I’ve done this for a couple years now, cool to see it pop up here. I believe the scale is a touch larger; 3935 acres in 2025, plus a small amount outside the fence line.
On the technical side, we not only log but photograph everything, down to each clump of toilet paper. We check our progress by doing hundreds of tests identical to what the BLM does, both ahead and behind our main crew; bagging up any debris to be photographed on green screens where the pixels are counted to ensure we’re under the 2.29×10^-3 percent limit.
It’s a stupendous amount of walking, with no shade, a moop stick and a bucket. But it’s a hell of a feeling to be part of making sure we remain undefeated against an impossible task that the future of burning man depends on.
I'm from a completely different country, never been to burning man, have no plans to visit, but I've been to other hacker camps and the most magical thing is being part of the build/clean up crews, because the 1 week camp is actually a 3 week experience. And those extra 2 weeks there is no bar, no lecture tent, no infrastructure, just you and a bunch of really fun people, in tents, in the wilderness, having a lot of cozy moments together.
Am I right to assume, that maybe this cleanup crew experiences something similar?
Burning Man culture draws a distinction between participants and spectators - one of the best ways to get the “participant” experience is by working and actively being a part of putting it on. This definitely includes build and strike. There are people (many paid by the Burning Man Org) who get there months before the event and stay for months after.
At burning man you can even get early access if you’re working on an art installation. It’s really fun hanging out, drinking beers, assembling art, and watching a mini Vegas sprout of nothing but a trash fence over a week or two.
Yeah, we definitely have a lot of great moments together, that's the biggest reason I come back. But otherwise, I imagine it's very different. We stay in the city and bus in each day. I had a dishwasher the year before last so doubt it's the same wilderness feel.
I had the same thought when reading this. Even a lightweight CV system that pre-sorts items for human review could save a lot of effort. Happy to help look at a small sample of the data if that would be useful.
What I love about Burning Man is that it is an event where all the programming is created by the attendees. All the art, sound stages, art cars, experiences.. if you want something to exist in Black Rock City, then it is up to you to just go figure out how to bring it, solely for the benefit and joy of those who get to experience it. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the rewarding feeling of seeing your creation manifested into reality is worth it.
So much of our daily lives in society is consuming experiences that other people create: the jobs we work are defined by other people, we buy products created by other people, we eat food made by other people. For me, Burning Man is a reminder for the rest of the year to be the creator of my own experience in the world.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” —Jobs
That's an incredibly cynical thing for a man like Jobs to say, given his life, especially late in it, was mostly just ordering people to invent things, and then acting like a generational genius because the massive amount of people under his purview invented things.
Why do people keep saying this? The direction of someone driving towards a thing is just as important as people working on that thing. Otherwise we may not actually have gotten anyone working on that thing at all. It's like saying a director is not important and actors should just do whatever they want.
He is part of a camp called Playground (alongside other people). The camp collectively brings the speakers, AV, fire effects, generators and structures, sets all of it up, and Carl and other artists perform. He’s probably not setting up the gear himself but he is part of the collective that puts the show on. I do know that he plays Playground fundraisers during the year to raise the money to pay for the costs of the camp, which is a forum of contribution / volunteering.
So a giant party can clean up after itself, but 4th of July in Tahoe for example is a toxic mess. I wish more people would practice these principles. It’s impressive how well this is cleaned up.
it helps that there's a regulatory agency that verifies the cleanup happened! if the 4th of july might get canceled the following year ppl might be more aggressive around cleaning up.
Do they? Japanese clean up after themselves when they fill the parks at cherry blossom season or a fireworks festival. Seems like you just need to feel responsible for yourself
Could be because people growing up in Japan are taught that they're an intrinsic part of any place, event, or group of people that includes their presence. Kids in classrooms in Japan are helping clean up together with everyone else at age 4.
It's kinda the opposite of "responsible for yourself," it's a civic sense that extends to include everyone and everything around you - including things that weren't directly caused by you-as-individal.
In the case of the cherry blossoms, they were planted for the enjoyment of the people, and thus the people who come to enjoy them are a part of that system. The cherry blossom viewing events where thousands of people come to picnic, only is a "thing" because thousands of people come - everyone there is a participant by virtue of attending. Thus they hold part of the responsibility for the outcome of the event and the aftermath.
Much as I love Glastonbury festival, even though I stopped going a few years back, the amount of waste generated definitely seems problematic. I think the festival does a great job of trying to deal with this problem, from the large number of lovingly decorated bins, through to all the site clearup teams both during and after and all the messaging.
But as highlighted elsewhere, it's definitely more of a cultural problem than anything. It's always depressing just casually observing the amount of abandoned tents on the way out and the amount of litter either put in the wrong recycling bins or just discarded less than yards from them. And the problems isn't just the cost which could be spent on good causes - £750,000+ [0] but the accidental effect of say a cow eating a tent peg (it's a working farm).
As someone who litter picks and talks to litter picking groups it's definitely a big problem nationwide sadly.
Probably unsurprisngly this always seems to be much worse in the higher traffic areas with the main stages than it is in say the Green or Healing field areas though their might be demographic and contextual reasons for that also. I've not been to any of the other main UK festivals in a long time, e.g. Reading, V Festival etc. but I'm guessing they aren't going to be any better?
> It's always depressing just casually observing the amount of abandoned tents on the way out
Not just tents, but all sorts of camping gear, carts, clothes, food, gimmics, and so on. Many in good condition. Aside from the waste having to be cleared, it's very wasteful to throw away good stuff.
I am convinced this is a cultural problem indeed. Stuff like a tent or a gas-burner is cheap. Cheap compared to what it cost (in % of monthly income) decades ago, and cheap compared to the ticket and other spendings on that festival.
The cost of a tent (or the costs of some cans of food, some shirts, a funny hat, an inflatable flamingo, a chair) is nothing on the total bill of a festival. That new tent you bought, costs about as much as that beer you spilled when you bumped into that drunk dude.
So, purely economically, it makes sense to just leave it behind. Why carry your (now dirty) tent, food, cloths, etc home, when you can leave it, have a more pleasant return trip, and just buy new stuff next year.
I think this is a very good analogy for why we are unable to stop ruining the world in an ever increasing pace.
Which makes it even more infuriating to me when people use the MOOP map as evidence that burners leave trash everywhere and destroy the desert every year.
It’s certainly worse than not having the event in the first place, but it is quite literally better about garbage than any large scale gathering on the planet. Burners do still need to be better about leaving their trash in Reno, but even with that it’s hard to see how it’s not monumentally better than virtually anything else.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that leaving trash in Reno is bad, not that that's what people should do? I first read your comment as saying that people should leave their trash in Reno, but a sibling comment makes me think it's the opposite.
If you've been to Reno after the festival, you know what he is talking about. It's people who have removed their garbage from the desert, who then find somewhere - anywhere - to ditch a bunch of cheap tents and camping chairs used for all of a week.
Overflowing private dumpsters, leaving garbage in the rental car, just leaving it in a heap somewhere, etc. The tell tale dust gives it away. The issue isn't people who stop by the Reno waste processing facility and pay for it to be tossed, it's the people who decide to dump in the city instead of in the desert.
To be clear, what you’re supposed to do is dump your trash in places you’re allowed to dump it.
If you have a lot of trash, most economical option is often to go to the public transfer stations or landfills in the Reno area (but that only works if they are open).
Also, there are services on the side of the highway that accept trash for $N per bag. Only give your trash to someone if you can see the dumpster it’s going into and the dumpster is not full. There have been scams where people charged to accept trash and then just left it there to get blown around the desert. Alternatively, you could drive your trash all the way home and let your local utilities handle it. But when I’ve had my cargo trailer piled with leaking garbage bags I’ve wanted to get rid of it ASAP.
Sorry, yes, I should have made that clearer. Burners should as a whole be better about [the fact that they] just dump their trash in Reno on the way out. It’s an enormous problem, and completely indefensible particularly given the number of cheap trash collection sites you drive past on the way out. Still, by comparison, burners are practically saints.
Going back to the event itself, I attended Lightning in a Bottle once. I was absolutely disgusted at the end of it. Entire camps quite literally just left, abandoning everything. Brand new equipment and the boxes it was sold in just left for others to deal with. And not just isolated groups either, people had done this absolutely everywhere.
There are some shitty Burners and those cause the most visible problems, but there are a lot of conscientious ones too (I think it’s the majority of them). Painting them all with the same brush isn’t quite right, a lot of us work hard to do things the right way (like spending hours in line to pay to dump trash at the Reno municipal transfer station). I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though, besides lots of public shaming. It’s hard to avoid having any jerks in a city of 70K people.
Yes, and it kinda defeats the purpose. The event is in large part about personal responsibility and accountability. Adding trash service out there would make it even easier for people to bring more than they need, consume more, leave shit everywhere, etc. And that money is already used for existing services and the BLM permit paid to the government, it's not like it's just sitting there ready to be spent on trash services. And at that point, increasing ticket prices makes it more inaccessible to people, and then cue the complaints that it's an event for such-and-such rich people blah blah whatever.
This is the fundamental contradiction of Burning Man values, and I admit to obnoxiously pursuing it around the fire these past three burns now.
Burning Man is a community and society, and often pitches itself that way, and attendees come away feeling that way - they're "Burners," any city in the world they go to they can probably find other Burners they've never met and hang out, and to truly understand the Burn you really just have to attend.
But the values, and event, and many attendees, reject this fact with the "radical self reliance" value. People try to work around it by doing Theme camps - tribes within a tribe. Oh you're self reliant all right, you and the rest of your suburb with whom you organized to bring water and toilet paper. But no no no, that line stops at the edge of your camp, beyond that lies only community WITHOUT responsibility.
In reality there is no community without responsibility. MOOP blows around. Your sound affects other people. And if someone is suffering from thirst or hunger at the Burn, you absolutely have a responsibility to them as a member of your community to share food and water.
This radical self reliance thing just shifts the burden of managing people to the theme camp level, without any guarantee that any given theme camp is actually itself a good member of the community (other than processes that take a while e.g. the MOOP map).
The Burn is big but so are towns. There's already infrastructure for sewage, there should be as well for trash, and imo food and shelter as well. That doesn't require violating any of the principles, and a form of "radical self reliance" can be maintained through "radical participation" wherein people can identify a problem they want to resolve about the Burn and resolve it, or organize a working group or syndic to do so.
The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
If you turn the event into a giant plug and play (if the org is providing food and shelter and trash and everything else), you've just created some variant of Coachella instead, and I sure as hell don't want that. The difficulty is part of the point and what makes it so worthwhile, the kind of people who self-select into doing all that work are people I want to be around. It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
> The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
Exactly my point, so why do we maintain this illusion through one specific principle that we are "radically self reliant" when that evidently isn't the case? Just look through this thread: multiple people rejecting the idea of shared trash bins as "opposed to the values." How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
> It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
Right, it already is that, and adding shared trash bins won't make it not that. We've just shifted responsibility for managing that onto the theme camps. And in any case, we don't have a magical enforcement mechanism for the values - nothing about changing what we consider a "shared community responsibility" causes our ability to gatekeep lazy people to diminish, the same mechanism of social pressure is there either way.
Meanwhile, our community is failing to handle the very real fact that people are dumping their trash in the streets of Reno, and Reno is, appropriately, attributing this failure to our community as a whole.
> Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
My Coachella comment was more in response to your suggestion that even infra for food and shelter should be provided. FWIW I also love Coachella, but that's because I love music - many people there sure don't follow leave no trace principles and that doesn't sit well with me either.
> How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
I think it's a spectrum. From completely no services at all to everything provided. My view is that providing things like toilets and medical services are something that we all (or at least most) agree makes the city a better place with no real downside. Trash is more complicated - I believe that does compromise the principles too much because of how people behave if dumpsters were to exist. I think people would be more irresponsible than they are now, because "someone else will take care of it" on playa. You also end up with tragedy of the commons problems like some camps dumping way more than others and perhaps filling things up so much that other camps can't even dispose of their stuff, and at that point how do you enforce or manage that? You could start charging by volume or something, but then that just starts to degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it, even if it means that sometimes people do the wrong thing. How we manage the problem in Reno, I'm not sure - TBH, if people started getting in trouble for doing it in a real way, like getting charged with illegal dumping, that'd be fine with me. It would certainly be a disincentive to do it once enough Burners get in real shit for doing irresponsible things like that. I'd have no sympathy for them, that's a personal accountability thing.
This 100%. They only care about their playa. As soon as they are off, their considerations go out the window and they trash every other town they want to.
Last year was tough - it rained for hours 5 nights in a row and the first rain night was accompanied by 70 mile an hour winds that did a massive amount of damage to camp infrastructure throughout the city. The roads in half the city were ruined by emergency traffic that kept on running throughout the storms, and the result was a lumpy nightmare that shook things loose from cars and bikes at a much higher rate than most years. The mud absorbed and hid things and made cleanup a far more grueling process than it usually is. We endured and did our best to still find and remove everything - breaking up mud clumps and raking/sifting through the dirt at the end of the week to find all that embedded trash. There are no public trash cans, no event dumpsters, etc. I can say from having been there almost every year since 07 that this was by far the hardest year for "mooping" - the process of spotting and picking up any item that shouldn't be on the ground - but that the group mindset endured and we somehow still trended downward in terms of overall trash.
I think the main difference between this and 2023 (the previous "mud burn") was that this time we had all the rain in the first half of the event, and then had relatively great weather for the second half. In 23, it closed out with the mud and people fleeing, leading to a spike.
Theme camp based on an area famous for getting hit with hurricanes and other natural disasters here.
During the rains we were one of the few places still open and where you could party, eat, and grab a solid drink. Being on Esplanade also meant we were a shelter for people to wait out the weather.
Last year was my first burn, and boy was it an experience. The most insane and hilarious part of the rain is how the lakebed silt mud attaches to your shoes. It gradually accumulates in layers as you walk so you get taller and taller as you walk and heavier and heavier and eventually end up walking around on these 6 inch tall dried mud platforms barely able to lift your legs normally anymore.
The tactics to avoid it are also hilarious, there is one where you put a sock on, then a plastic bag, then another sock on top. Apparently this makes you immune to the mud stacking
I eventually went barefoot out of frustration one time and sat down with feet sticking outside the tent for a good 45 minutes trying to dig the stuff out between my toes. What an experience
Two of my GP&E shifts got rained out. I had walk from Black Hole to 2&E one night with garbage bags over my shoes. The next time when they had to close the gate and all traffic over night, we had to come back in SxS with mud flying everywhere and in places it should not be. It was an experience, all good, still an experience to remember. The caked roads next morning were a sight :D
The unanticipated side effect of all roads being so bumpy after that from being torn up by the vehicles in the mud then solidifying to rock also made biking the remainder of the week quite the teeth chattering experience
lol, yeah - we got really good at tearing down the public space and getting everything into the container truck and then pulling it back out and building again. Party for whatever portion of the day we could, and then speed-run the teardown when the first drops of rain started coming down.
Since experiencing a deluge the day after the event ended in 1998, I know that the end of Burning Man will be a massive rainstorm at the wrong time.
Fortunately in 1998 it happened after almost everyone had left. It was Tuesday after the burn, and we were packing up. Clouds coming in from Gerlach were worrying, we could see the downpour happening over there and heading our way rapidly.
We closed the trailer door as the rain started. It came down so fast that by the time we were half way to the road it became almost impossible to drive in the mud, we were jackknifing with the trailer, almost losing control. There was an RV also racing to the exit that I witnessed doing accidental 360 spins in the mud, they totally lost control of the vehicle. I'm not sure they made it out.
I heard that the heavy rain continued for a few day, and the cars that were still there sunk into the mud. If you didn't get out before the rain, you were stuck there for weeks.
Now imagine this happens on Saturday, burn night. People have gone through almost all their food and water by then. Then the rain makes it impossible to leave, for weeks. All the vehicles sink into the mud. You can't even really walk through that mud to make it to the road, because it sticks to everything. "Playa platforms" are what you get when you try to walk through the mud. Now add 70,000 people, running out of food and water, and unable to exit the playa for possibly weeks? That's National Guard rescue territory. I doubt Burning Man would be allowed to continue after that.
Ever since 1998 I watch the weather closely, and you can bet I'll be the first one out of there if it's looking serious.
I can't even imagine that scenario with the remoteness of burning man.
Wacken got really bad a few years ago. Like, it's normal to rain here, and it's normal for cars to not get off campground, so a dozen of farmers or two are around with their tractors to evacuate people back to asphalt. Except that year, the rain escalated to badly that cars sunk deep enough into the mud that their undercarriage sat on the ground and the mud started to seep into the belly and the engine area.
At that point, dragging the car out has a decent risk of ripping rather important resources out of the rig, and then you got a scrapping job left. That was a fucking mess. They also closed off the Autobahn near Wacken that year, because the massive amount of mud the cars dragged onto the Autobahn turned into a rather slippery affair -- and hitting slippery mud at 100km/h, 60mph without expecting it can easily turn into a life-changing ad-hoc roller coaster.
Doing all of that at your distances in the middle of fucking nowhere would not be enjoyable or fun. Folks drowning in mud in northern Germany is now mostly a funny story among metal heads and rescue folks.
> People have gone through almost all their food and water by then
Isn't the whole point of Burning Man to be self sufficient? Why not bring food and water? It is not that difficult to pack a few weeks of rations in your RV.
Well I can tell you the counterstory about the massive storm that didn't ruin BRC.
Firstly, there's a ton (TONs) of water left at the end of the burn, unless things have changed a lot in the past 20 years, nobody is running out of water. I'm guessing a few people have snacks left over.
Some people are getting pissy and hiking out, and the rest are going to party on until the road is rebuilt, helping one another the whole time, and some will be dancing their butts off.
I remember being with a group that had a van breakdown on the way into the playa, and the only sensible thing to do was tow it into the playa to get help from mechanic friends who would help fix the van on the playa.
That's fine and dandy after a few days, but if it goes on for 2 weeks? I think you are overestimating burners. And you also may not realize that the BLM has studied this exact scenario, and would be unlikely to let 70,000 people go out there again after a worst-case storm, especially if rescue is required. And no recent storm was as bad as the storm in 1998. But sure, go dance in the mud, I don't care.
And yet the "worst" didn't come to pass, because we act as a community... people shared food and water (and dry space), gave rides to people who needed to leave early, used sat phones to call out sick, etc. The biggest problems were from people who didn't want to act collectively, and tried to drive out through the mud by themselves, then (predictably) got stuck, and blocked the way for everyone else.
I bet you there would be far less MOOP if a spot at Burning Man didn't cost so much money. When people pay hundreds of dollars, entitlement tends to creep in. They tend to regard themselves less as a participant and more as a customer.
"I'm not sweeping my spot look for a tiny screw; I paid hundreds of dollars to be here; I'm packing up in the most convenient way to me and getting the heck out."
Of course, that depends on personality, outlook and circumstances. Given enough people, you get lots of variety in these parameters.
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt have been there. Ask them how much trash they left behind or cleaned up.
I bet Jeff Bezos didn't carry out all his urine in plastic bottles with his private jet.
Years ago it was truly countercultural but now it's just a place for multimillionaires to come, sit in the air conditioning, oogle the Instagram/tiktok influencer girls, and talk about how money just, like, doesn't matter, man.
There's a machine for this, and you can rent it - the Barber Litter Picker.[1]
It's a large tractor-pulled machine, like an agricultural implement.
It's a variation on their Surf Rake, which is used for beach cleanup. The Litter Picker is built for dirt, hard ground, grass, and pavement. It's used for large outdoor festivals.
Scoops up everything from cigarette butts to lawn chairs.
Video of cleanup after a big festival.[2]
Big festivals are cleaned up in a few hours with this heavy equipment.
You are getting a bit of grief down thread- but this is cool as all get out.
The best use of these systems would be to combine the various procedures:
First, and foremost - don't leave garbage behind in the first place. Think twice before bring sequins and feathers in costumes (the biggest culprit in my experience from 2003-2010). Film cannisters for cigarette
Second - Every Camp does a combination of complete-grid clean up on their own "lot" - I've done that three times - and it was honestly great - plus an hour of "community time" - where you walk the play off your lot and clean it up as well. Your camp packs off 99% of the garbage, and then a grid search, plus heavy rake, finds the last 1%. About the only debate my camp ever had was whether it was acceptable to just dump their potable water onto the Playa (I thought it was fine - as long as you didn't just pour it all in one place - within 15 minutes you would be hard pressed to ever find out where it was poured out).
Third - the two-week "walk the line" where the detailed MOOP maps get created. 150 people for a 80,000 person 7+ day festival seems entirely reasonable - and it's a big part of BRC.
Finally (and I really mean do finally, it's almost a thing that shouldn't be really visible) - show up with the heavy gear to find all the submerged stakes/rebare/moop). Just rake the hell out of the Playa (absolutely fine - I've never understood people who think that it's a problem - it really isn't - you sure as hell aren't going to disrupt any ecology - except for a few random sand-fleas - it's entirely devoid of any life) - and the first bit of rain completely and 100% eliminates any trace of what you did.
> Scoops up everything from cigarette butts to lawn chairs.
From some of the videos you can find of it on Youtube, the cigarette butt claim doesn't look believable. It can definitely leave smaller debris behind, and certainly won't pull lag bolts out of the ground.
The whole point of the manual cleanup duty is the meticulous mapping of MOOP. This information is used by the community to learn and improve for next time. This has resulted in measurable improvement over the years, despite the event growing massively in size during that time.
I feel a big commercial machine that cleans the site up in a couple of hours will result in a community that does not espouse the 'leave no trace' principle. Because why would you care? A big machine is going to clean it all up anyway.
You can definitely add some telemetry to this that records and analyzes realtime location to "map" the litter, even when using a device like this. The conveyor actually seems very well suited to an external camera that records and analyzes the mess to a degree that should be suitable for the purpose of "recording" litter types and concentrations based on the location, without resorting to manual sweep/dust bins which actually sounds pretty insane at this scale.
You’ve missed the point. This is a cultural commitment not a logistics problem to engineer away.
The person you replied to did kindly try to explain to you, but you seem to have ignored it.
If you don’t understand the culture of Burning Man, that’s fine. But maybe don’t callously reduce 150 peoples’ labor of love to “btw just use this machine”.
I was part of the temple build last year and cleanup is extremely serious. We spent two days cleaning after the burn with magnetic rakes looking for minute pieces of metal. We take samples of dirt at different spots and count the number of MOOP fragments to measure progress
Actually an enormous whitepill on Burning Man. Modest amounts of debris, real accountability, and improvement over time despite overall growth. You really can't ask for much more.
I won't pretend I grok the underlying spirit of Burning Man. But I find it deeply fascinating to see the interaction between desires for counterculture, anarchy, free spirit, etc. and the benefit and ultimate necessity of organization, planning, rules... governance, essentially. And where there's those things, there's always maps and data.
It’s fun to read everyone's preconceptions about Burning Man. Its ten principles are published [1] and include stuff like “radical inclusion” and “civic responsibility” and “gifting” (the latter of which is taken very literally, there is almost no currency use on the playa and everything is gifted except ice and coffee at center camp).
Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists, but it’s hardly representative, especially when you include the family zone and all the specialized camps.
The idea that a stranger would effectively be a free Airbnb host (back when Airbnb actually had hosts) was baffling. Turns out:
1. Travel is expensive in time and money. Hosting someone gives you a travel-adjacent experience without having to leave home.
2. People who are willing to host strangers tend to be cool/open/interesting/friendly people. Opting-in to CouchSurfing is a good filter for someone you might enjoy spending time with.
Burning Man is similar.
One of the mainstays of Burning Man is the Hug Deli. It's like a lemonade stand, but instead of sugary beverages, they serve affection. You can order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server. Want an extra pep in your step? Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment.
The staff at the Hug Deli are all volunteers. You just roll up, toss on an apron, and start serving. (The guy who started it isn't particularly affectionate. He's a performer from LA who wanted a way to get strangers to try on characters.)
You would never stand in Golden Gate Park offering kisses to anyone who asked. Burning Man is a container that allows experiences like that to flourish, because opting-in to Burning Man is a good filter for the kind of people you might be willing to try stuff with.
Don't get me wrong, but on one side you have the gift culture, and on the other side the exception that one of the only things sold the the community in one of the hottest, most arid deserts in the world is ... ice ...
There’s no in and out privileges to get ice elsewhere, so the organization coordinates huge ice shipments into the event. All the proceeds from the ice and coffee sales benefit the local schools and students, which is great because that area is doing pretty rough economically
I actually got to buy fuel there once. They were absolutely surly about it, too.
Why didn't you plan ahead and bring enough gas??!?
Well what happened was, we stopped at the gas station in Wadsworth where we usually fuel up the RV before heading to the burn. I put the gas nozzle into the RV and flipped the nozzle auto-shut-off thing up while I went inside to buy some last minute stuff. I came out, the auto-shut-off thing had popped and I thought the tank was full. But no, it wasn't. The scene there was a bit chaotic, I was distracted. So we only got about 4 or 5 gallons into the tank, and that's only enough to get the RV about 40 miles, so we roll into BRC with an almost empty tank. I did not notice this until we were actually inside the gate and the fuel tank was really low. Give me a break, I was driving for 14 hours, I just didn't notice the fuel level.
So we had some fuel for the art car, which I was hoarding, but when I heard they were selling gas for the first time ever at BM, I dumped all the art car gas into the RV and then got on the art car and headed over to the gas station with every available gas can we had.
It's mostly yuppie culture as far as I can tell with it's hangerons and other cleanup artists, whatever. There's no such purity, but it's definitely not a flat organization.
As it has become so large, naturally you're going to get the hangerons. You also get all of the people that think it is trendy and go for the likes. All of the rich people that go out with custom RVs and all of that type of experience are just going to exponentially increase the hangerons as they have way more followers that want to follow the trends.
Again though, any time you get such large numbers the "core" group will tend to get dwarfed. That's about time when people start noticing it more and think the hangerons are the event so the original culture is sort of lost to the zeitgeist.
The people who hate Burning Man don't care about paltry things like the principles it's based on, they simply don't like the people that go for completely unrelated reasons.
Are you trying to imply that these people aren’t counterculture? Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
No it doesn't. Fashionable people pretending to be counter-cultural love to talk about hating them, but look how many people are on Facebook, how many are using Amazon, how many are using Google products. Consider that "google" is now a verb and literally everyone knows what it means. The part of dominant culture is to show one's "independence" and "free-mindedness" by saying some words about how all those people are oh so awful - and then go and consume the products they make, exactly in the way the want you to use them, and pay a lot of money for it. That's no more "counter-culture" than a multi-millionaire Hollywood actor dressing in a six-figure dress and showing up at a six-figure-per-ticket gala to protest "the elites" is "counter-culture". It's just the elites' LARPing.
Maybe, some of them were poor young iconoclasts some day. That's not when they joined the fashionable trend of Burning Man though. When they joined their trend, they were well into their power (or at least, in the case of somebody like Holmes, pretense of it). Because that's what is fashionable, of course, and they couldn't afford not to be part of "counter-culture" - it's so gauche not to be part of it!
All of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
Millionaire is not some ultra privileged status in the United States, an upper middle class family with a paid off house in a somewhat decent area will have a net worth in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
They may not be right wing conformist republicans but they are certainly not opposed to any aspect of current power structures in any meaningful way (unless, perhaps, it is restraining them).
I think the counter-intuitive examples of people who attend that you and others in the replies are pointing out are a demonstration of how many contradictions exist in these principals.
I am the type of person who thinks many, many things about the way the world currently exists need to change, but I am incredibly skeptical of the purported mission of the Burning Man Project to "extend the culture" of these principles to the wider world.
"Civic responsibility" is a ballsy claim from a bunch of first worlders exploiting child sweatshop labor, wasting resources on aura farming.
Burning Man is to the stated principles what Kraft singles is to cheese.
Just more empty American platitudes, advertising, marketing; watch! as rich capitalists role play rural community their capitalism tore apart!
The Party in 1984 is not just metaphor for a government but any group that puts its rhetoric before reality. Just some first world LARPers telling a story about themselves while the output is there for all to see.
Once. Was impressed by the human effort in general, little specifically stood out.
Worked in low voltage wiring through college. Have been a part of groups rallying behind large infrastructure projects; on farms, new office buildings, rapid response to weather related crisis (tornado alley). It's actually a very common human thing.
Been to many an art fair around the world and the minutiae of Burning Man blends right in.
Leave no trace while blowing fossil fuels into the air hauling tons of stuff to the desert. Nice loophole.
I like this but doesn't Burning Man itself constitute a hugely inefficient use of fossil fuels and unsustainable material use? The name has "burning" right in it. The climax is a bonfire. What about the air pollution? Perhaps it would be better for the planet if Burning Man didn't exist at all.
The event produces a huge amount of trash too. Every year you can see videos on youtube of people taking their moop out of the playa and just dumping it wherever (shopping malls, parking lots, the side of the road) in Nevada and California. The ethos only happens at the event and then all bets are off. I say that as an ex-burner.
I doubt the amount of generators running constitute some sunstantial fossil fuel use, at least not more than 70,000 people sitting at home in air conditioning doing "nothing". I would welcome your math though.
I've run power for a 100-person theme camp in the past. According to the logs, we burned an average of 36.8 gallons per day, or 1.4 liters/person/day (we ran the generator for 9 days total) in 2025. The camp has air conditioners (iirc ~20 units), lighting, freezers, etc. although not everyone has all of the above.
The average household consumption of electricity per day in the US is about 28kWh, which would take around 7-9 liters/day of diesel. Assuming an average US household of 2.6 persons, that's about 3 liters/person/day for electricity alone - does not include gas/electricity spent driving. So, at least for this camp, the average person is using less electricity at the burn, than if we weren't at burning man.
The fossil fuels spent getting to and from the event are more substantial than those burned at the event, but this is a separate discussion I think as to whether or not people should be flying to conferences, events, or taking vacations. COVID was great for reducing travel-related fossil fuel consumption, so we have the data and the experience on how to reduce that, but probably not the will.
The power logs are pretty interesting to look at. On average the generator is lightly loaded, so a lot of energy is going towards idling the generator, but batteries are expensive and these generators are not made to be stopped and started repeatedly.
Thanks for the math. My mind was more on the transportation pollution (moving all the people and stuff into the desert and then back out again, every year). The amount of CO2 spent on flying people around for business and vacations blows my mind. Using jet engines should be something like 10x more expensive than they are to reflect the actual burden on future generations of humans and other species.
I don't know anyone that goes to Burning Man that thinks it's some kind of conservation event. It was started on a beach in SF to mourn the loss of a relationship by a man with a broken heart. Then it got too big and moved to the desert. I think a lot of people have misconceptions about what Burning Man really is. The fact is, it's a lot of things to a lot of people, but one thing it is not is, is fuel efficiency or any kind of conservation.
The fact that it gets cleaned up is only due to the requirement to get a permit for the next year.
In 1997, BM was held on a private property, and the playa there was absolutely trashed, for as far as you could see. Bottles and cans littered everywhere. In the morning after the burn, I saw one woman was going around picking it all up. Others started to join in. It was not pretty. I think we made a dent in cleaning it up, but the trash was everywhere.
Unlike today, where people actually do make an attempt to clean up, but obviously some still do not give a single fuck about it.
The Dispossessed has one of my favorite quotes, “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”
I love this quote. It reminded me of a quote I heard recently:
"what a privilege to be tired from the work you once begged the universe for"
I'm not sure about the intent of the quote and its provenance. But for me the meaning is: To have wanted meaningful purpose and to get to look back and see that you have achieved that.
Right. "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
That's one of those definitions that's so broad as to make the word being defined meaningless. It's always silly when one re-phrases their position into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
Exactly. Of course they're capable of it. That doesn't mean they will. They have a lot of incentives to behave badly, and there's no way to eliminate them all.
Even under our decidedly non-anarchic regime, people STILL find reasons to behave poorly. I can't imagine removing the disincentive of state punishment would benefit society very much.
By "bad behavior," I mean robbing and murdering and the like, so no need for scare-quotes. Framing the average criminal as the victim of their own circumstances -- which seems to really be in vogue -- is entirely unconvincing to me.
> people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
You make it sound as if turning to crime is less the criminal's decision and moreso nature's.
While it doesn't explain 100% of crime, this is just true. You change people's circumstances such that crime isn't rational, and they're less likely to do it.
it's heavy lifestyle restrictions that lead to anti-social behavior in the first place. by far the most common crime is property crime, people usually commit it out of desperation and lack of opportunity. the degree of personal freedom in a capitalist state is defined by wealth, which creates a natural incentive to steal. then when they do, those people are put in prison, where they connect with other labeled criminals, all of whom face significantly lower chances of being hired, making sure that doing anything else in their life except crime will be as difficult as possible. aren't those heavy lifestyle restrictions enforced on people by government?
There is a reason that crime goes up a ton when existing tools for survival disappear (e.g. disaster scenarios). When people have paths to prosperity, the need to do crime goes down. When the marginal value of crime is low, people don't do it. You can get there with draconian punishments, but you can also get there with, like, a strong social safety net and general prosperity.
While not the only reason, one reason that my coworkers won't steal my wallet if I leave it somewhere is that the $20 is mostly irrelevant to them given the general level of prosperity at my office.
I'm willing to bet most burglars aren't motivated to do crime due to suffering from starvation-level poverty; there is hardly ever a "need" to do crime -- i.e., a scenario wherein doing something criminal is the only way to survive. You totally neglect the moral angle and reduce it to a barebones cost/benefit sort of judgement, which is reflective of this popular view of criminals as hapless victims of fate or of society, and who are almost righteous in their choice to do crime. Oh, and the only solution is more welfare.
I said that for many people crime is a rational approach to more prosperity. That doesn't mean folks are near starvation and have no other choices, it just means that criminal options may be more appealing than other ones. If you create accessible, non criminal pathways to prosperity, crime decreases..if you remove them, it goes up.
Yes, but not nature's—the built environment and socially constructed institutions of modern civilization.
Conservative political scientists like James Q. Wilson have historically argued that the root of crime is an essential moral and cultural failure, rather than just a byproduct of poverty. They maintain that social programs squander investments on those who will simply continue their destructive ways, and that society instead needs punitive mechanisms to regulate inherently destructive human urges.
On the other hand, sociologists and criminologists argue that while the decision to commit a crime belongs to the individual, the conditions that make that decision likely are structural.
Criminologists have long studied "social disorganization" as an engine for bad behavior, analyzing why certain neighborhoods suffer from persistent vandalism, street crime, and violence even as the specific individuals living there change over the decades. Critics of this theory often share your skepticism—arguing that high-crime neighborhoods might simply be the result of "birds of a feather flocking together," and that individual choices or family nurturing are far more important than neighborhood effects—but, ultimately, research demonstrates that people are profoundly motivated not only by their own choices, but by the circumstances and choices of those around them. When community social capital is high, networks of trust enforce positive standards and provide mentors and job contacts. When those adult networks and institutions break down, individuals are left to their own devices, making them far more likely to act on shortsighted or self-destructive impulses.
As the person who posted the quote, gonna be direct: no idea.
I have to say, I don't identify myself as a anarchist (maybe a bit of a sympathizer), yet I'm middle aged and finding myself a little dissatisfied by many things I see around me, so if I see people making the equation anarchist = degenerate, my immediate reaction is "yeah let's slow it down shall we."
Fair. But I think that statement isn't meant as a strict and precise definition (eg. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or whatever), more like a "gateway" description directed at those who associate anarchism only with utter chaos and "burn the house down" kinda attitudes.
Now, I'm aware that when you need to say something is "gateway" that's a bit of a red flag, i.e. "milk before meat" (describing something as friendly and innocent at first, then only later showing the more aggressive indoctrination) is exactly what cults do. Having said that, I'd grant that the late David Graeber is quite the straight shooter so I think he's in the clear here.
When I recognize this pattern (reducing one's beliefs to a line of common sense) in someone's writing, I usually take that to be evidence that they're not a quality thinker. I've skimmed the rest of the article you linked from Graeber, and I think my first impression holds up. Like, take this snippet:
> Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
Woah, mindblown! If you think about it, aren't you kind of a huge hypocrite and elitist for doubting that others can control themselves? Well, no! We know that plenty of people do, in fact, decide to act criminally and selfishly of their own accord. This line, and many others in Graeber's article, are goofy and I wouldn't take him seriously on this topic.
> "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
If it were that simple, then every FOSS project would be considered to operate under Anarchists principles. After all, the license and software forkability made it so that no one is forced to conform to whatever social structure is used to maintain a given project. But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
There may be plenty of good reasons for them to argue that, but none of them are "very simple notions" as your definition would imply.
> But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
no they won't, FOSS project's governance model has no relevance to anarchist discussion. anarchists are against coercive authority, not leadership in general, and FOSS does operate under anarchist principles, which is why anarchist community is a strict subset of FOSS community.
If we define "leader" as "someone who commands by force or by some other means the obedience of a group of people" then Anarchy is a society without leaders. It doesn't mean a society without order, but it presupposes that people can behave reasonably and that that is enough to ensure order.
Your "Other means" could almost be an essay prompt.
There's distinctions between power and violence (see Hannah Arendt), between social and structural power (see The Tyranny of Structurelessness).
And then there's this ancient Chinese text that has been slopified for a million management manuals:
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When they have accomplished their task, the people say, "Amazing! We did it, all by ourselves!"
To me this essay was an eye-opener, both because it's well argued and also because it's so obvious once you read it. Even outside the specific niche of feminist groups in the US, who hasn't witnessed this phenomenon in action? Those supposedly flat groups where everyone has a voice, yet it's always the same subset of people who are heard and ultimately influence or direct all decisions? And the unwritten rules who are both invisible and "the law".
It sounds great until you see what kind of actual people operate under the banner of anarchism. Then it might turn out their definition of reasonable fashion may be quite different from yours.
> almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation.
Burning Man forces you to really think hard about social contracts.
For example - you won't get kicked out for leaving trash all of the ground but you will absolutely be shunned and shamed by everyone around you for doing so. That notion simply doesn't scale to a place like the US with 350M people with varying cultures, values, etc. because the social contracts are simply all over the place and inconsistent.
there’s an interesting side to this that better cell coverage, starlink, and others have made burning man more phone friendly. purists will say don’t bring a phone. or the event only works because no one has phones that work
but the event isn’t possible to run without internet. DPW has wifi at every station. internet has become a core planning and organization tool
Honestly, that contrast is what draws me in. In the same way ultralight hiking forces you to think about and let go of extraneous weight, going to Burning Man and doing the whole camp thing and seeing the city work showcases the "dead weight" of "making things happen".
People think of anarchism as against organizations and rules, but its just against hierarchy. Western people in particular are so used to hierarchical thinking that its difficult to even imagine an organization that isn't hierarchical in nature.
And "eastern culture" is largely not hierarchical by heart?
Also, I have been to quite some anarchist places, but I did not found one without a hierachy. It is usually just informal. (But at times even formal and everyone pretends it is still not hierachy)
Ah yeah I've seen that video. What blows me away is that in the end all the accused did to get suspected for sexual assault was somehow made contact with her thigh
Seeing stuff like that makes me glad I left the anglosphere
From my experience, people are pretty good about cleaning up. The first year I went I camped solo, so I theoretically could have left a bunch of crap, but I didn't. The second year I camped with a camp, and they were really thorough with check out and break down. We had a formal clean up of certain areas that I participated in where I remember people finding the tiniest things, like little pieces of thread and what not. And then when I personally went to leave, we had someone come and inspect my area and whatnot. So in my opinion, I think people do a pretty good job. And even if people didn't do a good job... we are not talking about a beautiful national park here, it is a desolate wasteland where literally no life can survive. I saw maybe ONE bug while I was out there. Not even bugs can survive out there. It's like the surface of the moon.
It's not a wasteland. Plenty of insects live in the mud. Plus the pattern of the playa is special on its own. I honestly hate that burning man ruins the ground. Never the same after so many cars and people drive on it.
Yeah, that was where I was coming from. I know very few people that stub out their ciggy and then put the butt in the pocket to dispose of later, but I do know a couple. You'll get responses arguing how the filters are degradable now so it's no big deal when in truth it would be much less of a big deal if people just didn't toss them willy nilly.
Austria is a small country but festival-wise it does host a couple superlatives -- Donauinselfest as the largest festival in the world, Novarock being the largest rock festival depending on how you count. And then theres so many great other festivals in austria and the surrounding countries, big and small.
People keep raving about burning man so I kind of want to go but I wonder whether I'd just be slightly disappointed. Or whether it's an american media influencing europeans thing where expectations become overinflated compared to what we have here.
Burning Man isn’t really a festival, and you’ll likely have a bad time if you approach it that way.
Many people seem to think it’s some hippy Woodstock or Coachella-esque event, but It’s more like an anarcho-punk temporary city, where your survival is in your own hands.
American media loves to bash it, and Instagram influencers love to flaunt that they went, but it’s most certainly not for everybody.
I don’t recommend going unless you do your research and really want to go.
I’d also encourage any first-timers to go solo their first year.
Like most (counter-) cultural phenomena, you should have seen it ten or twenty years ago when it was an authentic experience, before they sold out and became commercial. Joking of course, but it's true. It's a gentrified shadow of its former glory.
It's not a music festival like the ones you listed for starters, and while those are like an all-inclusive resort in that you just show up with money, Burning Man is more like camping in that you take everything there (and back).
Nova Rock is mostly camping on and inhaling dry dirt, camping in and being covered in mud, not going to the toilet for 2-3 days, and eating canned food. But I hear you.
As an Austrian living in the Bay Area and on my fourth burn and having been to Novarock and the Donauinselfest: it is very much not the same. BM is less a music festival than an immersive experience. For self-reliant folks, it is a delight. For others, hell. Try it out, see what it is for yourself.
When I was a kid my stepdad was big into amateur rocketry, so we'd go to a lot of launches, including at Black Rock. One of them (could've swore it was LDRS, but given the timeline it would've had to have been XPRS or maybe BALLS) was at the same time that Burning Man's MOOP crew was doing their thing, and that was my exposure to how much work goes into preserving the playa for future users/visitors (including us). It's impressive to watch, even from long distance via binoculars. Of course the rocket launches have similar requirements, but they involve a lot fewer than 70,000 people (but on the other hand, a much larger area of potential litter, given that rockets fly far and sometimes don't come down in one piece).
I live in Reno nowadays, and the locals either love or absolutely despise Burning Man, in the latter case for good reason: while Burning Man as an organization clearly cares a lot about “leave no trace” (as I've gotten to see firsthand), the Burners themselves have a tendency to leave pretty giant traces throughout Reno. A big one is bikes getting left behind (by people who don't want to deal with a bike caked in excruciating-to-fully-clean playa dust), and there's a whole supply chain of companies here that'll find those dumped bikes (or encourage Burners to bring them directly), clean 'em up, fix 'em up, and resell them (often back to Burners the following year; rinse and repeat). A lot of other, less-lucrative-to-refurbish-and-resell stuff unfortunately ends up clogging up every dumpster in town.
If you think that’s dedication: I met Dominic (DA) who they interviewed in this article almost 20 years ago in the Spanish desert, where taught us Euroburners the art of MOOP cleanup. He’s been at it for a long time now.
i've always felt like going to Burning Man, something just attracts me to it. but i'm a eurodude, going to the US just for a festival sounds idiotic and i currently don't want to visit the US anyways.
are there similar events in europe? you sound like an experienced oldhead :)
Look up whatever regional burns[1] exist in your country or neighboring countries, and attend one of those. Ideally, join whatever online community exists around it first, and then reach out to some of the camps that interest you about joining and helping with whatever it is they like to do. I love Burning Man, but I can honestly say that I've had a lot more fun at my local regional burns than I've had at the big burn.
Glad to hear of it. I wonder if one of the reasons for the improvement is the "corprotization" of the event. From what I hear, people are increasingly showing up with prefab shelters, or the VIP tents probably have entire cleanup crews.
Not like the old "a couple of stoners with a lean-to" kind of thing that probably featured heavily, in the old days.
Since 2022, the organization has significantly pushed back against camps trying to package and sell "VIP packages" by restricting them from getting early setup passes, water deliveries, trailer & intermodal container delivery, etc. Without those support services, the model has become pretty unattractive.
Also, Burning Man is very intentional about its culture, with de-commodification as one of its main principles. The spotlight that got put on this issue a few years ago has really pushed these camps out, as of 2025.
As far as housing, most people sleep in tents, including specialized dome tents with reflective coating for the heat, but those are still essentially tents. Others sleep in RVs/trailers/vehicles. There isn't anyone building a condo tower in the desert.
Thanks. Good to know. Not something I was ever involved in, but knew a few people that went. They seemed to do it “the right way.”
I just know a number of tech bros, and it’s difficult to reconcile what I know of them, and “roughing it.” The stories I heard about VIP tents, aligned a lot more with my observations.
70,000 people during a week. It would be interesting to compare this with some other kind of event with the same duration and similar amount of people or perhaps make a
I went to an AMC Theatre last week and amazingly the room was absolutely trashed after the movie. For only maybe 25 people in the room.
Concert two weeks ago, same thing. The venue was full of garbaghe. It is really amazing how great most burtners are about those principles. For my camp at least we spend a solid 3 or 4 hours before leaving to rake our whole area and make sure we don't leave anything behind. Most people do the same.
> In 2025, lag bolts were by far the biggest problem. They anchor tents, art pieces, and other infrastructure into the ground, and can easily disappear beneath the dust.
I thought of a few potential solutions but then clicked through to the journal entry for last year and it turns out they're way ahead, the journal article is very interesting with some ideas: https://journal.burningman.org/2026/03/black-rock-city/leavi...
Sounds to me like there ought to be a MOOP cleanup deposit charged upfront, that only gets returned after this inspection. If the cleanup crew has to clean your site, you forfeit part or all of your deposit. Repeat offenders get charged increased deposits each time. Repeat inoffenders(?) get their deposit reduced.
There are lots of people out there who would happily pay fines or not get deposits back if they didn't have to do the less glamorous parts of the event. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
If a camp does a really bad job at moop cleanup, Burning Man organization talks to leads to understand what happened. Frequently what they will take away is the camp's placement in the event, or sometimes even the ability to attend the event as that camp at all.
For reference: I am one of the leads for a fairly large and famous Burning Man camp. We camp on Esplanade most years. We do exactly what you proposed: We have deposits, and the more people put into the camp before, during, and after the event, determines if we offer them a refund and an invitation to camp with us next year. One of the factors is if you help us during setup and strike.
An invitation to camp with us guarantees them a ticket at one of the cheaper tiers. We have plenty of campers that come in, pay the dues, do nothing for the camp, are generally useless during the event, and bail out leaving a huge mess.
Conversely, we have a very small (10-20%) team of highly dedicated individuals who stay past the event and pick every piece of string, fuzz, fluff, lag bolt, rebar, and debris out of the dust and take it out. These people get nearly their entire camp dues back. If they attend next year, the social capital that they've built doing so compounds into them becoming increasingly popular and famous on Playa.
If there's one thing that Burning Man has taught me, it is that very few people are motivated by financial incentive. If you really want to motivate someone, figure out what they genuinely desire. It's rarely money.
Your claim is backed by psychology research. The most well known study is the "Israeli Nursery" one where a fine was introduced based on how late you were to pick up your kid.
Parents started treating "x shekel fine for y minutes late" as "buy an extra y minutes for only x shekels!".
Would it though? It seems like it could work, even if people opt to "not comply" aka pay the fine.
Charge $1,000 fee per acre (eyeballing it, that seems reasonable). There are people who will clean an acre to be spotless for $500: not bad for a day of honest, actually contributing to the environment, outdoor work!
If I'm missing something and it actually costs more than I know, raise it to $2,000. If heavy trash needs to be removed also, charge that too, by weight.
It wouldn't really work because BM is a highly dynamic system with multiple variables that resists simple solutions.
- The site conditions and trends of the day changes amount of moop per year
- Some people dump their trash on other people's campsites
- Wind carries moop onto campsites that already cleaned
- Complaints about "unfair" deposit revocation would cause strife in the community
- 10k attendees make <$50k/yr but must pay full price; doubling the price is a huge burden, even if temporary
- Everybody already cleans as much as they're willing to clean
- Rich people will all moop if they think they can pay to be exempted.
They don't mind being banned because the event doesn't matter to them, it's just a party
- There aren't many people who can/will stay for weeks after the burn, even if you paid them
- The risk of increased moop increases risk that the event becomes banned
So basically it would result in more moop, would make people angry, would make it harder for poor people to attend, and would risk the status of the burn. Current system is working, no need to introduce additional downsides.
Depends on the outcome you want. I'd easily pay $$ to not have to do shit at BM but I'd not really like what that would do to the event.
Probably the closest example is if you ever read freakonomics introducing a late fee for parents picking up their child late from daycare increase late pickups.
Like many other financially-backed initiatives, it's been investigated. Implementation is extremely hard, and would lead to an enormous shift in the very-established culture of volunteering.
> Would it though?
Rather than immediately shoot down your idea, let's talk about logistically implementing this:
1. Cleaning/non-compliance is already fined, if it's not cleaned properly or in a timely manner. This is serious waste like blackwater spills ($500+).
2. This would impact the the self-reliance, decommodification, and leave no trace principles. Burners don't need to be expected to clean up after themselves, they can pay someone else to do it. Yes, lots of wealthy burners would do this.
3. We'd need to set up a system of accountability. Sure, we can create a new department within the org, The Waste Accountability Department. Who do we charge for the bike graveyards (https://imgur.com/a/PolJDcI)? These are bikes that get abandoned in large clusters at the end of the event. Do they get assigned to whichever camp space they end up near? Do we start to add in plenty of surveillance (human or tech-based) to see which burner left their bike? Do we add in facial or other recognition to make sure we fine the right person?
3a. Currently bike graveyards are handled by nonprofits and volunteer orgs that take those bikes, fix them, and donate them to kids in Nevada. If we continue that program, do we pay them for taking the bikes? Do we need to appraise bikes based on their value, or do some other system of cost to repair vs value? Do we just sell blocks of "1000 lbs of bike"?
4. A core element of burning man, as mentioned in 2. is "Decommodification". This would commodify cleanup, and there are loads of first and second year burners who would absolutely pay someone $500/$1000 to clean their plot. Accountability here gets hard, as the people who are willing to pay are also the people who are unlikely to verify the quality of work. There are loads of people who would prey on burners in a rush to get out, pocket the $500, and walk off. Accountability and prosecution here, again, gets hard. The decommodification principle prevents this.
5. Who would issue the fine? Burning Man is a non-profit, the fine would require legal enforcement, collections or some other method to threaten people into paying. It would also require accounting for where that money goes and how it is used. Bureau of Land Management? They already do issue fines for blackwater spills and other serious environmental hazards (see 1).
6. Currently cleanup is handled by the Department of Public Works and Playa Resto. Both are volunteer-driven. Once we start paying people to clean up, why aren't we paying the people who deploy the porto-potties, make the streets, maintain the vehicles, and operate the core infrastructure? DPW spends 3-6 months before the event preparing the site for the event.
As I hope this demonstrates, it's not as simple as just having a group of people you can pay to clean up. There's a lot of logistical challenges, not to mention a pretty big shift in the culture.
I vote we stick with making people clean up after themselves, independent of their ability to pay.
This results in affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit, which creates so much trash it requires a lot more staff and time to clean up. Existing system works: you clean up your moop because you're a good community member, shamed on Reddit if you don't, and if you're a problem multiple times, out you go.
> ...affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit
This is why I suggested an increasing deposit for repeat offenders. Leave a huge pile of trash? Next year's deposit is $100k. Do it several years in a row? $10MM deposit.
This is how camps known as "Plug n Plays" work. Charge exorbitant camp dues, provide everything for your campers, and let them lead the most privileged lifestyle out there.
Many camps did this, and were actually turning a profit at Burning Man by taking advantage of the community of volunteers.
A few years ago the Burning Man organization put a stop to this by decreasing or eliminating camps considered to be Luxury or Plug N Play. Not just because they were antithetical to the event, but because they became famous for a slew of problems.
White Ocean is one of the more famous camps in this domain. A luxury camp that charged exorbitant fees for extremely wealthy individuals to come and party without any responsibility. They had loads of sexual assaults, dosing incidents, and campers generally being shitty people. The leads also refused to pay the hired help. This led to a now-infamous vandalism incident.
White Ocean basically has a permanent ban on attending now.
You cannot incentivize people out there with money. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
This is definitely a concern. We've pretty much always been green, but it's hard to police after you leave, and usually we're gone before Temple Burn. (One year two of our camp mates stayed for Temple Burn and they ended up having to pack out two extra bikes that got dumped, in addition to having to deal with multiple people trying to camp in our empty spot. Maybe those people would've been fine, but given that they didn't understand the open camping situation, I'm unsure they understood LNT either.)
If people pay for something, they feel entitled to take advantage of it. I've literally seen people fail to clean up after themselves and explain it as "that's what janitors are paid for".
Requiring a clean-up deposit up front will encourage people who were already inclined to clean up to do so, and encourage people disinclined to do so to leave trash behind.
The communal honor / shame culture that is in place is much more effective- people tend to care more about their reputation than they do money they've already spent.
This penalizes honest mistakes, or moop from prior years resurfacing, or wind blowing trash into camp, or any number of things that are outside of a given camp's control
The moop map, and community holding itself accountable, seems to be a decently functioning system.
Not to mention the administrative overhead, at the org level and at the camp level.
Frankly being a camp of 100+ people, not just taking dues but also handling this Deposit, and distributing the cost fairly?
Running a camp is enough of a pain in the ass without adding on this kind of thing.
Monetary incentive systems like what you're suggesting are just a way of enforcing culture. If culture spreads organically, why bother with the overhead of bringing money into the picture?
There's actually research that making people pay for noncompliance (either upfront or post-factum) leads to less compliance, because people that can afford it treat it as a service. And giving that these events are visited by literally billionaires and a lot of affluent SV tech folks, making it a pay service would bury the volunteers under the mountain of trash. If the rules are "you MUST clean up", you get some trash slipping by. But if the rules are changed to "you clean up, or you pay a small fee and don't worry about it" - the amount of things to clean up would raise exponentially, unless you make the deposit so high the vast majority of people can't afford it - which would kill the event completely.
If the issue are tent stakes/lag bolts which get buried under surface, clear solution would be metal detectors available to borrow/rent (or brought by each camp). Also probably could do a drone or ground robot with a metal detecting loop on the bottom.
The best solution I know of is to get three-link segments of chain and put one on each screw as it goes into the ground. That not only marks the spot, it also gives you a flexible attachment point which is useful in all sorts of situations. (Two links would be pinned in a stationary fashion.)
Biggest problem is it’s a pain in the ass to chop up all that chain, and nobody sells them in pre-cut lengths.
Closest I've been to losing vision in one eye was creating these 3x chain links for Burning Man.
Naive thought: I could use a large bolt cutter to cut chain links. Started trying to cut a link, felt it was sketchy, went and put on some safety glasses.
Restart cutting (had these bolt cutters with like 1m long arms), apply full force, jaws slip a bit on the chain, jaws bite hard. Chunks of steel fly into my chin and face, metal chunks embedded in chin, cracked safety glasses. Dodged a bullet.
Ended using a small welded up jig so I could stretch the chain and then use angle grinder to cut the chain links. Still sketchy, but no flying metal chunks.
The leave-no-trace aspect of Burning Man is one of my favourite parts of the event. I've been 10 times in my life, I haven't been for a few years, the trek from the UK is a bit much sometimes! But each time I go to a UK festival I'm always reminded of how bad it would be if leave-no-trace was not a thing. It sickens me seeing the rubbish just strewn everywhere and, at the end of a festival, tents and general piles of waste left "for someone else to deal with".
Burning Man is a real breath of fresh air from that viewpoint and seeing everyone (pretty much) adhere to it is pretty special. Individually you take responsibility, not just for your own mess, but if you see MOOP, you clean it up regardless of who made it. It's not somebody else's problem, it's ours.
Seeing the camp MOOP report is always pleasing (obviously if you take the cleanup seriously, as most do).
Kind of crazy this is so successful, considering it's hosted in a country where it's the norm for (so many, but not all) people to leave their bags of popcorn and cups of soda at their seats when they leave the movie theatre or ball game, under the assumption, "someone else will take care of it."
But that's all based on societal norms. It's kind of understood (whether it's right or not) to leave popcorn etc under your seat at a theatre or a stadium. At Burning Man, it's obviously not acceptable.
I'm not going to be Gell-Mann Amnesiated. At least not without calling it out.
> Marblelous music. Wintergatan is a quirky instrument that relies heavily on marbles to make music. It's beautiful to watch, and doesn't sound anything like you expect.
No. Wintergatan is the artist name of the guy who made and played the instrument.
> The infinite buffalo sentence. It's a grammatically correct sentence, using just the word buffalo. The video explanation benefits from some useful visuals, but you'll still probably hate this. Or absolutely love it. There's definitely no middle ground here.
The visual below this point is completely useless and does not explain how to make an infinite sentence.
the moop map used to be a analog creation with pics of it uploaded every day of the resto(ration) process. some years ago they switched to digital tools and now they don't release it for several months after the event. huh.
The analog version still exists, and gets hand updated every day (though we don’t upload photos). You can visit it the following year at the appropriately named camp, Moop Map.
An event built on radical self-reliance now needs a public shame map to keep people honest. Every community that scales past the point where trust works eventually reinvents compliance.
Sort of. The "compliance" here is just transmitting pressure applied by the regular, boring, government. But certainly the cleanup would not happen without serious pressure from somewhere.
The process of setting up a camp for the first few times and attempting new art installations is positively gargantuan. There are a lot of considerations happening and MOOP is just one of them. Unless you expect people to get camps and installations right the first time, you need this.
Mostly no. Dead leaves that were just lying on a trailer without getting cleaned in advance and bits of decorative plants that broke off are probably the worst offenders.
This is one principle and shared ethos done really well
Burning Man would get a lot less criticism if they dropped their 22 year old principles out of its 40 year run
Being part of a camp is the least inclusive social chore I’ve seen of any similar event, it is optional while making the “radically inclusive” trek a lot easier. Its a fairly high bar if you don't know the people
“Radical Self Reliance” can be interpreted in completely opposite ways when convenient. The person mooching off of everyone may call that self reliance to themselves, not realizing they are just attractive, while the person “gifting” resources to be around the attractive person can withhold it under the edict of expecting radical self reliance. Its a desert, are people really more or less prepared because that principle is taking up space on a list of commandments?
Larry Harvey didn’t expect people to make these things their whole identity. He was just having fun pontificating some guidelines in 2004.
The guidelines-now-principles are also outdated. Many “Regional burns” that have been inspired by Burning Man have added additional principles more relevant to the times, such as ones focusing on consent and shared consent frameworks.
That MOOP map is overlaid on top of the actual Burning Man POOP map: all those attendees who stream to the desert from their urbanized homes? they are People Out Of Place, and eradicating them and all the carbon footprints they leave would completely eliminate the MOOP problem while also generating positive externalities.
Is there anything more "Burning Man" than taking something we've been doing for decades (A FOD walk), giving it a worse name, and bragging about it on some random blog?
I mean, hats off, the author really did nail it. This is as honest as I've ever seen BM get, and the juxtaposition of the unintentionally contrasted with the title makes it even better.
They aren't referring to the regulatory requirement, but the response, I think?
Like if people can put in this much time and effort in a remote desert environment to meet regulatory requirements, and document their efforts so thoroughly, why can't corpos?
"Black Rock City is only allowed to return to the playa each year if it passes a strict post-event inspection from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM): No more than one square foot of debris can remain per acre (0.23 m²/ha)."
The authorities are saying they don't want to see any trash at all, regardless of volume. Imagine 100 sheets of paper vs 100 AA batteries. The batteries have much more volume, but the sheets of paper cover a much larger area so there's much more visible trash.
Burning man is the biggest recurring environmental disaster purportated by humans in the name of entertainment. A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given, in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
That seems pretty harsh. Have you been? If you go out after the rain has washed the playa flat again to hide the bike tracks through the soft powder, it looks like there has never been an event. As per the article, they do a fantastic job cleaning, unlike any event I've ever been too. Hardly "zero fks given", in fact quite a few were given and that's why we get to keep doing it.
Does the purpose change how the act should be interpreted?
> A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given
Burners give so many fucks that we willingly do a thing historically reserved for punishment in the military (de-mooping)
> in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
Environmental sustainability is an actual goal not just greenwashing.
I encourage you too look into Playa Resto https://journal.burningman.org/2022/10/black-rock-city/leavi... and note that the term volunteer is used meaning these people don't get paid.
Now this is some next-level “I didn’t read the article, have no context, and understand little to nothing about the subject matter” type of comment. I’m actually impressed.
in a year where the world cup is taking place, counter-examples are readily available in numbers. I doubt FIFA will be releasing environmental impact datasets...
I’ve done this for a couple years now, cool to see it pop up here. I believe the scale is a touch larger; 3935 acres in 2025, plus a small amount outside the fence line.
On the technical side, we not only log but photograph everything, down to each clump of toilet paper. We check our progress by doing hundreds of tests identical to what the BLM does, both ahead and behind our main crew; bagging up any debris to be photographed on green screens where the pixels are counted to ensure we’re under the 2.29×10^-3 percent limit.
It’s a stupendous amount of walking, with no shade, a moop stick and a bucket. But it’s a hell of a feeling to be part of making sure we remain undefeated against an impossible task that the future of burning man depends on.
I'm from a completely different country, never been to burning man, have no plans to visit, but I've been to other hacker camps and the most magical thing is being part of the build/clean up crews, because the 1 week camp is actually a 3 week experience. And those extra 2 weeks there is no bar, no lecture tent, no infrastructure, just you and a bunch of really fun people, in tents, in the wilderness, having a lot of cozy moments together.
Am I right to assume, that maybe this cleanup crew experiences something similar?
Burning Man culture draws a distinction between participants and spectators - one of the best ways to get the “participant” experience is by working and actively being a part of putting it on. This definitely includes build and strike. There are people (many paid by the Burning Man Org) who get there months before the event and stay for months after.
At burning man you can even get early access if you’re working on an art installation. It’s really fun hanging out, drinking beers, assembling art, and watching a mini Vegas sprout of nothing but a trash fence over a week or two.
Yeah, we definitely have a lot of great moments together, that's the biggest reason I come back. But otherwise, I imagine it's very different. We stay in the city and bus in each day. I had a dishwasher the year before last so doubt it's the same wilderness feel.
What are these hacker camps you speak of?
EMF, CCC, WHY
Those are a lot less focused on drugs and sex than burning man.
That's really cool. Props.
> It’s a stupendous amount of walking, with no shade, a moop stick and a bucket
That does sound taxing. Is it volunteer or do people get paid?
I'm a volunteer, there are both volunteer and paid roles
Have you tried any computer vision for automatic categorisation? Happy to take a look into the data if helps.
I had the same thought when reading this. Even a lightweight CV system that pre-sorts items for human review could save a lot of effort. Happy to help look at a small sample of the data if that would be useful.
Any kind of tech for this? Spreadsheets...?
We use tablets running custom software for everything
What tablets?
What I love about Burning Man is that it is an event where all the programming is created by the attendees. All the art, sound stages, art cars, experiences.. if you want something to exist in Black Rock City, then it is up to you to just go figure out how to bring it, solely for the benefit and joy of those who get to experience it. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the rewarding feeling of seeing your creation manifested into reality is worth it.
So much of our daily lives in society is consuming experiences that other people create: the jobs we work are defined by other people, we buy products created by other people, we eat food made by other people. For me, Burning Man is a reminder for the rest of the year to be the creator of my own experience in the world.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” —Jobs
This, combined with the serenity prayer [0] have helped push me to try getting involved in fixing problems I never thought I'd be involved with.
We can all make a positive difference in the world for those still living, and those who have yet to live.
[0] God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
That's an incredibly cynical thing for a man like Jobs to say, given his life, especially late in it, was mostly just ordering people to invent things, and then acting like a generational genius because the massive amount of people under his purview invented things.
Why do people keep saying this? The direction of someone driving towards a thing is just as important as people working on that thing. Otherwise we may not actually have gotten anyone working on that thing at all. It's like saying a director is not important and actors should just do whatever they want.
Hm, so when Carl Cox plays a set he's bringing all the gear?
He is part of a camp called Playground (alongside other people). The camp collectively brings the speakers, AV, fire effects, generators and structures, sets all of it up, and Carl and other artists perform. He’s probably not setting up the gear himself but he is part of the collective that puts the show on. I do know that he plays Playground fundraisers during the year to raise the money to pay for the costs of the camp, which is a forum of contribution / volunteering.
fix oida
So a giant party can clean up after itself, but 4th of July in Tahoe for example is a toxic mess. I wish more people would practice these principles. It’s impressive how well this is cleaned up.
it helps that there's a regulatory agency that verifies the cleanup happened! if the 4th of july might get canceled the following year ppl might be more aggressive around cleaning up.
Participants also have to feel like they are part of the event rather than passive spectators.
Do they? Japanese clean up after themselves when they fill the parks at cherry blossom season or a fireworks festival. Seems like you just need to feel responsible for yourself
Most people clean up after themselves, even in hyper individualist America.
The Japanese clean up after everyone including the shitty few who don't clean up after themselves.
Could be because people growing up in Japan are taught that they're an intrinsic part of any place, event, or group of people that includes their presence. Kids in classrooms in Japan are helping clean up together with everyone else at age 4.
It's kinda the opposite of "responsible for yourself," it's a civic sense that extends to include everyone and everything around you - including things that weren't directly caused by you-as-individal.
In the case of the cherry blossoms, they were planted for the enjoyment of the people, and thus the people who come to enjoy them are a part of that system. The cherry blossom viewing events where thousands of people come to picnic, only is a "thing" because thousands of people come - everyone there is a participant by virtue of attending. Thus they hold part of the responsibility for the outcome of the event and the aftermath.
Much as I love Glastonbury festival, even though I stopped going a few years back, the amount of waste generated definitely seems problematic. I think the festival does a great job of trying to deal with this problem, from the large number of lovingly decorated bins, through to all the site clearup teams both during and after and all the messaging.
But as highlighted elsewhere, it's definitely more of a cultural problem than anything. It's always depressing just casually observing the amount of abandoned tents on the way out and the amount of litter either put in the wrong recycling bins or just discarded less than yards from them. And the problems isn't just the cost which could be spent on good causes - £750,000+ [0] but the accidental effect of say a cow eating a tent peg (it's a working farm).
As someone who litter picks and talks to litter picking groups it's definitely a big problem nationwide sadly.
Probably unsurprisngly this always seems to be much worse in the higher traffic areas with the main stages than it is in say the Green or Healing field areas though their might be demographic and contextual reasons for that also. I've not been to any of the other main UK festivals in a long time, e.g. Reading, V Festival etc. but I'm guessing they aren't going to be any better?
[0] - https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/whats-on/music-nightlife/glas...
> It's always depressing just casually observing the amount of abandoned tents on the way out
Not just tents, but all sorts of camping gear, carts, clothes, food, gimmics, and so on. Many in good condition. Aside from the waste having to be cleared, it's very wasteful to throw away good stuff.
I am convinced this is a cultural problem indeed. Stuff like a tent or a gas-burner is cheap. Cheap compared to what it cost (in % of monthly income) decades ago, and cheap compared to the ticket and other spendings on that festival.
The cost of a tent (or the costs of some cans of food, some shirts, a funny hat, an inflatable flamingo, a chair) is nothing on the total bill of a festival. That new tent you bought, costs about as much as that beer you spilled when you bumped into that drunk dude.
So, purely economically, it makes sense to just leave it behind. Why carry your (now dirty) tent, food, cloths, etc home, when you can leave it, have a more pleasant return trip, and just buy new stuff next year.
I think this is a very good analogy for why we are unable to stop ruining the world in an ever increasing pace.
Japanese visitors were applauded for cleaning up after themselves in the stadium. So it is an attitude thing too.
Which makes it even more infuriating to me when people use the MOOP map as evidence that burners leave trash everywhere and destroy the desert every year.
It’s certainly worse than not having the event in the first place, but it is quite literally better about garbage than any large scale gathering on the planet. Burners do still need to be better about leaving their trash in Reno, but even with that it’s hard to see how it’s not monumentally better than virtually anything else.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that leaving trash in Reno is bad, not that that's what people should do? I first read your comment as saying that people should leave their trash in Reno, but a sibling comment makes me think it's the opposite.
If you've been to Reno after the festival, you know what he is talking about. It's people who have removed their garbage from the desert, who then find somewhere - anywhere - to ditch a bunch of cheap tents and camping chairs used for all of a week.
Overflowing private dumpsters, leaving garbage in the rental car, just leaving it in a heap somewhere, etc. The tell tale dust gives it away. The issue isn't people who stop by the Reno waste processing facility and pay for it to be tossed, it's the people who decide to dump in the city instead of in the desert.
To be clear, what you’re supposed to do is dump your trash in places you’re allowed to dump it.
If you have a lot of trash, most economical option is often to go to the public transfer stations or landfills in the Reno area (but that only works if they are open).
Also, there are services on the side of the highway that accept trash for $N per bag. Only give your trash to someone if you can see the dumpster it’s going into and the dumpster is not full. There have been scams where people charged to accept trash and then just left it there to get blown around the desert. Alternatively, you could drive your trash all the way home and let your local utilities handle it. But when I’ve had my cargo trailer piled with leaking garbage bags I’ve wanted to get rid of it ASAP.
Sorry, yes, I should have made that clearer. Burners should as a whole be better about [the fact that they] just dump their trash in Reno on the way out. It’s an enormous problem, and completely indefensible particularly given the number of cheap trash collection sites you drive past on the way out. Still, by comparison, burners are practically saints.
Going back to the event itself, I attended Lightning in a Bottle once. I was absolutely disgusted at the end of it. Entire camps quite literally just left, abandoning everything. Brand new equipment and the boxes it was sold in just left for others to deal with. And not just isolated groups either, people had done this absolutely everywhere.
The giant party just dumps their trash in the Reno Sparks area on the way home. Search for burning man at /r/Reno if you don't believe me
There are some shitty Burners and those cause the most visible problems, but there are a lot of conscientious ones too (I think it’s the majority of them). Painting them all with the same brush isn’t quite right, a lot of us work hard to do things the right way (like spending hours in line to pay to dump trash at the Reno municipal transfer station). I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though, besides lots of public shaming. It’s hard to avoid having any jerks in a city of 70K people.
> I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though,
I know. Use the $600/person or whatever cost is now to have trash service out there. Ever think of that?
Yes, and it kinda defeats the purpose. The event is in large part about personal responsibility and accountability. Adding trash service out there would make it even easier for people to bring more than they need, consume more, leave shit everywhere, etc. And that money is already used for existing services and the BLM permit paid to the government, it's not like it's just sitting there ready to be spent on trash services. And at that point, increasing ticket prices makes it more inaccessible to people, and then cue the complaints that it's an event for such-and-such rich people blah blah whatever.
This is the fundamental contradiction of Burning Man values, and I admit to obnoxiously pursuing it around the fire these past three burns now.
Burning Man is a community and society, and often pitches itself that way, and attendees come away feeling that way - they're "Burners," any city in the world they go to they can probably find other Burners they've never met and hang out, and to truly understand the Burn you really just have to attend.
But the values, and event, and many attendees, reject this fact with the "radical self reliance" value. People try to work around it by doing Theme camps - tribes within a tribe. Oh you're self reliant all right, you and the rest of your suburb with whom you organized to bring water and toilet paper. But no no no, that line stops at the edge of your camp, beyond that lies only community WITHOUT responsibility.
In reality there is no community without responsibility. MOOP blows around. Your sound affects other people. And if someone is suffering from thirst or hunger at the Burn, you absolutely have a responsibility to them as a member of your community to share food and water.
This radical self reliance thing just shifts the burden of managing people to the theme camp level, without any guarantee that any given theme camp is actually itself a good member of the community (other than processes that take a while e.g. the MOOP map).
The Burn is big but so are towns. There's already infrastructure for sewage, there should be as well for trash, and imo food and shelter as well. That doesn't require violating any of the principles, and a form of "radical self reliance" can be maintained through "radical participation" wherein people can identify a problem they want to resolve about the Burn and resolve it, or organize a working group or syndic to do so.
The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
If you turn the event into a giant plug and play (if the org is providing food and shelter and trash and everything else), you've just created some variant of Coachella instead, and I sure as hell don't want that. The difficulty is part of the point and what makes it so worthwhile, the kind of people who self-select into doing all that work are people I want to be around. It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
> The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
Exactly my point, so why do we maintain this illusion through one specific principle that we are "radically self reliant" when that evidently isn't the case? Just look through this thread: multiple people rejecting the idea of shared trash bins as "opposed to the values." How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
> It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
Right, it already is that, and adding shared trash bins won't make it not that. We've just shifted responsibility for managing that onto the theme camps. And in any case, we don't have a magical enforcement mechanism for the values - nothing about changing what we consider a "shared community responsibility" causes our ability to gatekeep lazy people to diminish, the same mechanism of social pressure is there either way.
Meanwhile, our community is failing to handle the very real fact that people are dumping their trash in the streets of Reno, and Reno is, appropriately, attributing this failure to our community as a whole.
> Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
My Coachella comment was more in response to your suggestion that even infra for food and shelter should be provided. FWIW I also love Coachella, but that's because I love music - many people there sure don't follow leave no trace principles and that doesn't sit well with me either.
> How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
I think it's a spectrum. From completely no services at all to everything provided. My view is that providing things like toilets and medical services are something that we all (or at least most) agree makes the city a better place with no real downside. Trash is more complicated - I believe that does compromise the principles too much because of how people behave if dumpsters were to exist. I think people would be more irresponsible than they are now, because "someone else will take care of it" on playa. You also end up with tragedy of the commons problems like some camps dumping way more than others and perhaps filling things up so much that other camps can't even dispose of their stuff, and at that point how do you enforce or manage that? You could start charging by volume or something, but then that just starts to degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it, even if it means that sometimes people do the wrong thing. How we manage the problem in Reno, I'm not sure - TBH, if people started getting in trouble for doing it in a real way, like getting charged with illegal dumping, that'd be fine with me. It would certainly be a disincentive to do it once enough Burners get in real shit for doing irresponsible things like that. I'd have no sympathy for them, that's a personal accountability thing.
Defeats "the purpose" - of maximizing profits? In this case I agree with you.
It’s run by a literal non-profit. You clearly have no clue what the event is like or how it’s managed.
Edit: You can even see their financials here
https://burningman.org/about-us/what-we-do/financials-public...
What I’m seeing in that link is that the organization pays 16 people a total of $3.6 million.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the ten principles. Trash service would undermine some of those tenets
I don't need to do that. I already see the scam. Socialize the waste and privatize the profit. The mask was blown off years ago.
You're right minus the profits, nobody's really making any money off the Burn except maybe fancy RV rental places or whatever.
Are you on the outside looking in or are/were you an active burning man participant?
This 100%. They only care about their playa. As soon as they are off, their considerations go out the window and they trash every other town they want to.
There are volunteer opportunities to help clean-up after the 4th of July festivities in Tahoe.
Last year was tough - it rained for hours 5 nights in a row and the first rain night was accompanied by 70 mile an hour winds that did a massive amount of damage to camp infrastructure throughout the city. The roads in half the city were ruined by emergency traffic that kept on running throughout the storms, and the result was a lumpy nightmare that shook things loose from cars and bikes at a much higher rate than most years. The mud absorbed and hid things and made cleanup a far more grueling process than it usually is. We endured and did our best to still find and remove everything - breaking up mud clumps and raking/sifting through the dirt at the end of the week to find all that embedded trash. There are no public trash cans, no event dumpsters, etc. I can say from having been there almost every year since 07 that this was by far the hardest year for "mooping" - the process of spotting and picking up any item that shouldn't be on the ground - but that the group mindset endured and we somehow still trended downward in terms of overall trash.
I think the main difference between this and 2023 (the previous "mud burn") was that this time we had all the rain in the first half of the event, and then had relatively great weather for the second half. In 23, it closed out with the mud and people fleeing, leading to a spike.
Hmm, group mindset...or moop grindset? Either way great work to leave no trace!
Theme camp based on an area famous for getting hit with hurricanes and other natural disasters here.
During the rains we were one of the few places still open and where you could party, eat, and grab a solid drink. Being on Esplanade also meant we were a shelter for people to wait out the weather.
Loads of great moments by doing that.
Last year was my first burn, and boy was it an experience. The most insane and hilarious part of the rain is how the lakebed silt mud attaches to your shoes. It gradually accumulates in layers as you walk so you get taller and taller as you walk and heavier and heavier and eventually end up walking around on these 6 inch tall dried mud platforms barely able to lift your legs normally anymore.
The tactics to avoid it are also hilarious, there is one where you put a sock on, then a plastic bag, then another sock on top. Apparently this makes you immune to the mud stacking
My tactic is walking around barefoot then having a "oh no" moment when I get to my tent and realize I have no plan to get the mud off my feet :)
I eventually went barefoot out of frustration one time and sat down with feet sticking outside the tent for a good 45 minutes trying to dig the stuff out between my toes. What an experience
Two of my GP&E shifts got rained out. I had walk from Black Hole to 2&E one night with garbage bags over my shoes. The next time when they had to close the gate and all traffic over night, we had to come back in SxS with mud flying everywhere and in places it should not be. It was an experience, all good, still an experience to remember. The caked roads next morning were a sight :D
The unanticipated side effect of all roads being so bumpy after that from being torn up by the vehicles in the mud then solidifying to rock also made biking the remainder of the week quite the teeth chattering experience
I saw a few one wheelers getting close to teeth shattering when the fell.
Yeah, last year we were calling it Building Man cause the first three days were just rebuilding the setup from the previous day's storm.
We called it "Continuous Improvement Man" because by the 3rd round of building our camp we had the process really dialed in
The Burning Man of Theseus.
Do you use the scrum methodology?
It was a bit more Kamban-ish
lol, yeah - we got really good at tearing down the public space and getting everything into the container truck and then pulling it back out and building again. Party for whatever portion of the day we could, and then speed-run the teardown when the first drops of rain started coming down.
*Rebuilding Man
Since experiencing a deluge the day after the event ended in 1998, I know that the end of Burning Man will be a massive rainstorm at the wrong time.
Fortunately in 1998 it happened after almost everyone had left. It was Tuesday after the burn, and we were packing up. Clouds coming in from Gerlach were worrying, we could see the downpour happening over there and heading our way rapidly.
We closed the trailer door as the rain started. It came down so fast that by the time we were half way to the road it became almost impossible to drive in the mud, we were jackknifing with the trailer, almost losing control. There was an RV also racing to the exit that I witnessed doing accidental 360 spins in the mud, they totally lost control of the vehicle. I'm not sure they made it out.
I heard that the heavy rain continued for a few day, and the cars that were still there sunk into the mud. If you didn't get out before the rain, you were stuck there for weeks.
Now imagine this happens on Saturday, burn night. People have gone through almost all their food and water by then. Then the rain makes it impossible to leave, for weeks. All the vehicles sink into the mud. You can't even really walk through that mud to make it to the road, because it sticks to everything. "Playa platforms" are what you get when you try to walk through the mud. Now add 70,000 people, running out of food and water, and unable to exit the playa for possibly weeks? That's National Guard rescue territory. I doubt Burning Man would be allowed to continue after that.
Ever since 1998 I watch the weather closely, and you can bet I'll be the first one out of there if it's looking serious.
I can't even imagine that scenario with the remoteness of burning man.
Wacken got really bad a few years ago. Like, it's normal to rain here, and it's normal for cars to not get off campground, so a dozen of farmers or two are around with their tractors to evacuate people back to asphalt. Except that year, the rain escalated to badly that cars sunk deep enough into the mud that their undercarriage sat on the ground and the mud started to seep into the belly and the engine area.
At that point, dragging the car out has a decent risk of ripping rather important resources out of the rig, and then you got a scrapping job left. That was a fucking mess. They also closed off the Autobahn near Wacken that year, because the massive amount of mud the cars dragged onto the Autobahn turned into a rather slippery affair -- and hitting slippery mud at 100km/h, 60mph without expecting it can easily turn into a life-changing ad-hoc roller coaster.
Doing all of that at your distances in the middle of fucking nowhere would not be enjoyable or fun. Folks drowning in mud in northern Germany is now mostly a funny story among metal heads and rescue folks.
> People have gone through almost all their food and water by then
Isn't the whole point of Burning Man to be self sufficient? Why not bring food and water? It is not that difficult to pack a few weeks of rations in your RV.
Well I can tell you the counterstory about the massive storm that didn't ruin BRC.
Firstly, there's a ton (TONs) of water left at the end of the burn, unless things have changed a lot in the past 20 years, nobody is running out of water. I'm guessing a few people have snacks left over.
Some people are getting pissy and hiking out, and the rest are going to party on until the road is rebuilt, helping one another the whole time, and some will be dancing their butts off.
I remember being with a group that had a van breakdown on the way into the playa, and the only sensible thing to do was tow it into the playa to get help from mechanic friends who would help fix the van on the playa.
That's fine and dandy after a few days, but if it goes on for 2 weeks? I think you are overestimating burners. And you also may not realize that the BLM has studied this exact scenario, and would be unlikely to let 70,000 people go out there again after a worst-case storm, especially if rescue is required. And no recent storm was as bad as the storm in 1998. But sure, go dance in the mud, I don't care.
The org has huge amounts of food and water. It won’t be fine dining but nobody is going to starve.
2023 came pretty close to your nightmare scenario
And yet the "worst" didn't come to pass, because we act as a community... people shared food and water (and dry space), gave rides to people who needed to leave early, used sat phones to call out sick, etc. The biggest problems were from people who didn't want to act collectively, and tried to drive out through the mud by themselves, then (predictably) got stuck, and blocked the way for everyone else.
Wetsuit boots, for scuba diving, are the cheat code for walking on muddy playa.
> There are no public trash cans,
That's okay, your attendees just dump it on the roadside or overflow public trash bins at random businesses and parks along their way.
My respect for Burning Man just went up a lot.
These big events usually leave a giant mess behind. Glad to see they take the cleanup and restoration so seriously.
To paraphrase Captain Malcom Reynolds: "My days of not taking Burning Man seriously are definitely coming to a middle."
I bet you there would be far less MOOP if a spot at Burning Man didn't cost so much money. When people pay hundreds of dollars, entitlement tends to creep in. They tend to regard themselves less as a participant and more as a customer.
"I'm not sweeping my spot look for a tiny screw; I paid hundreds of dollars to be here; I'm packing up in the most convenient way to me and getting the heck out."
Of course, that depends on personality, outlook and circumstances. Given enough people, you get lots of variety in these parameters.
Doesn’t sound like you’ve been there
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt have been there. Ask them how much trash they left behind or cleaned up.
I bet Jeff Bezos didn't carry out all his urine in plastic bottles with his private jet.
The whole event is one of excessive entitlement...
Years ago it was truly countercultural but now it's just a place for multimillionaires to come, sit in the air conditioning, oogle the Instagram/tiktok influencer girls, and talk about how money just, like, doesn't matter, man.
There's a machine for this, and you can rent it - the Barber Litter Picker.[1] It's a large tractor-pulled machine, like an agricultural implement. It's a variation on their Surf Rake, which is used for beach cleanup. The Litter Picker is built for dirt, hard ground, grass, and pavement. It's used for large outdoor festivals. Scoops up everything from cigarette butts to lawn chairs. Video of cleanup after a big festival.[2]
Big festivals are cleaned up in a few hours with this heavy equipment.
[1] https://www.hbarber.com/litter-collection-equipment/litter-p...
[2] https://videos.files.wordpress.com/IxQgz6Oo/lp-concert-jiffy...
You are getting a bit of grief down thread- but this is cool as all get out.
The best use of these systems would be to combine the various procedures:
First, and foremost - don't leave garbage behind in the first place. Think twice before bring sequins and feathers in costumes (the biggest culprit in my experience from 2003-2010). Film cannisters for cigarette
Second - Every Camp does a combination of complete-grid clean up on their own "lot" - I've done that three times - and it was honestly great - plus an hour of "community time" - where you walk the play off your lot and clean it up as well. Your camp packs off 99% of the garbage, and then a grid search, plus heavy rake, finds the last 1%. About the only debate my camp ever had was whether it was acceptable to just dump their potable water onto the Playa (I thought it was fine - as long as you didn't just pour it all in one place - within 15 minutes you would be hard pressed to ever find out where it was poured out).
Third - the two-week "walk the line" where the detailed MOOP maps get created. 150 people for a 80,000 person 7+ day festival seems entirely reasonable - and it's a big part of BRC.
Finally (and I really mean do finally, it's almost a thing that shouldn't be really visible) - show up with the heavy gear to find all the submerged stakes/rebare/moop). Just rake the hell out of the Playa (absolutely fine - I've never understood people who think that it's a problem - it really isn't - you sure as hell aren't going to disrupt any ecology - except for a few random sand-fleas - it's entirely devoid of any life) - and the first bit of rain completely and 100% eliminates any trace of what you did.
> Scoops up everything from cigarette butts to lawn chairs.
From some of the videos you can find of it on Youtube, the cigarette butt claim doesn't look believable. It can definitely leave smaller debris behind, and certainly won't pull lag bolts out of the ground.
Did you read the full article?
The whole point of the manual cleanup duty is the meticulous mapping of MOOP. This information is used by the community to learn and improve for next time. This has resulted in measurable improvement over the years, despite the event growing massively in size during that time.
I feel a big commercial machine that cleans the site up in a couple of hours will result in a community that does not espouse the 'leave no trace' principle. Because why would you care? A big machine is going to clean it all up anyway.
You can definitely add some telemetry to this that records and analyzes realtime location to "map" the litter, even when using a device like this. The conveyor actually seems very well suited to an external camera that records and analyzes the mess to a degree that should be suitable for the purpose of "recording" litter types and concentrations based on the location, without resorting to manual sweep/dust bins which actually sounds pretty insane at this scale.
Right, needs a drone pass for mapping before and after cleaning.
Needing 150 people for weeks to clean up is too labor-intensive. Are they paid?
You’ve missed the point. This is a cultural commitment not a logistics problem to engineer away.
The person you replied to did kindly try to explain to you, but you seem to have ignored it.
If you don’t understand the culture of Burning Man, that’s fine. But maybe don’t callously reduce 150 peoples’ labor of love to “btw just use this machine”.
> This is a cultural commitment not a logistics problem to engineer away.
Not entirely.[1] Not all the workers are happy campers. There's a high suicide rate and injury rate.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2018/08/24/exclusive-burning-man-a-uto...
I've met enough people that have that same attitude towards other people having to clean it.
Why not just hold Burning Man on a garbage dump instead of the playa?
I was part of the temple build last year and cleanup is extremely serious. We spent two days cleaning after the burn with magnetic rakes looking for minute pieces of metal. We take samples of dirt at different spots and count the number of MOOP fragments to measure progress
Actually an enormous whitepill on Burning Man. Modest amounts of debris, real accountability, and improvement over time despite overall growth. You really can't ask for much more.
I won't pretend I grok the underlying spirit of Burning Man. But I find it deeply fascinating to see the interaction between desires for counterculture, anarchy, free spirit, etc. and the benefit and ultimate necessity of organization, planning, rules... governance, essentially. And where there's those things, there's always maps and data.
It’s fun to read everyone's preconceptions about Burning Man. Its ten principles are published [1] and include stuff like “radical inclusion” and “civic responsibility” and “gifting” (the latter of which is taken very literally, there is almost no currency use on the playa and everything is gifted except ice and coffee at center camp).
Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists, but it’s hardly representative, especially when you include the family zone and all the specialized camps.
[1] https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/
A friend introduced my to CouchSurfing in ~2009.
The idea that a stranger would effectively be a free Airbnb host (back when Airbnb actually had hosts) was baffling. Turns out:
1. Travel is expensive in time and money. Hosting someone gives you a travel-adjacent experience without having to leave home.
2. People who are willing to host strangers tend to be cool/open/interesting/friendly people. Opting-in to CouchSurfing is a good filter for someone you might enjoy spending time with.
Burning Man is similar.
One of the mainstays of Burning Man is the Hug Deli. It's like a lemonade stand, but instead of sugary beverages, they serve affection. You can order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server. Want an extra pep in your step? Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment.
The staff at the Hug Deli are all volunteers. You just roll up, toss on an apron, and start serving. (The guy who started it isn't particularly affectionate. He's a performer from LA who wanted a way to get strangers to try on characters.)
You would never stand in Golden Gate Park offering kisses to anyone who asked. Burning Man is a container that allows experiences like that to flourish, because opting-in to Burning Man is a good filter for the kind of people you might be willing to try stuff with.
One of my sluttier female friends made a habit of seducing her male CouchSurfing hosts.
As she tells it, a lot of people had a great time!
Don't get me wrong, but on one side you have the gift culture, and on the other side the exception that one of the only things sold the the community in one of the hottest, most arid deserts in the world is ... ice ...
Got a chuckle out of me there.
There’s no in and out privileges to get ice elsewhere, so the organization coordinates huge ice shipments into the event. All the proceeds from the ice and coffee sales benefit the local schools and students, which is great because that area is doing pretty rough economically
They also sell fuel.
Not to any old so and so, only to mutant vehicle and art camps
I actually got to buy fuel there once. They were absolutely surly about it, too.
Why didn't you plan ahead and bring enough gas??!?
Well what happened was, we stopped at the gas station in Wadsworth where we usually fuel up the RV before heading to the burn. I put the gas nozzle into the RV and flipped the nozzle auto-shut-off thing up while I went inside to buy some last minute stuff. I came out, the auto-shut-off thing had popped and I thought the tank was full. But no, it wasn't. The scene there was a bit chaotic, I was distracted. So we only got about 4 or 5 gallons into the tank, and that's only enough to get the RV about 40 miles, so we roll into BRC with an almost empty tank. I did not notice this until we were actually inside the gate and the fuel tank was really low. Give me a break, I was driving for 14 hours, I just didn't notice the fuel level.
So we had some fuel for the art car, which I was hoarding, but when I heard they were selling gas for the first time ever at BM, I dumped all the art car gas into the RV and then got on the art car and headed over to the gas station with every available gas can we had.
It's mostly yuppie culture as far as I can tell with it's hangerons and other cleanup artists, whatever. There's no such purity, but it's definitely not a flat organization.
As it has become so large, naturally you're going to get the hangerons. You also get all of the people that think it is trendy and go for the likes. All of the rich people that go out with custom RVs and all of that type of experience are just going to exponentially increase the hangerons as they have way more followers that want to follow the trends.
Again though, any time you get such large numbers the "core" group will tend to get dwarfed. That's about time when people start noticing it more and think the hangerons are the event so the original culture is sort of lost to the zeitgeist.
FYI - Coffee at center camp was canceled as of 2022
*people associated with counterculture and anarchists who also have thousands of dollars of discretionary income.
The people who hate Burning Man don't care about paltry things like the principles it's based on, they simply don't like the people that go for completely unrelated reasons.
> Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists
And Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt... you get the idea.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceos-founders-attended-...
Are you trying to imply that these people aren’t counterculture? Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
If whole top of Silicon Valley is "counterculture", that word has no meaning.
> Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
And from that you make the conclusion they are "counterculture"? I don't think it means what you think it means.
> a group whose values, norms, and behaviors actively oppose and reject those of mainstream society
Basically every name listed meets this definition
Are you trying to imply that Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukerberg are counterculture in some way? What?
Correct, but I wasn’t trying to imply it, I stated it outright.
So anyone that creates a new business that is successful is inherently counter cultural?
These people in fact are some of the principal figures dictating the dominant culture and status quo.
In what way? The dominant culture hates them.
No it doesn't. Fashionable people pretending to be counter-cultural love to talk about hating them, but look how many people are on Facebook, how many are using Amazon, how many are using Google products. Consider that "google" is now a verb and literally everyone knows what it means. The part of dominant culture is to show one's "independence" and "free-mindedness" by saying some words about how all those people are oh so awful - and then go and consume the products they make, exactly in the way the want you to use them, and pay a lot of money for it. That's no more "counter-culture" than a multi-millionaire Hollywood actor dressing in a six-figure dress and showing up at a six-figure-per-ticket gala to protest "the elites" is "counter-culture". It's just the elites' LARPing.
Either of the mentioned was at one point of their career someone who would have been considered at least belonging to "counterculture".
Unfortunately, money and power corrupts, and lo and behold, one day you wake up to find you have become the very thing you once swore to destroy.
Maybe, some of them were poor young iconoclasts some day. That's not when they joined the fashionable trend of Burning Man though. When they joined their trend, they were well into their power (or at least, in the case of somebody like Holmes, pretense of it). Because that's what is fashionable, of course, and they couldn't afford not to be part of "counter-culture" - it's so gauche not to be part of it!
Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals.
All of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
Millionaire is not some ultra privileged status in the United States, an upper middle class family with a paid off house in a somewhat decent area will have a net worth in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
Number of millionaires in the US: 23,831,00.
Yet again, different idea of “privilege”, I guess?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
Maybe wisdom gives another perspective on the ideals we had in our youth?
there's nothing wise about hoarding
None of those people are your average citizen.
The idea that rich people are all right wing conformist republicans does not survive getting to know a few of them.
They may not be right wing conformist republicans but they are certainly not opposed to any aspect of current power structures in any meaningful way (unless, perhaps, it is restraining them).
Not sure how did you read "right wing conformist republicans" into my comment that had literally nothing about partisan politics.
I think the counter-intuitive examples of people who attend that you and others in the replies are pointing out are a demonstration of how many contradictions exist in these principals.
I am the type of person who thinks many, many things about the way the world currently exists need to change, but I am incredibly skeptical of the purported mission of the Burning Man Project to "extend the culture" of these principles to the wider world.
"Civic responsibility" is a ballsy claim from a bunch of first worlders exploiting child sweatshop labor, wasting resources on aura farming.
Burning Man is to the stated principles what Kraft singles is to cheese.
Just more empty American platitudes, advertising, marketing; watch! as rich capitalists role play rural community their capitalism tore apart!
The Party in 1984 is not just metaphor for a government but any group that puts its rhetoric before reality. Just some first world LARPers telling a story about themselves while the output is there for all to see.
Have you been? Or are you basing this on second-hand information?
Once. Was impressed by the human effort in general, little specifically stood out.
Worked in low voltage wiring through college. Have been a part of groups rallying behind large infrastructure projects; on farms, new office buildings, rapid response to weather related crisis (tornado alley). It's actually a very common human thing.
Been to many an art fair around the world and the minutiae of Burning Man blends right in.
Leave no trace while blowing fossil fuels into the air hauling tons of stuff to the desert. Nice loophole.
That's quite the straw man you've constructed, which I suppose is appropriate for a Burning Man thread.
Appeal to authority you don't have to dictate what is and isn't logical fallacy.
Easier to regurgitate some old philosophy you read than think. You look educated in philosophy if not intelligent in logic.
These are informal fallacies, so logic’s not at issue here. Though you whiffed on your accusation.
Whiffed on my accusation according to some random internet posters interpretations.
Oh no. Anyway.
Trashing the planet is mainstream. Taking care of it is counterculture.
I like this but doesn't Burning Man itself constitute a hugely inefficient use of fossil fuels and unsustainable material use? The name has "burning" right in it. The climax is a bonfire. What about the air pollution? Perhaps it would be better for the planet if Burning Man didn't exist at all.
The event produces a huge amount of trash too. Every year you can see videos on youtube of people taking their moop out of the playa and just dumping it wherever (shopping malls, parking lots, the side of the road) in Nevada and California. The ethos only happens at the event and then all bets are off. I say that as an ex-burner.
I doubt the amount of generators running constitute some sunstantial fossil fuel use, at least not more than 70,000 people sitting at home in air conditioning doing "nothing". I would welcome your math though.
I've run power for a 100-person theme camp in the past. According to the logs, we burned an average of 36.8 gallons per day, or 1.4 liters/person/day (we ran the generator for 9 days total) in 2025. The camp has air conditioners (iirc ~20 units), lighting, freezers, etc. although not everyone has all of the above.
The average household consumption of electricity per day in the US is about 28kWh, which would take around 7-9 liters/day of diesel. Assuming an average US household of 2.6 persons, that's about 3 liters/person/day for electricity alone - does not include gas/electricity spent driving. So, at least for this camp, the average person is using less electricity at the burn, than if we weren't at burning man.
The fossil fuels spent getting to and from the event are more substantial than those burned at the event, but this is a separate discussion I think as to whether or not people should be flying to conferences, events, or taking vacations. COVID was great for reducing travel-related fossil fuel consumption, so we have the data and the experience on how to reduce that, but probably not the will.
The power logs are pretty interesting to look at. On average the generator is lightly loaded, so a lot of energy is going towards idling the generator, but batteries are expensive and these generators are not made to be stopped and started repeatedly.
Thanks for the math. My mind was more on the transportation pollution (moving all the people and stuff into the desert and then back out again, every year). The amount of CO2 spent on flying people around for business and vacations blows my mind. Using jet engines should be something like 10x more expensive than they are to reflect the actual burden on future generations of humans and other species.
Then it’s somewhat intellectually dishonest to single out Burning Man vs any other kind of vacation travel.
I don't know anyone that goes to Burning Man that thinks it's some kind of conservation event. It was started on a beach in SF to mourn the loss of a relationship by a man with a broken heart. Then it got too big and moved to the desert. I think a lot of people have misconceptions about what Burning Man really is. The fact is, it's a lot of things to a lot of people, but one thing it is not is, is fuel efficiency or any kind of conservation.
The fact that it gets cleaned up is only due to the requirement to get a permit for the next year.
In 1997, BM was held on a private property, and the playa there was absolutely trashed, for as far as you could see. Bottles and cans littered everywhere. In the morning after the burn, I saw one woman was going around picking it all up. Others started to join in. It was not pretty. I think we made a dent in cleaning it up, but the trash was everywhere.
Unlike today, where people actually do make an attempt to clean up, but obviously some still do not give a single fuck about it.
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
It's a week long party for rich people. I don't think it's that deep.
The natural tension between chaos and order is one of the things that makes Burning Man so interesting.
More like the natural tension between what you say and what you do.
People that don't mind SF might want to look at these for some examples of anarchy in fictional action:
The Day Before The Revolution, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Before_the_Revolution
The Dispossessed, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
The Dispossessed has one of my favorite quotes, “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”
I love this quote. It reminded me of a quote I heard recently:
"what a privilege to be tired from the work you once begged the universe for"
I'm not sure about the intent of the quote and its provenance. But for me the meaning is: To have wanted meaningful purpose and to get to look back and see that you have achieved that.
It's actually pretty compatible with "capital a" Anarchy.
Right. "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
From: "Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!", David Graeber, 2009, https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-a...
That's one of those definitions that's so broad as to make the word being defined meaningless. It's always silly when one re-phrases their position into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
I agree 100%, but it makes a mildly interesting jumping off point.
My first question is: but what if they don't?
Exactly. Of course they're capable of it. That doesn't mean they will. They have a lot of incentives to behave badly, and there's no way to eliminate them all.
Even under our decidedly non-anarchic regime, people STILL find reasons to behave poorly. I can't imagine removing the disincentive of state punishment would benefit society very much.
> Even under our decidedly raging conflagration, people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
The argument—to which I'm quite sympathetic—is that these non-anarchic institutions perpetuate the environment which incentizes "bad behavior."
By "bad behavior," I mean robbing and murdering and the like, so no need for scare-quotes. Framing the average criminal as the victim of their own circumstances -- which seems to really be in vogue -- is entirely unconvincing to me.
> people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
You make it sound as if turning to crime is less the criminal's decision and moreso nature's.
While it doesn't explain 100% of crime, this is just true. You change people's circumstances such that crime isn't rational, and they're less likely to do it.
That would require a government to enforce such heavy lifestyle restrictions on people.
it's heavy lifestyle restrictions that lead to anti-social behavior in the first place. by far the most common crime is property crime, people usually commit it out of desperation and lack of opportunity. the degree of personal freedom in a capitalist state is defined by wealth, which creates a natural incentive to steal. then when they do, those people are put in prison, where they connect with other labeled criminals, all of whom face significantly lower chances of being hired, making sure that doing anything else in their life except crime will be as difficult as possible. aren't those heavy lifestyle restrictions enforced on people by government?
There is a reason that crime goes up a ton when existing tools for survival disappear (e.g. disaster scenarios). When people have paths to prosperity, the need to do crime goes down. When the marginal value of crime is low, people don't do it. You can get there with draconian punishments, but you can also get there with, like, a strong social safety net and general prosperity.
While not the only reason, one reason that my coworkers won't steal my wallet if I leave it somewhere is that the $20 is mostly irrelevant to them given the general level of prosperity at my office.
I'm willing to bet most burglars aren't motivated to do crime due to suffering from starvation-level poverty; there is hardly ever a "need" to do crime -- i.e., a scenario wherein doing something criminal is the only way to survive. You totally neglect the moral angle and reduce it to a barebones cost/benefit sort of judgement, which is reflective of this popular view of criminals as hapless victims of fate or of society, and who are almost righteous in their choice to do crime. Oh, and the only solution is more welfare.
> aren't motivated to do crime due to suffering
Good thing I never said that!
> Oh, and the only solution is more welfare
Nor that!
I said that for many people crime is a rational approach to more prosperity. That doesn't mean folks are near starvation and have no other choices, it just means that criminal options may be more appealing than other ones. If you create accessible, non criminal pathways to prosperity, crime decreases..if you remove them, it goes up.
Yes, but not nature's—the built environment and socially constructed institutions of modern civilization.
Conservative political scientists like James Q. Wilson have historically argued that the root of crime is an essential moral and cultural failure, rather than just a byproduct of poverty. They maintain that social programs squander investments on those who will simply continue their destructive ways, and that society instead needs punitive mechanisms to regulate inherently destructive human urges.
On the other hand, sociologists and criminologists argue that while the decision to commit a crime belongs to the individual, the conditions that make that decision likely are structural.
Criminologists have long studied "social disorganization" as an engine for bad behavior, analyzing why certain neighborhoods suffer from persistent vandalism, street crime, and violence even as the specific individuals living there change over the decades. Critics of this theory often share your skepticism—arguing that high-crime neighborhoods might simply be the result of "birds of a feather flocking together," and that individual choices or family nurturing are far more important than neighborhood effects—but, ultimately, research demonstrates that people are profoundly motivated not only by their own choices, but by the circumstances and choices of those around them. When community social capital is high, networks of trust enforce positive standards and provide mentors and job contacts. When those adult networks and institutions break down, individuals are left to their own devices, making them far more likely to act on shortsighted or self-destructive impulses.
As the person who posted the quote, gonna be direct: no idea.
I have to say, I don't identify myself as a anarchist (maybe a bit of a sympathizer), yet I'm middle aged and finding myself a little dissatisfied by many things I see around me, so if I see people making the equation anarchist = degenerate, my immediate reaction is "yeah let's slow it down shall we."
Fair. But I think that statement isn't meant as a strict and precise definition (eg. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or whatever), more like a "gateway" description directed at those who associate anarchism only with utter chaos and "burn the house down" kinda attitudes.
Now, I'm aware that when you need to say something is "gateway" that's a bit of a red flag, i.e. "milk before meat" (describing something as friendly and innocent at first, then only later showing the more aggressive indoctrination) is exactly what cults do. Having said that, I'd grant that the late David Graeber is quite the straight shooter so I think he's in the clear here.
When I recognize this pattern (reducing one's beliefs to a line of common sense) in someone's writing, I usually take that to be evidence that they're not a quality thinker. I've skimmed the rest of the article you linked from Graeber, and I think my first impression holds up. Like, take this snippet:
> Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
Woah, mindblown! If you think about it, aren't you kind of a huge hypocrite and elitist for doubting that others can control themselves? Well, no! We know that plenty of people do, in fact, decide to act criminally and selfishly of their own accord. This line, and many others in Graeber's article, are goofy and I wouldn't take him seriously on this topic.
Isn’t that all political movements when described in general terms?
The same is true of all political movements when described dishonestly and over-simplistically, yes.
> into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
Start a topic on democracy here and at least a handful will argue against regular people governing society and their own lives.
That’s more than no-one.
> "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
If it were that simple, then every FOSS project would be considered to operate under Anarchists principles. After all, the license and software forkability made it so that no one is forced to conform to whatever social structure is used to maintain a given project. But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
There may be plenty of good reasons for them to argue that, but none of them are "very simple notions" as your definition would imply.
> But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
no they won't, FOSS project's governance model has no relevance to anarchist discussion. anarchists are against coercive authority, not leadership in general, and FOSS does operate under anarchist principles, which is why anarchist community is a strict subset of FOSS community.
If we define "leader" as "someone who commands by force or by some other means the obedience of a group of people" then Anarchy is a society without leaders. It doesn't mean a society without order, but it presupposes that people can behave reasonably and that that is enough to ensure order.
That’s a narrow definition of a leader. Seems to me that a leader can be someone who others _choose_ to follow.
That’s “other means”
Whats the difference, from an anarchist perspective, of a leader making a rule or a group voting on a rule?
Consent
Your "Other means" could almost be an essay prompt.
There's distinctions between power and violence (see Hannah Arendt), between social and structural power (see The Tyranny of Structurelessness).
And then there's this ancient Chinese text that has been slopified for a million management manuals:
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist. The next best is a leader who is loved and praised. Next comes the one who is feared. The worst one is the leader that is despised.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly. When they have accomplished their task, the people say, "Amazing! We did it, all by ourselves!"
> The Tyranny of Structurelessness
To me this essay was an eye-opener, both because it's well argued and also because it's so obvious once you read it. Even outside the specific niche of feminist groups in the US, who hasn't witnessed this phenomenon in action? Those supposedly flat groups where everyone has a voice, yet it's always the same subset of people who are heard and ultimately influence or direct all decisions? And the unwritten rules who are both invisible and "the law".
It sounds great until you see what kind of actual people operate under the banner of anarchism. Then it might turn out their definition of reasonable fashion may be quite different from yours.
Here's another excellent piece. Ignore the site please.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/03/butler-shaffer/lx-what-i...
> almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation.
A core thing you should expect from anarchists is disagreement.
Some anarchists agree with Graeber's definition. A majority probably disagrees, in many different ways.
I expect this post will be met with disagreement. Wouldn't want it any other way!
But to bring it back to the topic at hand, the people doing this are forced to by the BLM, so not very Anarchistic.
Burning Man forces you to really think hard about social contracts.
For example - you won't get kicked out for leaving trash all of the ground but you will absolutely be shunned and shamed by everyone around you for doing so. That notion simply doesn't scale to a place like the US with 350M people with varying cultures, values, etc. because the social contracts are simply all over the place and inconsistent.
there’s an interesting side to this that better cell coverage, starlink, and others have made burning man more phone friendly. purists will say don’t bring a phone. or the event only works because no one has phones that work
but the event isn’t possible to run without internet. DPW has wifi at every station. internet has become a core planning and organization tool
It’s obviously possible to run without the internet. They did it for many years.
Honestly, that contrast is what draws me in. In the same way ultralight hiking forces you to think about and let go of extraneous weight, going to Burning Man and doing the whole camp thing and seeing the city work showcases the "dead weight" of "making things happen".
People think of anarchism as against organizations and rules, but its just against hierarchy. Western people in particular are so used to hierarchical thinking that its difficult to even imagine an organization that isn't hierarchical in nature.
And "eastern culture" is largely not hierarchical by heart?
Also, I have been to quite some anarchist places, but I did not found one without a hierachy. It is usually just informal. (But at times even formal and everyone pretends it is still not hierachy)
No comment on whether anarchists achieve this goal.
Hierarchy is “Western” now?
Western culture is hierarchical, hierarchy isn't inherently Western. Lots of cultures do it.
Yeah, well it's all fake really. Still filled with people that are terrible, from the organizers to the goers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0_u1ZvHOu4
Ah yeah I've seen that video. What blows me away is that in the end all the accused did to get suspected for sexual assault was somehow made contact with her thigh
Seeing stuff like that makes me glad I left the anglosphere
From my experience, people are pretty good about cleaning up. The first year I went I camped solo, so I theoretically could have left a bunch of crap, but I didn't. The second year I camped with a camp, and they were really thorough with check out and break down. We had a formal clean up of certain areas that I participated in where I remember people finding the tiniest things, like little pieces of thread and what not. And then when I personally went to leave, we had someone come and inspect my area and whatnot. So in my opinion, I think people do a pretty good job. And even if people didn't do a good job... we are not talking about a beautiful national park here, it is a desolate wasteland where literally no life can survive. I saw maybe ONE bug while I was out there. Not even bugs can survive out there. It's like the surface of the moon.
There’s a lot of fairy shrimp that live there and wait for the right conditions to come out. I think there’s a camp dedicated to them.
It's not a wasteland. Plenty of insects live in the mud. Plus the pattern of the playa is special on its own. I honestly hate that burning man ruins the ground. Never the same after so many cars and people drive on it.
the full map image for 2025: https://webassets.burningman.org/largeimages/MOOP_Map_2025_0...
r/burningman moop map shame thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/1rtzumg/moop_ma...
Only 146 cigarette butts? That's amazingly much lower than I would have expected.
That's not just amazing, it's inconceivable! I can go on a hike on almost any trail in the SF Bay Area and pick up a half dozen in a couple hours.
Yeah, that was where I was coming from. I know very few people that stub out their ciggy and then put the butt in the pocket to dispose of later, but I do know a couple. You'll get responses arguing how the filters are degradable now so it's no big deal when in truth it would be much less of a big deal if people just didn't toss them willy nilly.
I think that’s how many were actually found over the limited testing areas. You would need to multiply by the testing area ratio
Austria is a small country but festival-wise it does host a couple superlatives -- Donauinselfest as the largest festival in the world, Novarock being the largest rock festival depending on how you count. And then theres so many great other festivals in austria and the surrounding countries, big and small.
People keep raving about burning man so I kind of want to go but I wonder whether I'd just be slightly disappointed. Or whether it's an american media influencing europeans thing where expectations become overinflated compared to what we have here.
Burning Man isn’t really a festival, and you’ll likely have a bad time if you approach it that way.
Many people seem to think it’s some hippy Woodstock or Coachella-esque event, but It’s more like an anarcho-punk temporary city, where your survival is in your own hands.
American media loves to bash it, and Instagram influencers love to flaunt that they went, but it’s most certainly not for everybody.
I don’t recommend going unless you do your research and really want to go.
I’d also encourage any first-timers to go solo their first year.
Like most (counter-) cultural phenomena, you should have seen it ten or twenty years ago when it was an authentic experience, before they sold out and became commercial. Joking of course, but it's true. It's a gentrified shadow of its former glory.
It's not a music festival like the ones you listed for starters, and while those are like an all-inclusive resort in that you just show up with money, Burning Man is more like camping in that you take everything there (and back).
Nova Rock is mostly camping on and inhaling dry dirt, camping in and being covered in mud, not going to the toilet for 2-3 days, and eating canned food. But I hear you.
As an Austrian living in the Bay Area and on my fourth burn and having been to Novarock and the Donauinselfest: it is very much not the same. BM is less a music festival than an immersive experience. For self-reliant folks, it is a delight. For others, hell. Try it out, see what it is for yourself.
When I was a kid my stepdad was big into amateur rocketry, so we'd go to a lot of launches, including at Black Rock. One of them (could've swore it was LDRS, but given the timeline it would've had to have been XPRS or maybe BALLS) was at the same time that Burning Man's MOOP crew was doing their thing, and that was my exposure to how much work goes into preserving the playa for future users/visitors (including us). It's impressive to watch, even from long distance via binoculars. Of course the rocket launches have similar requirements, but they involve a lot fewer than 70,000 people (but on the other hand, a much larger area of potential litter, given that rockets fly far and sometimes don't come down in one piece).
I live in Reno nowadays, and the locals either love or absolutely despise Burning Man, in the latter case for good reason: while Burning Man as an organization clearly cares a lot about “leave no trace” (as I've gotten to see firsthand), the Burners themselves have a tendency to leave pretty giant traces throughout Reno. A big one is bikes getting left behind (by people who don't want to deal with a bike caked in excruciating-to-fully-clean playa dust), and there's a whole supply chain of companies here that'll find those dumped bikes (or encourage Burners to bring them directly), clean 'em up, fix 'em up, and resell them (often back to Burners the following year; rinse and repeat). A lot of other, less-lucrative-to-refurbish-and-resell stuff unfortunately ends up clogging up every dumpster in town.
> its release inevitably fuels a bit of public finger-pointing
Is this what's helping with that?
> the most striking trend is that the community has steadily improved at Leave No Trace
Probably not only? But shame and avoidance of shame can be good motivation
infamous: adjective
Yeah, they knew what it meant.
If you think that’s dedication: I met Dominic (DA) who they interviewed in this article almost 20 years ago in the Spanish desert, where taught us Euroburners the art of MOOP cleanup. He’s been at it for a long time now.
i've always felt like going to Burning Man, something just attracts me to it. but i'm a eurodude, going to the US just for a festival sounds idiotic and i currently don't want to visit the US anyways.
are there similar events in europe? you sound like an experienced oldhead :)
Look up whatever regional burns[1] exist in your country or neighboring countries, and attend one of those. Ideally, join whatever online community exists around it first, and then reach out to some of the camps that interest you about joining and helping with whatever it is they like to do. I love Burning Man, but I can honestly say that I've had a lot more fun at my local regional burns than I've had at the big burn.
[1] https://burnerguides.com/europe-burner-events
oh wow, there's one in my country in a region which i've never visited but always wanted to go to, maybe that's a sign :D thanks!
https://burningman.org/global-events-groups/
his full nomenclature is "Dark Angel of the Playa"
I've never heard of this blog, but it's great.
Glad to hear of it. I wonder if one of the reasons for the improvement is the "corprotization" of the event. From what I hear, people are increasingly showing up with prefab shelters, or the VIP tents probably have entire cleanup crews.
Not like the old "a couple of stoners with a lean-to" kind of thing that probably featured heavily, in the old days.
Burning Man itself does not sell VIP tickets.
Since 2022, the organization has significantly pushed back against camps trying to package and sell "VIP packages" by restricting them from getting early setup passes, water deliveries, trailer & intermodal container delivery, etc. Without those support services, the model has become pretty unattractive.
Also, Burning Man is very intentional about its culture, with de-commodification as one of its main principles. The spotlight that got put on this issue a few years ago has really pushed these camps out, as of 2025.
As far as housing, most people sleep in tents, including specialized dome tents with reflective coating for the heat, but those are still essentially tents. Others sleep in RVs/trailers/vehicles. There isn't anyone building a condo tower in the desert.
Thanks. Good to know. Not something I was ever involved in, but knew a few people that went. They seemed to do it “the right way.”
I just know a number of tech bros, and it’s difficult to reconcile what I know of them, and “roughing it.” The stories I heard about VIP tents, aligned a lot more with my observations.
70,000 people during a week. It would be interesting to compare this with some other kind of event with the same duration and similar amount of people or perhaps make a
grams of garbage per humanhour unit
I went to an AMC Theatre last week and amazingly the room was absolutely trashed after the movie. For only maybe 25 people in the room.
Concert two weeks ago, same thing. The venue was full of garbaghe. It is really amazing how great most burtners are about those principles. For my camp at least we spend a solid 3 or 4 hours before leaving to rake our whole area and make sure we don't leave anything behind. Most people do the same.
Nice to see el pulpo magnifico's camp be spotless on the mini-map in the blog post.
> In 2025, lag bolts were by far the biggest problem. They anchor tents, art pieces, and other infrastructure into the ground, and can easily disappear beneath the dust.
I thought of a few potential solutions but then clicked through to the journal entry for last year and it turns out they're way ahead, the journal article is very interesting with some ideas: https://journal.burningman.org/2026/03/black-rock-city/leavi...
My camp, while doing our moop sweep in 2023, found lag bolts from prior years!
2023 was a weird one, because of the heavy rain and so many people not being used to it.
But it also seriously churned the Playa, revealing what was hidden for a whiiile
Marking whiskers, as mentioned, seem like a good solution if you can keep them attached. They are designed to be easily visible on the ground.
As long as they really stay attached and don't come apart, otherwise you're now creating plastic debris.
Reinforcement training. Camps that leave too much moop don't get invited back.
Sounds to me like there ought to be a MOOP cleanup deposit charged upfront, that only gets returned after this inspection. If the cleanup crew has to clean your site, you forfeit part or all of your deposit. Repeat offenders get charged increased deposits each time. Repeat inoffenders(?) get their deposit reduced.
This would lead to less compliance.
There are lots of people out there who would happily pay fines or not get deposits back if they didn't have to do the less glamorous parts of the event. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
If a camp does a really bad job at moop cleanup, Burning Man organization talks to leads to understand what happened. Frequently what they will take away is the camp's placement in the event, or sometimes even the ability to attend the event as that camp at all.
For reference: I am one of the leads for a fairly large and famous Burning Man camp. We camp on Esplanade most years. We do exactly what you proposed: We have deposits, and the more people put into the camp before, during, and after the event, determines if we offer them a refund and an invitation to camp with us next year. One of the factors is if you help us during setup and strike.
An invitation to camp with us guarantees them a ticket at one of the cheaper tiers. We have plenty of campers that come in, pay the dues, do nothing for the camp, are generally useless during the event, and bail out leaving a huge mess.
Conversely, we have a very small (10-20%) team of highly dedicated individuals who stay past the event and pick every piece of string, fuzz, fluff, lag bolt, rebar, and debris out of the dust and take it out. These people get nearly their entire camp dues back. If they attend next year, the social capital that they've built doing so compounds into them becoming increasingly popular and famous on Playa.
If there's one thing that Burning Man has taught me, it is that very few people are motivated by financial incentive. If you really want to motivate someone, figure out what they genuinely desire. It's rarely money.
Your claim is backed by psychology research. The most well known study is the "Israeli Nursery" one where a fine was introduced based on how late you were to pick up your kid.
Parents started treating "x shekel fine for y minutes late" as "buy an extra y minutes for only x shekels!".
I don't think it would work here.
Some camp leaders spend famously x m$+ just to bring their art to the playa. They wouldn't care about some fine.
Similarly the fine would make it impossible for others to stay after.
This is one event that somehow resisted economic behavior IMO
I wonder how well that replicates between different cultures with different attitudes about money.
Would it though? It seems like it could work, even if people opt to "not comply" aka pay the fine.
Charge $1,000 fee per acre (eyeballing it, that seems reasonable). There are people who will clean an acre to be spotless for $500: not bad for a day of honest, actually contributing to the environment, outdoor work!
If I'm missing something and it actually costs more than I know, raise it to $2,000. If heavy trash needs to be removed also, charge that too, by weight.
And if you don't pay, you're banned.
It's worth a try if you ask me.
It wouldn't really work because BM is a highly dynamic system with multiple variables that resists simple solutions.
So basically it would result in more moop, would make people angry, would make it harder for poor people to attend, and would risk the status of the burn. Current system is working, no need to introduce additional downsides.Depends on the outcome you want. I'd easily pay $$ to not have to do shit at BM but I'd not really like what that would do to the event.
Probably the closest example is if you ever read freakonomics introducing a late fee for parents picking up their child late from daycare increase late pickups.
https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/what-makes-people-do-what-t...
Like many other financially-backed initiatives, it's been investigated. Implementation is extremely hard, and would lead to an enormous shift in the very-established culture of volunteering.
> Would it though?
Rather than immediately shoot down your idea, let's talk about logistically implementing this:
1. Cleaning/non-compliance is already fined, if it's not cleaned properly or in a timely manner. This is serious waste like blackwater spills ($500+).
2. This would impact the the self-reliance, decommodification, and leave no trace principles. Burners don't need to be expected to clean up after themselves, they can pay someone else to do it. Yes, lots of wealthy burners would do this.
3. We'd need to set up a system of accountability. Sure, we can create a new department within the org, The Waste Accountability Department. Who do we charge for the bike graveyards (https://imgur.com/a/PolJDcI)? These are bikes that get abandoned in large clusters at the end of the event. Do they get assigned to whichever camp space they end up near? Do we start to add in plenty of surveillance (human or tech-based) to see which burner left their bike? Do we add in facial or other recognition to make sure we fine the right person? 3a. Currently bike graveyards are handled by nonprofits and volunteer orgs that take those bikes, fix them, and donate them to kids in Nevada. If we continue that program, do we pay them for taking the bikes? Do we need to appraise bikes based on their value, or do some other system of cost to repair vs value? Do we just sell blocks of "1000 lbs of bike"?
4. A core element of burning man, as mentioned in 2. is "Decommodification". This would commodify cleanup, and there are loads of first and second year burners who would absolutely pay someone $500/$1000 to clean their plot. Accountability here gets hard, as the people who are willing to pay are also the people who are unlikely to verify the quality of work. There are loads of people who would prey on burners in a rush to get out, pocket the $500, and walk off. Accountability and prosecution here, again, gets hard. The decommodification principle prevents this.
5. Who would issue the fine? Burning Man is a non-profit, the fine would require legal enforcement, collections or some other method to threaten people into paying. It would also require accounting for where that money goes and how it is used. Bureau of Land Management? They already do issue fines for blackwater spills and other serious environmental hazards (see 1).
6. Currently cleanup is handled by the Department of Public Works and Playa Resto. Both are volunteer-driven. Once we start paying people to clean up, why aren't we paying the people who deploy the porto-potties, make the streets, maintain the vehicles, and operate the core infrastructure? DPW spends 3-6 months before the event preparing the site for the event.
As I hope this demonstrates, it's not as simple as just having a group of people you can pay to clean up. There's a lot of logistical challenges, not to mention a pretty big shift in the culture.
I vote we stick with making people clean up after themselves, independent of their ability to pay.
This results in affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit, which creates so much trash it requires a lot more staff and time to clean up. Existing system works: you clean up your moop because you're a good community member, shamed on Reddit if you don't, and if you're a problem multiple times, out you go.
> ...affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit
This is why I suggested an increasing deposit for repeat offenders. Leave a huge pile of trash? Next year's deposit is $100k. Do it several years in a row? $10MM deposit.
This is how camps known as "Plug n Plays" work. Charge exorbitant camp dues, provide everything for your campers, and let them lead the most privileged lifestyle out there.
Many camps did this, and were actually turning a profit at Burning Man by taking advantage of the community of volunteers.
A few years ago the Burning Man organization put a stop to this by decreasing or eliminating camps considered to be Luxury or Plug N Play. Not just because they were antithetical to the event, but because they became famous for a slew of problems.
White Ocean is one of the more famous camps in this domain. A luxury camp that charged exorbitant fees for extremely wealthy individuals to come and party without any responsibility. They had loads of sexual assaults, dosing incidents, and campers generally being shitty people. The leads also refused to pay the hired help. This led to a now-infamous vandalism incident.
White Ocean basically has a permanent ban on attending now.
You cannot incentivize people out there with money. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
Seems likely this would result in a lot of disputes over windblown debris and neighbors dumping their stuff on your spot after you leave.
This is definitely a concern. We've pretty much always been green, but it's hard to police after you leave, and usually we're gone before Temple Burn. (One year two of our camp mates stayed for Temple Burn and they ended up having to pack out two extra bikes that got dumped, in addition to having to deal with multiple people trying to camp in our empty spot. Maybe those people would've been fine, but given that they didn't understand the open camping situation, I'm unsure they understood LNT either.)
If people pay for something, they feel entitled to take advantage of it. I've literally seen people fail to clean up after themselves and explain it as "that's what janitors are paid for".
Requiring a clean-up deposit up front will encourage people who were already inclined to clean up to do so, and encourage people disinclined to do so to leave trash behind.
The communal honor / shame culture that is in place is much more effective- people tend to care more about their reputation than they do money they've already spent.
This penalizes honest mistakes, or moop from prior years resurfacing, or wind blowing trash into camp, or any number of things that are outside of a given camp's control
The moop map, and community holding itself accountable, seems to be a decently functioning system.
Not to mention the administrative overhead, at the org level and at the camp level.
Frankly being a camp of 100+ people, not just taking dues but also handling this Deposit, and distributing the cost fairly?
Running a camp is enough of a pain in the ass without adding on this kind of thing.
Monetary incentive systems like what you're suggesting are just a way of enforcing culture. If culture spreads organically, why bother with the overhead of bringing money into the picture?
There's actually research that making people pay for noncompliance (either upfront or post-factum) leads to less compliance, because people that can afford it treat it as a service. And giving that these events are visited by literally billionaires and a lot of affluent SV tech folks, making it a pay service would bury the volunteers under the mountain of trash. If the rules are "you MUST clean up", you get some trash slipping by. But if the rules are changed to "you clean up, or you pay a small fee and don't worry about it" - the amount of things to clean up would raise exponentially, unless you make the deposit so high the vast majority of people can't afford it - which would kill the event completely.
If the issue are tent stakes/lag bolts which get buried under surface, clear solution would be metal detectors available to borrow/rent (or brought by each camp). Also probably could do a drone or ground robot with a metal detecting loop on the bottom.
Or just count them before and after. Know how many you're supposed to bring home.
The best solution I know of is to get three-link segments of chain and put one on each screw as it goes into the ground. That not only marks the spot, it also gives you a flexible attachment point which is useful in all sorts of situations. (Two links would be pinned in a stationary fashion.)
Biggest problem is it’s a pain in the ass to chop up all that chain, and nobody sells them in pre-cut lengths.
Closest I've been to losing vision in one eye was creating these 3x chain links for Burning Man.
Naive thought: I could use a large bolt cutter to cut chain links. Started trying to cut a link, felt it was sketchy, went and put on some safety glasses.
Restart cutting (had these bolt cutters with like 1m long arms), apply full force, jaws slip a bit on the chain, jaws bite hard. Chunks of steel fly into my chin and face, metal chunks embedded in chin, cracked safety glasses. Dodged a bullet.
Ended using a small welded up jig so I could stretch the chain and then use angle grinder to cut the chain links. Still sketchy, but no flying metal chunks.
Wish I had a plasma cutter.
The Org should make a deal with a manufacturer to produce some huge bulk quantity of these and just sell them pre-cut to camps.
I had a Home Depot employee cut them for me before purchase, they have a big thing that does it with no effort at all.
Could use one of those metal detecting car trailers used in meteorite search, that might map out things pretty quickly
I can't find it right now, but I think it was used in deserts in the US or Australia
The problem isn't that there aren't solutions, the problem is getting everyone on board
The leave-no-trace aspect of Burning Man is one of my favourite parts of the event. I've been 10 times in my life, I haven't been for a few years, the trek from the UK is a bit much sometimes! But each time I go to a UK festival I'm always reminded of how bad it would be if leave-no-trace was not a thing. It sickens me seeing the rubbish just strewn everywhere and, at the end of a festival, tents and general piles of waste left "for someone else to deal with".
Burning Man is a real breath of fresh air from that viewpoint and seeing everyone (pretty much) adhere to it is pretty special. Individually you take responsibility, not just for your own mess, but if you see MOOP, you clean it up regardless of who made it. It's not somebody else's problem, it's ours.
Seeing the camp MOOP report is always pleasing (obviously if you take the cleanup seriously, as most do).
Kind of crazy this is so successful, considering it's hosted in a country where it's the norm for (so many, but not all) people to leave their bags of popcorn and cups of soda at their seats when they leave the movie theatre or ball game, under the assumption, "someone else will take care of it."
But that's all based on societal norms. It's kind of understood (whether it's right or not) to leave popcorn etc under your seat at a theatre or a stadium. At Burning Man, it's obviously not acceptable.
My respect for Burning Man just went up a lot.
People do high-speed driving on the smooth lakebed. Encountering a lag bolt might be quite dangerous.
The real moop map is the absolute mountain of unsorted garbage that gets dumped at the first rest stop / dumpster / trash can.
Yeah cool you did not leave your plastic trinkets in the desert, but you did leave all of it next to the trash can on your first gas break
Hearing all the issues with lug bolts in the ground I'm curious whether metal detectors were used during cleanup.
I'm not going to be Gell-Mann Amnesiated. At least not without calling it out.
> Marblelous music. Wintergatan is a quirky instrument that relies heavily on marbles to make music. It's beautiful to watch, and doesn't sound anything like you expect.
No. Wintergatan is the artist name of the guy who made and played the instrument.
> The infinite buffalo sentence. It's a grammatically correct sentence, using just the word buffalo. The video explanation benefits from some useful visuals, but you'll still probably hate this. Or absolutely love it. There's definitely no middle ground here.
The visual below this point is completely useless and does not explain how to make an infinite sentence.
the moop map used to be a analog creation with pics of it uploaded every day of the resto(ration) process. some years ago they switched to digital tools and now they don't release it for several months after the event. huh.
The analog version still exists, and gets hand updated every day (though we don’t upload photos). You can visit it the following year at the appropriately named camp, Moop Map.
I want to know more about this analog upload! :-)
what sort of tool they use?
An event built on radical self-reliance now needs a public shame map to keep people honest. Every community that scales past the point where trust works eventually reinvents compliance.
Sort of. The "compliance" here is just transmitting pressure applied by the regular, boring, government. But certainly the cleanup would not happen without serious pressure from somewhere.
The process of setting up a camp for the first few times and attempting new art installations is positively gargantuan. There are a lot of considerations happening and MOOP is just one of them. Unless you expect people to get camps and installations right the first time, you need this.
I wish I had gone before the billionaires discovered it
The small regionals don't attract billionaires, some even unaffiliated from the BMorg over certain billionaires being involved with it.
Thank you for not "mooping" around.
Is "plant matter" weed?
Mostly no. Dead leaves that were just lying on a trailer without getting cleaned in advance and bits of decorative plants that broke off are probably the worst offenders.
Worth noting: Plants, living or dead, are banned from Burning Man because they turn into moop really easily, but some always end up there anyway
You think they’re leaving any of that behind?
If it was that'd be an absurd amount of weed being left behind to make a mark on the map.
This is one principle and shared ethos done really well
Burning Man would get a lot less criticism if they dropped their 22 year old principles out of its 40 year run
Being part of a camp is the least inclusive social chore I’ve seen of any similar event, it is optional while making the “radically inclusive” trek a lot easier. Its a fairly high bar if you don't know the people
“Radical Self Reliance” can be interpreted in completely opposite ways when convenient. The person mooching off of everyone may call that self reliance to themselves, not realizing they are just attractive, while the person “gifting” resources to be around the attractive person can withhold it under the edict of expecting radical self reliance. Its a desert, are people really more or less prepared because that principle is taking up space on a list of commandments?
Larry Harvey didn’t expect people to make these things their whole identity. He was just having fun pontificating some guidelines in 2004.
The guidelines-now-principles are also outdated. Many “Regional burns” that have been inspired by Burning Man have added additional principles more relevant to the times, such as ones focusing on consent and shared consent frameworks.
Time for a new arc
That MOOP map is overlaid on top of the actual Burning Man POOP map: all those attendees who stream to the desert from their urbanized homes? they are People Out Of Place, and eradicating them and all the carbon footprints they leave would completely eliminate the MOOP problem while also generating positive externalities.
Is there anything more "Burning Man" than taking something we've been doing for decades (A FOD walk), giving it a worse name, and bragging about it on some random blog?
I mean, hats off, the author really did nail it. This is as honest as I've ever seen BM get, and the juxtaposition of the unintentionally contrasted with the title makes it even better.
Imagine if environmental regulation, pollution, etc looked like this.
This is an environmental regulatory requirement by the Federal Bureau of Land Management.
They aren't referring to the regulatory requirement, but the response, I think?
Like if people can put in this much time and effort in a remote desert environment to meet regulatory requirements, and document their efforts so thoroughly, why can't corpos?
for the curios or those that skipped over it:
"Black Rock City is only allowed to return to the playa each year if it passes a strict post-event inspection from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM): No more than one square foot of debris can remain per acre (0.23 m²/ha)."
K, but what’s a square foot in metric? And percent would be better here. Or per Mille to be annoying.
Read it again, it says right there in square metres.
Isn’t it strange to mesure this in surface rather than volume?
The authorities are saying they don't want to see any trash at all, regardless of volume. Imagine 100 sheets of paper vs 100 AA batteries. The batteries have much more volume, but the sheets of paper cover a much larger area so there's much more visible trash.
Not much difference between a 12" and a 18" lag bolt for the purpose of "how much trash is visible and impacts terrain".
Surface feels a bit fairer in that sense. Or at least, easier to measure.
I fairly obviously meant outside of this specific instance, if pollution etc were policed and responded to in such a manner.
This is driven in part by regulatory pressure.
Burning Man is just polyamarous glamping for the Coachella set...
Burning man is the biggest recurring environmental disaster purportated by humans in the name of entertainment. A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given, in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
That seems pretty harsh. Have you been? If you go out after the rain has washed the playa flat again to hide the bike tracks through the soft powder, it looks like there has never been an event. As per the article, they do a fantastic job cleaning, unlike any event I've ever been too. Hardly "zero fks given", in fact quite a few were given and that's why we get to keep doing it.
> in the name of entertainment.
Does the purpose change how the act should be interpreted?
> A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given
Burners give so many fucks that we willingly do a thing historically reserved for punishment in the military (de-mooping)
> in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
Environmental sustainability is an actual goal not just greenwashing. I encourage you too look into Playa Resto https://journal.burningman.org/2022/10/black-rock-city/leavi... and note that the term volunteer is used meaning these people don't get paid.
Now this is some next-level “I didn’t read the article, have no context, and understand little to nothing about the subject matter” type of comment. I’m actually impressed.
Read the posted article before commenting.
It's literally written to refute your point.
this is so far from the truth its baffling.
in a year where the world cup is taking place, counter-examples are readily available in numbers. I doubt FIFA will be releasing environmental impact datasets...