere else. Participation could mean more than participating in Burning Man; self-reliance could become competence, gifting could become service, and Communal Effort could become a habit of working with other people on a problem that didn't come with Burning Man branding.
Meanwhile, some participants were learning that enough money could remove the need to know where the shovel was kept. These aren't separate stories. As Burning Man’s practices became established, they accumulated institutions, markets, recognizable aesthetics, and conventions for representing them. Those developments made the culture easier to transmit and created more ways to participate in its recognizable forms without developing all of the capacities that had originally produced them.
Paul Addis burning the Man early in 2007 provides another example. There were genuine problems with what he did. Safety and consent mattered, as did the destruction of other people’s work. Calling something trickster behavior does not make it ethical. But the response was revealing: the Man, whose intended purpose was to burn, had burned on the wrong day, so Burning Man rebuilt it in order to burn it at the scheduled time. By then the institution was capable of absorbing an unscheduled version of its central act and restoring the scheduled version. That ability isn't simply a defect. Burning Man’s institutional development has made possible enormous art projects, medical systems, sanitation, transportation, emergency planning, and civic coordination. Without those things, an event of its present size would be unsafe and probably impossible. The issue is what changes when a practice that once depended heavily on improvisation develops reliable systems for reproducing itself.
Something similar happened with Immediacy. Burning Man generates an enormous number of photographs and stories about experiences that are supposed to be immediate. Those representations allow people who were not present to understand something about the event, and they help participants remember and interpret what happened. They also become part of the culture later participants encounter. People see what Burning Man looks like before they arrive. They learn what Burners wear, what kinds of experiences are regarded as significant, what the event looks like when photographed, and what kinds of stories people tell afterward. Over time, the culture becomes somewhat responsive to the way it appears through the camera. Participants don't have to be consciously performing for this to happen; representations circulate, people learn from them, and those expectations affect later behavior.
Cultures need representations in order to travel. Stories, photographs, principles, and regional Burns all allow practices developed in Black Rock Desert to appear elsewhere. People no longer need the playa in order to build a strange little place, invite strangers into it, and give something away. But symbols can also become available independently of the capacities they originally represented. Someone can know that self-reliance is part of who they are because they are a Burner. A photograph can provide evidence of immediacy. Clothing can communicate radical self-expression. An expensive experience can take place inside a culture committed to decommodification. Adherence to the Ten Principles is therefore not a very good measure of whether the capacities those principles once described are still being developed.
More useful questions concern what at Burning Man still requires somebody to become more capable, what changes because somebody participated, what can now be purchased that once required learning, negotiation, repair, dependence on other people, or improvisation, and how much of an experience is being shaped by an expectation of how it will later be represented. Those questions also apply to the people who helped create the early culture. It would be convenient to treat billionaires, influencers, spectators, plug-and-play camps, or the organization itself as outside forces that corrupted something the rest had made, but the history isn't that clean. If the early participants made experiences that people found valuable, they helped create demand for them. If they developed a distinctive aesthetic, they made something that could be imitated. If they created attractive identities, people would predictably want to adopt them. If they made the culture coherent enough to transmit, people could learn its recognizable forms without sharing the history that produced them.
Those consequences don't make the original experiment fraudulent. Saying Burning Man “sold out” misses much of what's interesting about its history, because the culture didn't simply begin with authentic practices and later replace them with fake ones. Some of the resulting structures became bureaucracy, some commerce, some costume or cultural status. Other resulting structures supported people rebuilding a temple after a hurricane. In 2015, some were still visible in two strangers beneath an umbrella. One of them had built something unnecessary and ridiculous, had something to drink, and made room for someone else. Pollack saw that from the back of a Buick. Whatever else had changed, that practice had survived.
There is probably no way to transmit a living culture while preventing people from simplifying it, representing it, institutionalizing it, making businesses around it, or finding easier ways to obtain some of its benefits. At Trego in 1993, the practical question was simply: now what are you going to do? More than thirty years later, it remains a useful question to ask of Burning Man: not whether its principles remain visible, or whether it still looks sufficiently like an earlier version of itself, but what kinds of people its present conditions ask participants to become, what they allow participants to avoid becoming, and what those people are able to do when they leave.