“A camel is a horse designed by a committee” – Sir Alec Issigonis.
Sadly, I’m not making the title of this post up.
Many Burners were negatively impacted by last year’s ticket fiasco. How seriously does the BMOrg take it? Seriously 
enough to have a meeting about it, and invite “game theorists, theme camp leaders, artists, volunteers, families, senior staff, and ticket industry experts“
Oh goodie. No-one from the tech industry then. Well, I guess it’s hard to find them in San Francisco. [/sarcasm]
And what did this amazing meeting of the minds achieve? An innovative solution to the ticket crisis perhaps? Or, even, “ask the community“? They don’t even have to ask, the community is already telling them loud and clear and have been for some time. Link tickets to ID’s. But, I’m getting ahead of myself…we’ll have a poll at the end. In the meantime, back to the BMOrg:
By the time we were done, our brains were literally gone, eaten from our heads by zombies. In case you didn’t realize it, Burning Man ticketing is HARD.
Now that Burning Man tickets can be expected to sell out each year, we need new, creative solutions to address the challenges of ticketing. Burners are smart people, by and large, so the organization figures we’re the right people to ask.
artwork by Ben Jennings
That’s who BMOrg figures they should ask. This guy’s not speaking metaphorically, he makes it quite clear to us that he is speaking literally. Zombies actually ate the brains so much that he was out of his head. That’s how hard Burning Man ticketing is to these people. They don’t actually ask Burners, they ask the random mismatched cross-sectional anonymous motley crew of people who they invited to this Bilderberg-like closed door meeting where they were discussing – nay, deciding on – one of the most important issues to our community and its future.
Before anyone else hooks their brain up to this zombie matrix of mind-numbing groupthink and indecision, let’s see if we can wake a few people up from their trance.
#1. Burning Man was not even sold out this year. There were literally thousands of tickets floating around at the end. Attendance was DOWN on last year, even though the Bureau of Land Management kindly agreed to a special permit with 10,000 more tickets, despite their slap on the wrist for Burning Man exceeding their population cap (and crowing about it on Wikipedia and their web site). The attendance drop can be attributed to all the BMOrg’s efforts to squeeze old timers out in their so-called “random lottery” and attract newbies going to waste, when the n00bz left early unable to handle the (really not unusual) amount of dust.
#2. Burning Man is not that big of an event. Music events in Australia much larger than this sell out in minutes. I mean, an artist like Kylie Minogue pulls WAY bigger crowds than Burning Man. And everyone survives. The events where there have been scalper problems, link ID to tickets. This is true for Glastonbury, the Oscars, and many festivals all over the world. Coachella and EDC Vegas are more than 5 times the size of Burning Man. What is so special about Burning Man, that only Burning Man has these problems? I can’t see anything in the party, the only thing I can point to is the BMOrg, and this “let’s ask game theorists and volunteers and artists and families” decision making process. Why do they need game theorists? Is this a game to them? Is someone trying to game the system, or game the Burners? And no offense to artists, but most of them struggle to sell their own works, what do they know about selling 60,000 tickets over the Internet? Decisions require dictatorship, and leadership – radical inclusion will get you everyone’s opinions, but that only makes decisions harder. If you can’t make a decision, then ask the community, get them to vote, let them decide for you.
#3. If Gifting is an issue, then allow tickets to be gifted, allow names to be changed, but charge a $100 donation to BRAF or the Burning Man Project. I can’t see that this would impede gifting, but it would certainly deter scalpers.
#4. The old system used to work fine. Why fix what ain’t broke? Any time you see change apparently just for the sake of change, you should wonder if there is a hidden agenda. So what if the event sold out by July? The only reason to change appears to be lining the pockets of whoever got the early tickets. Did insiders get hundreds of free tickets, and sell them on the secondary market for thousands of dollars each? What other motivation is there for this weird special system they want?
#5. Forget low income tickets and tiered pricing. People with no money can easily find work as volunteers on art projects, in exchange for tickets, room and board, and other forms of compensation. Just charge one price for everybody. Maybe even a VIP price if you want to camp in certain areas, or have a say in your camp placement.
Do you really think the future of Burning Man should lie in the hands of people who “literally had their brains eaten by zombies”, trying to figure out an issue as simple as ticketing? I mean, I know some real ticketing experts, all in tech in San Francisco, I wonder who BMOrg’s ones were. The three guys I’m thinking of would not be even slightly affected like that from a discussion about “how do we sell tickets at Burning Man“? Sorry but that is a trivial problem for ticketing experts. I don’t even need to consult them, to me it’s simple, do it the same way Coachella does it. That’s the biggest event, so if they can figure it out, we can too. But, let’s ask the community, what do you think Burners?
