At the moment, Burning Man is a pyramid organization. The pyramid has ruled humanity for thousands of years. I’m not talking about 2.3 million 2-ton limestone blocks in Eqypt – I’m talking about an organizational structure that is taught at every business school. You have the CEO on the top, you have subordinates, then you have a layer of worker drones at the bottom. Almost all of Western society is organized in this fashion.
Burning Man’s org chart is no different. We have the “All-Seeing Eye” of Horus/Hours/Whores at the top, and everyone scrambling to be included in the bottom. This is very much the structure of Burning Man today. The community expresses our opinions, they listen, then they decree. Then we go 
back to our serfdom, and they run their party (sorry, “event“) however they damn well please. Except for one key difference: in commercial, military, and government pyramids, all the workers get paid by the Eye at the top. In Burning Man, only a few get paid, many are volunteers, and money is not supposed to exist; most participants in the pyramid structure are obedient to their masters, they pay to go and pay to contribute art, and get no reward other than being there. Burners get no say in any of the decisions, and no say in the context being created for them to self-organize in.
Burning Man is an amazing social experiment. But the nature of an experiment, is you need to try different things. Not just keep it the same. Burning Man should evolve. The 10 principles are not the ideal guide. We need a streamlined Ritalin Kid version for the 30,000+ n00bz coming this year, the Millenials and others to come, who’ve never known a time when they weren’t on an iDevice.
Bureaucracies stagnate. We live in that system in the Default World. Burning Man is our great shining hope for freedom, for humanity to fuse with technology and joy and love and spirit and Nature, and evolve. Consciously, and harmoniously.
“Our centralized and bureaucratic system of authority is crushing our spirit”…so what is the answer? Participatory democracy, also known by the more punchy phrase Direct Democracy. This is a great introduction to the idea, you can fast forward to 7:55 he wraps it up pretty well in the conclusion:
I was first put onto the Direct Democracy movement by black belt trends forecaster Gerald Celente, a frequent contributor to Max Keiser and Alex Jones.
From Celente’s directdemocracynow.org
What Is Direct Democracy?
Unlike the current “Representative Democracy” where elected representatives make decisions regardless of the wishes of their constituencies, inDirect Democracy individuals vote on critical issues and their decisions are carried out by their elected representatives… Whether they like it or not
…As Victor Hugo put it, ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come’
I believe that time is now. And if you believe it, we can make Direct Democracy happen. We are looking for allies; volunteers with expertise in diverse fields. Direct Democracy can happen if we make it happen
As Celente says, if we can bank online, we can vote online.
Here’s Gerald responding to his critics:
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the board of directors is part of the All Seeing Eye, just as with any Fortune 500 corporation. Direct democracy would give the community a voice on issues that matter, it would not interfere with BMorgs ability to deal with the Feds and locals.
Amazing that you think the BMorg are smarter than the Burners. Look what Burners have achieved.
This post is not entirely accurate. BMan has a Board of Directors. So no, there is not a single all-seeing eye at the top of a pyramid.
I’m not sure how direct democracy comes into play since it is a mostly an anarchic event. I feel quite fortunate there is a competant team dealing with federal permitting and logistics instead of a fuckwad theorist who does little more than insult their audience by suggesting millennials can’t grasp or learn the guding principles because they’ve grown up in an era of digital conveniences.
Maybe we should do away with the event guidebook too? It is really long and complex.
Maybe ditching words on the map and completely switching to pictographs?
It sounds just like Congress and every marketing firm: presuming people are stupid and incapable and dumbing down the message. Strange that you’d want stupid people entirely in charge of an event of this scale. Notice the dissonance there?