Burnt Man

One of the cultural origins of Second Life I find particularly repugnant is Burning Man. This, of course, was a formative experience for Philip Rosedale. Why do I find it repugnant, when I am a free thinker, at least appreciative of hippies and alternative movements, and like camping outdoors and art? Because...For the life of me, I cannot see anything grand about going out into the heat on the playa and burning a tall wooden structure. It seems atavistic, destructive, and stupid. I read the Carlos Castaneda books ("The Teachings of Don Juan") when I was a teenager, I didn't find them very attractive then, and I still don't. Somehow, the notion of going out in the desert and chewing peyote and throwing up and seeing visions didn't hugely attract me in the end, although it was fascinating for a time, because there was a kind of nagging voice: "And then what? Then what do you do? And if it all has to come from following some weird, oppressive teacher and taking some toxic drugs, what do you have for yourself afterwards?" And, like other countercultural heroes of the time, Carlos seemed to end badly, with the three cultic-like followers, the women surrounding him, turning up dead or disappeared. It always had a heavily creepy feel to me.

In real life, the Burning Man people have turned into something of a counter-culture industry, since it has grown to the size of 50,000, a small village. Since they ardently hate capitalism, they haven't gone the merchandising route that served the Grateful Dead t-shirt industry and other hippie ventures so well -- they just sell coffee and ice cubes, apparently to generate the proceeds to pay this little town near the BM site whose services are obviously terribly overwhelmed when these Woodstock-type freaks descend. Now, they have to print bunches of rules, and browbeat people not to shit on the playa or hold too large dinner parties, because police do come and shut down unsanitary kitchens, and of course make drug arrests. The organizers "do not condone drugs" but one notes that...they do not condemn them, either.

People are supposed to make "art". I dunno, somehow, culminating in destroying a big wooden tower man doesn't seem like "art" to me. But I suppose people paint their bodies and dance around and get their freak on. They are practicing the "gift economy". I'll bet some are secretly taking that $5 bus into town to get cigs lol.

Anyway, whatever the intensity of the RL BM, which does indeed seem to be cult-like in its devotion, the SL version of course is very tame. In true SL fashion, it is PG, meaning no nipples can be shown, but of course, that doesn't stop residents, or Lindens from tolerating, a big BDSM display of restrained and chained people, which of course is, uh, PG lol.

And all the predictable Geek Religion, Techlib, California Ideology chimes are rung. We are to hate suburbia. We are to embrace pagan rural techno...ism. LOL. For example, the guy who made famous the Sizzle and Fizzle critiques of BM has denounced someone who put one of those big megaprim flat green prim lawns with deck chairs on the playa as essentially being the Babbitt of Burning Man lol, disgusting with his horrid suburban sensibilities (the horror!) and the good guys are people with a totally derivative cliche hobo/hillbilly house with a broke-down porch, tin cans, rabbits for sale, blah blah. I wish I had a dollar for every one of *those* uniform, rigidly conformist builds in SL. Sigh.

You know, even though the cards are stacked, and I know what it will consist of, I still fly to something like this, thinking, well, maybe there will be something.

Dizzy Banjo sent me his landmark, and he has a very magical and whispy installation where you can fly around in a kind of pod, see these amazing..fractal thingies...and listen to weird music. It really is full out-there use of SL. It's an A-plus show, but my problem is rides in general in SL. Dizzy does an excellent job of hiding the sort of typical SL scene to put you in an encased experience, but the problem with rides is always the same: you yourself are not riding, you are watching your avatar ride, and it's at that precise moment that you go from being immersed and engaged and exploring to realize...oh, that's my avatar doing something not me, because I do not feel like I'm riding anywhere. These guide-rail trains actually do a better job by hugging the ground of giving you that "ride" sense, but it is never perfect in SL.

There is a very big gap between something like Dizzy's work, and much of the other stuff, which seems to be of the school, "Look! I can put coloured prims in the air! AND I can spin them! AND I can be really hip and cutting edge by putting out an American flag with...blood on it or something and talking about pigs and greed! This is so original! Look at me!"

Thus, the Sizzle guy really loses me with that sort of head-patting of totally unoriginal insipid "american dream" stuff. We are to be incited to the favourite geek mode of gleeful malice by seeing "suburbia" and "Bob" and even a picture of "Bob's family". Sorry, but.../fail. I don't hate Bob and I don't hate Suburbia. Do these people have kids?

There were the predictable ruin-like structures, and bicycles lying everywhere -- "art" these days or "SLART" as we are NOT supposed to call it as that term is trademarked -- usually consists of distressed-urban end-of-the-world landscapes with burning trash and blaring music.

I went to where the green dots are, and I caught up with Poid Maholovich standing there with a header "Burning Core" (even BM has a core! Especially BM!) and Everett Linden. A FIC moment! Poid of course is 2.5 FIC and as it happens, a tenant of mine in Free Tibet!

And she's an authentic Burner, as the BMers call themselves, BM sounding too much like the thing you aren't supposed to be doing out on the playa...

I jested her a bit and tried to get her to explain why it was "art" to just haul a lot of junk to the desert and burn it. Isn't it more like...a bad sanitation policy, and not art?

Poid told me some stuff about rising from the ashes or renewing one's self...and stuff.

Hokay. She also explained, when I razzed the idea of just going to the desert once a year like weekend hippies, that some people do live their all year round. So I am educated on that point. I wonder if they ever like...sneak in McDonald's and actually violate protocol and buy something from each other instead of expecting a gift. "Hey, Joe, I'm getting bored as shit out here on the playa, can I just give you like $5 to...like just go *away* dude? Or at least...go buy me a slurpee at the 7/11 back in town 70 miles away, could you? I mean, I'm parched out here."

And now comes some pictures, see there in my "Photo Albums," taken with a bad system, and also without crediting who the people are, which is truly an SL sin but...there is horrible labelling at BM. There are these kiosks on each lot that you would think had the person's name and title of their build. But, when you click on them, instead of information, they give you an error message about not being in the group. Very few artists thought to supply a separate landmark giver than this thing, which may have only been some sort of rental manager, I couldn't tell, since surely they wouldn't make you join the group to see something about who the artists were. So it was very frustrating. You had to click on the object and go in edit, which became hugely laggy. I lagged out and overshot the sim into some nowhere's land and lost my place. I then couldn't find this build with the sort of "whirling dervishes" who appeared magically and suddenly.

Coming across them swinging their fire around and dancing in the desert was the sort of treat you'd look for at a thing like this, but it seemed impromptu. Like a lot of SL stuff, it was hard to find the people. There didn't seem to be any. Or there were, but they were AFK. Then just when I thought, "Ah, people!" it's...a small Twitter world, and it's Harper Beresford in a different fugly avatar with prim hair...issues....

You know, I want to *like* Second Life. And I do, truly...

Comments

[Erbo Evans]

A coworker of mine was once interviewed by CNN at Burning Man, and she was asked, "Why is it important to burn a man?" Her response was, "It's NOT important, it's FUN!" Make of that what you will.

[Carl Metropolitan]

I read Carlos Castaneda as a teenager, too. I didn't realize until later that they weren't supposed to be considered fantasy novels...

[Desmond Shang]

I've never been to Burning Man in 'real life', ever. However I have spent plenty of time out in just about every desert in the southwest United States, growing up. The desert is a mythic place, in a way; it's a shame not many can experience it the way locals can.

Burning Man I have no objection to; it is, perhaps, more safe and sanitised than most of the experiences young people have out there.

Back in the day, the desert was a place to take fireworks, alcohol, goof around with your crazy buddies and their questionably dangerous firearms. Shoot at cans and stuff, smoke cigars, explore, or burn your decrepit volkswagen to the ground, just because it was worthless and you could. If you were truly crazy you brought your girlfriend. Of course, that kind of miscreant behaviour won't fly any more - certainly not in this day and age. Once upon a time, possessing huge fireworks or firearms just meant you were a crazy, typical kid. Now it means you are a terrorist.

When I think back upon adolescence, college, growing up... and the things we did out in the desert, burning man is ridiculously tame - a family event, and truly about art and goofing off more than anything else. It's an outlet, a distraction from the 70 hour a week cubicles to which its population must surely return.

We need these other places. It's a deep part of human culture. Prok, I know you see the evils of tribalism, of returning to less civilised habits. But there is value there too. We have lost so much, all sitting in our air conditioned homes. Human touch. Spirituality. A sense of meaning beyond feeding ourselves.

Every culture needs its vision quest, its pilgrimages, its hajj - it's a fundamental need of mankind. This is Silicon Valley's - and while you may not partake, see it for what it is. Essential. Just different. Just a big party? Sure, for most, probably. But doubtless there are also people there having the experience of a lifetime, just not in ways obvious.

* * * * *

There were maybe 15 or 20 of us, I can't remember - I was in graduate school but not everyone else was. We had driven out to some lava caves. I'll not state the exact location for safety purposes but it's about 1/2 way between Barstow and Needles and remarkably close to I-40.

It was the usual sort of road trip - just everybody had some kind of contraband. Well, believe it or not about half of us didn't do drugs of any kind (me included) but there were plenty of other distractions. It was the 1980's, but the '70's hadn't quite lost their hold yet.

So it went like this. Those in the know would joke about the caves we were exploring - nasty, jagged lava caves that seemed ridiculously too huge to be relatively unknown - but they are. Joke was that somewhere, the lava caves stopped being horizontal and took a dive straight down toward the core, from whence the magma came in the first place. Everyone laughs at this, especially the 'smart guys' but everyone sort of gets a sense that it is logical, too. True or false. Has to be false, but... it's one or the other. They do or they don't.

So everyone proceeds, and after a while, the tunnel gets smaller and tighter, narrow - cavernous halls separated by crawl tubes. The leaders toss pebbles into each small tunnel before proceeding to the next - it's really hard to get both the flashlight and your head through to see what's possible. People also yell into them to get an idea of the space - then everyone moves on. The talk moves on to bats, dangerous gases, what-have-you. The few bats we see are small, cute almost, sleeping high above. No mountain lion would ever be dumb enough to come down this far, everyone is sure. We shut off the flashlights and it is utterly pitch black. We'd be dead if they failed, no question.

Eventually, we get to a tight crawlspace, and the people up front say: wow, there's a ridiculously huge space ahead. And nobody can see the bottom. Pebbles are thrown - no sound. Someone hollers in there - and it echoes forever. It's tight where we are - only a few people up front can really see. "I see a ledge! It's crazy deep!" Everyone is silent. The guys up front say: "Let's go!"

There is only one way to do this: feet first, into pitch black. Climbing down, I can feel the vastness of the space - I can't see the other side, and I sure can't see the ledge of the abyss I'm aiming for. "Don't slip! You got it!"

So as each person comes down, convinced their white knuckle grip is the only thing between life and death - the people down below give them a shove. It's a ridiculously short fall - a foot or two maybe, after being shoved - but in that instant, you *know* you are going to die. Most people scream or yell (I sure did). Then you land on your arse, a light flicks on, a hand is put over your mouth and a finger is held up: "Shhhhhh!" You are handed a beer, surprisingly still cold.

You've been initiated. And as you recover from the stun of it - you watch your friends as in turn, they face death. It's deeply, deeply revealing. Amazingly, nobody gets it from the cut-short screams and following silence. Confusion mixed with fear is an incredible thing.

Many are quite predictable, but some surprisingly meek girlfriends turn out to be tougher than nails; the 'tough guys' are often not.

As it turns out, the abyss wasn't an abyss - a vast space, yes - but horizontal. There's much to talk about, as the beer and the junk food comes out - just a single flashlight illuminating faces. Someone checks a watch and realises that it's now dark, topside. No matter - there is no sense of change in the underworld.

Talk rambles from juvenile joking, to accusatory, to spiritual... then grows more serious. Everyone realises they will face death again - for real, someday. Someone remembers a loved one who faced illness and died... then another... then the stories start to flow. The sweaty dusty faces seem so alive, so fleeting, compared to the ancient cave rock and the incredible forces that shaped it.

You can't come away from either experience - the memory of facing death, or the common bond of humanity that is realised thereafter - unchanged. Nobody leaves that cave without learning something, no matter how they try to dismiss it.

Probably you could get arrested for scaring someone unnecessarily like that, these days. However, it was a valuable moment that I'm personally glad I went through. Done wrong, it could be horrific and scarring - I can see why the ancients left such things to the experienced. But these sorts of experiences - these rites of passage are pretty much gone from western culture today, and with it, the tempering knowledge it brings.

* * * * *

Compared to that, Burning Man doesn't go nearly far enough.

[Kryss Wanweird]

"Why do I find it repugnant, when I am a free thinker, at least appreciative of hippies and alternative movements, and like camping outdoors and art?"

Hi Prokofy,

Does your statement mean you abandoned myths altogether or, do you have your very own definition of the term "free thinker" as some sort of hippie related stuff?

[Prokofy Neva]

Free thinkers are not necessarily hippies; in a world dominated by hippies, they aren't hippies. What's funny about the myths that geeks adapt, as I explain in my essay "The Geek Religion," is that they imagine that their more pagan, or derivative, or tribalist myths are "better" (Extropianism, The Singularity, various mish-mashes of pagan and wiccan, Buddhism lite, karma, etc.) than traditional "religions of the book". Yet the replicate some of the very things they said we had to flee "religions of the book" for -- oppression, male dominance, cruelty, etc.

One of the greatest tekkie myths is "Darwinism" taken to extremes not only in science, but in every field of human affairs, so it is "Darwinism" or "Nature's Way" for people to lose their homes, they are weak, there is something wrong with them.

[Prokofy Neva]

I've learned some more stuff:

1) These folks depicted here are called Lamplighters, and represent a RL Burning Man tradition.

2) Poid instructs me that in fact the build is not all PG, but has M, so that's how they could have the BDSM crap. Here's the thread from Dusty Linden:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=277884

Here's what he says:

"Many of planet Earth's cultures find nudity and public references to sexuality to be highly offensive and downright irritating"

Isn't that so very SL and so very LL?

Let me reword that for you, Dusty:

"A tiny minority of the planet's cultures that range from either very primitive in poor countries to very extremist in rich countries find nudity acceptable, and because we're sectarians, we will encourage this."

You know, I wonder if we need to go in there tonight with a fire brigade, water buckets, and t-shirts that say 'STOP THE SLAUGHTER. STOP THE MADNESS. PUT OUT THE FIRE. DON'T BURN THE MAN!"

It's interesting how the Burning Man thing isn't really so "Green" at the end of the day, because true Greens wouldn't burn stuff needlessly and heedlessly like that.

[Gareth Nelson]

"It's interesting how the Burning Man thing isn't really so "Green" at the end of the day, because true Greens wouldn't burn stuff needlessly and heedlessly like that."

Another rare comment that we agree on.