A most amusing video from Playa Slumlord, based on a true story from this years’ Burn. You can tell from the guy’s art car that he’s really slumming it! This does show some of the behind the scenes logistical nightmares involved in running big camps and vehicles.
One wonders who “Hauptmann Z” is…I did have some generator problems towards the end of the week, my sister flew in to be a sparkle pony Burgin and was struggling with the heat, and the crew from Shift camp did help me out with my generator (thanks Sick Dog and Spider, and also FJ at Ideate and Sonus) There was nothing to do with Gerlach though, so perhaps I’m off the hook. Would the real Hauptmann Z please stand up!
Remember Second Life? The virtual reality “game without a purpose” multiverse swept through the tech world like the latest Pokemon craze, about 10 years ago. The makers, Linden Lab, minted their own currency and people became overnight millionaires building cool virtual spaces, then renting out other virtual spaces to people with less cyber presence. Divorces happened because of affairs taking place solely in the online world. Gang-like “Assaults” happened, where eccentric real estate moguls were pummeled with flying penises. Beats drones falling from the sky!
Well, believe it or not, Second Life is still going after 14 years – 36 million strong. They may have lost some more casual users to World of Warcraft and other MMORG’s, but for the million that are still logging in every month, advances in technology are making the Second Life metaverse more fun to explore than ever. And it’s only going to get better – I’ve heard rumors that Playstation 4 on the new 4K TVs looks amazing (that’s right folks, Burners.Me hears rumors and sometimes even shares them with you if they’re from trusted sources; we make sure we tell you that they’re rumors if we can’t verify them with at least one other source). A huge convergence is going on today between open source hardware, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, sensor networks, wearable technologies, social media, the maker world, and high-definition immersive virtual environments. And San Francisco, and Burning Man, are smack bang in the middle of it. Forget smart phones, WE are going to be the smart phones – as Reallocate founder, Burner Scopecreep Doc North explains in this talk at Le Web. The line between cyberspace and Meatspace will inevitably become blurrier – if it ever existed in the first place.
At any given time these days, there are around 50,000 people in Second Life processing 1.2 million virtual transactions per day. More than $3.2 billion dollars of virtual goods have been sold to date. And Burning Man has a regional there: Burn2. The founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, is a Burner – in fact he credits Burning Man for giving him the idea. A colorful, weird and wacky world of creative freaks where people are free to express themselves as whoever they want to be, and regular commerce doesn’t fly? Yeah, I can see some similarities.
Burning Man would do well to learn a lesson from Second Life – enabling their customers to re-monetize their spaces and make personal profit from all the hours they spend developing art to share with the other citizens of Second Life, is a “win-win-win” strategy instead of an “only we win” strategy – or, as Larry Ellison likes to say, “it’s not sufficient that I succeed, everyone else must fail“, a strategy he adopted from Genghis Khan. Genghis didn’t want the villages he absorbed into his empire to have crops, prosperity of their own. He burned the villages, burned the crops, took their women. Unless you were close to Genghis, you got nothing. Feudalism was a better life for the indentured serfs, than being on Genghis territory but not being a total slave to Genghis. Victory for him meant crushing the spirit and destroying the independence of the vanquished. And he was victorious with this strategy. Most tyrants are – but such empires don’t stand the test of time. It’s good to be the king! The king is dead – long live the king!
I’m not saying that Burning Man can’t win with their “only we win” Genghis-style strategy – clearly, they are winning from it, and have been for some time. The party keeps growing, we keep spending the hundreds of millions to put it on for them, they get paid royalties from the saturation coverage in the mainstream media. But just because a strategy works, doesn’t mean it’s the best, and must be pursued whatever the cost. There are values and principles underlying Black Rock City, that are sacred to the people who populate it and have built it, culturally as well as physically. Not all of them are listed in the “10 Principles”, guidelines and reflections on culture that Larry Harvey first shared almost 20 years into Burning Man, in 2004. He says he never meant for them to be a dicktate – which would make him, or whoever is at the head of the pyramid, the dicktator. Burn2 seems to me much more about getting back to the original spirit of Burning Man, culture jamming. Jazz meets urban planning. Burner City was about anyone can do anything, everyone can participate, no strangers, no spectators. Light touch on the earth. People put hundreds or thousands of hours and dollars into art, just to share with us for free. Not merely to show us – to let us interact with it, ride on it, participate in it, co-create with it. In Burn2, it doesn’t cost them tens of thousands to get the art there. The art can be reused and installed elsewhere. Anyone is welcome, all ages, from anywhere in the world. Except…and this is important: no dicks!
Win-win-win created millions of customers for Linden Lab and hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of dollars for the founders, just like it has done for other marketplace enablers such as eBay, the App Store, AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, Amazon…I could go on, since this is now a proven strategy in tech (and business). Just like Genghis Khan’s strategy was great thousands of years ago, the sharing economy and the freemium model are the “killer app” strategies for 2013 and beyond.
A lot of development has gone on in the virtual Burning Man world in the last ten years since Burn 2 began. It’s like the processing power required for the CGI in Lord of the Rings when they first started to make the trilogy, compared to the technology used in the Hobbit now. Faster, cheaper, better. The movie’s the same, the story’s the same, but the culture richness is enhanced by technology. In the case of Second Life, we can all contribute images and elements. The culture is enriched by the contributions of the entire community in co-creating the space. Back in the day, Burn 2 (aka Burning Man 2.0) was known as Burning Life. Although they have imposed some theoretical constraints based on physics to simulate the real world experience of the desert, development of this city is unrestricted from rules of BMOrg…other than, of course, even in this cyber world they can’t post photos of the party or use the words Burning Man, if there’s any dollars involved be it Linden or Greenback$, the BMOrg intellectual property ca$h machine needs their $lice. You can see how Linden has grown in this time, compared to Burning Man. Although Burning Man’s growth is impressive, and they’re a household name in some circles, they have 450,000 Facebook likes and a smaller number of people who have attended…a lot less than 36 million. Openness works. Sharing works. Valuing the contributions of your user base works.
You might recognize some of the artworks in the Second Life world from Burn 1 – the new Defaultia.
photo by Yordie Sands, Creative Commons license
Burn 2 takes place for 8 days, just like Burning Man. It starts this weekend, October 19, and the Man burns on Saturday October 26. You can get a Second Life viewer here and avatar here, you don’t have to spend $400 to attend and the only sniffer dog is called N.S.A. (you can exchange your Linden Dollars for Bitcoins, crypto-freaks).
Last year’s Burn2 generated a surprising amount of media coverage for something that only exists in the Ether.
This year’s build has been going on since September 21. People have been competing to get the best plot sizes and locations in a “plottery”; people have also been buying plots. There are art cars and DJs playing. The theme is Cargo Cult, just like Burn 1.
Imagine! Just up Gate Road, you see a crowd playing around in your build. The Man stands tall in the background, arms raised. Zany art cars fill the streets, winding their way through hundreds of builds of all shapes and sizes. Greeters welcome you excitedly, and helpful Rangers are on hand. Dozens dance to a live performer in Center Camp, while others rock out to a DJ in another sim. Lamplighters will dance the evenings away, illuminating the playa. You know that the week is filled with events; the Man will burn Saturday, and the beautiful Temple on Sunday.
If your name is on this list, then you’re a winner! Congratulations and happy building! Juried Art and Theme Camp winners receive a free 1024sm or 2048sm plot; Plottery winners each receive a 512sm plot for this year’s BURN2: Cargo Cult.
Artist/Builder Build Name Awarded plot size Giovanna Cerise “The magic of objects” 2048sm Alesha Hax “Cult-Ure Queen” 2048sm MORLITA Quan “Sokofa” 2048sm Loki Eliot “The Sand Fairy” 2048sm Caro Fayray “Anomaly” 1024sm Ginger Lorakeet “Inside Art” 1024sm Juliana Burns “Camp Marshmallow” 1024sm catboy Qunhua “Catboy’s Camp of Cuisine, Culture, and Comedy” 1024sm Sarrah Docherty “Cargo Train” 1024sm Marianne McCann “Inner Child Camp” 1024sm
Congratulations, plot winners! We’ll see you on the playa!
Building begins September 21, 2013.
They employed a full-time staffer at Linden Labs to manage the Burning Man joint venture, then after downsizing in 2010 made the event an official Regional. Burning Man founder Danger Ranger got involved – yup, they even have virtual rangers. The history of how this all came about is surely the most unique of all the 12524 Regionals.
“dreamy guy” Philip Rosedale rocking some electronic beats
In 1999, a dreamy guy from San Francisco decided to go explore this Burning Man thing he’d been hearing about. Into his car, he tossed a tent, water and everything else he needed to survive, then he drove 300 miles out to the Nevada high desert.
He arrived at a featureless, 40-square miles of cracked mud, ringed by distant mountains. Hot. It was terribly hot. Except when the sun went down. Then it was just plain cold. The Black Rock Desert is an ancient dry lake bed. “The Playa”, geologists called it; harsh, foreign, unforgiving and so shockingly barren that it *begs* to be your empty canvas. A strange encampment had been erected there, ringed around a 40-foot tall anthropomorphic wooden statue destined to be burned the last night.
What the Dreamer found there— a huge group of people, self organized into a city, collaboratively creating a different reality— tweaked the direction of the project he was working on back in San Francisco, and filled his head with ideas about the nature of reality, creativity, identity and community. He worked some of these ideas into the very fabric of his project “Linden World”, which you and I now know as Second Life. That Dreamer was our Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale
…Fast forward to 2003. Numerous Linden Lab employees were regulars at Burning Man, but by 2003 they were too busy getting Second Life out the door to visit the real life Playa. So Phoenix Linden approached the Burning Man organization for permission to build a tribute to the real event in Second Life. With permission duly granted, the Lindens built a Man statue much like the real thing, and “burned” it in-world. While Phoneix Linden (and Haney Linden)- started the Burning Life event, other Lindens facilitated over the years: Hamlet, Torley, Jeska, Iridium, and Everett.
By 2007 the Lindens were too busy to be directly involved with the event, and other SLers were running the event. These residents had never been to Burning Man and did not really understand how to represent its principles – yet they were using Burning Man’s symbols and vocabulary, and representing it inworld. Understandably, Burning Man was becoming concerned about what was happening to the vibe, the message, the community and it’s principles as represented and enacted by Burning Life. It was decided that sending help and getting involved was the Burner way to improve the event.
Everett Linden, the head of Community Initiatives for LL (and also a Burner), was aware of the issues involved. In 2008, the Lab hired Dusty Udal, an experienced burner, as a contractor and gave her a Linden name tag in order to help reposition the event. Also at this time, Danger Ranger – founder of the real life Black Rock Rangers at Burning Man – got involved and helped with reorganizing the Burning Life Rangers into a more community-based organization, truer to the principles of the RL Rangers.
In 2010, Linden Lab experienced a sharp downsizing, and ownership of Burning Life was transformed from a partnership between Burning Man and Linden Lab into an entirely regional Burning Man event held in the metaverse. This was seen as a win-win, as Linden Lab was focusing on it’s core business and technology, and less on suplementary activities, while Burning Man wanted a higher fidelity representation in the metaverse.
If you look at the history of BM, it has also undergone a dramatic shift. 1996 was an evolutionary year for BM. After that, BM found a balance between anarchy and organization. In a sense, BURN2 is where Burning Man was in 1997. We are establishing a firm base for evolution and growth in the future.
With the birth of Burn2, there is a sense of renewal, a sense of community and a sense of hope as Burning Man and the metaverse intermix. The Burn2 community is established and viable, and the future is at our doorstep.
What do I like about Burn 2, compared to Burn 1? First of all, it really is a Leave No Trace event – no MOOP to pick up, no bags of trash on the side of the road, no bike theft, no crime or medical emergencies, no carbon pollution from cars and generators. No stinking, paperless port-a-potties. Wear all the feathers you want, hell you can probably pee on the Playa and Burnier-than-thous won’t complain. Even better though, whatever they build in Second Life for Burning Man one year, is there for ever to be enjoyed by all citizens of the Universe, for free. It’s an additive strategy – it only grows, and the more it grows, the more valuable it becomes. In the tech world this phenomenon is known at Metcalfe’s Law, after the main guy who invented networks (who is a Burner). Also called “the Network Effect”, and technically coined by George Gilder, Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of the network is equal to the number of nodes in the network, squared. So the way to increase value the most, is to add more connected nodes. NOT monopolize the flows of information and currency between the existing nodes you have, throttling everything towards the black box at the top. The Internet is valuable because many people use it, and it is free. AirBnB works, because there are a lot of users looking for places to stay, and a lot of people wanting to rent out rooms in their homes. The more users of either type they get, the more valuable they are. eBay doesn’t say “buy from us”, they say “buy from each other”.
BMOrg’s new IP Battle Tank: “exterminate!”
Embrace the sharing economy, BMOrg! It’s the 21st Century now, the dinosaur strategy of “I must own everything and others must own nothing” has been demonstrated to be sub-optimal. Help Burners raise money, sell camp memberships and tickets, throw events. Help – just by getting out of the frikking way! Create a marketplace for costumes and art cars and photos and art projects. Let’s find a permanent location where we can keep our art cars and installations, work on them, and display them for others to enjoy. Let us use our photos for whatever we want, just require them to have a Burning Man logo watermark and impose a low cost royalty for the use of that. Hey presto, instead of one tiny city of 68,000 people for 1 week per year (making $50 million or so revenue, but supposedly very little profit for the founders), you would get an infinitely scaleable Burner universe (potentially making billions for the owners). And the loyalty of Burners to you would be assured, if you are enabling commerce for them. Next time you get in an Uber, ask the driver if he likes Uber. Next time you buy something from Etsy or eBay, ask the vendor if those tools are useful to their business.
Burn2 shows what the future could be like, and opens a vast range of possibilities for hijinks and capers. There are some ways that more fun can be made in the virtual world, than the Default world.
Flying penises…the new shunning. It’s as close to sex as you’re gonna get in cyberspace, that is until the next breakthrough in teledildonics. Some things are always going to be better in Meatspace.
Award-winning technology journalist Susan Karlin has written an excellent, in-depth article for Fast Co Create on drone use at Burning Man – something that is becoming increasingly popular, making some Burners disgruntled (of course!). You can also listen to this story on Los Angeles NPR station, KCRW.
Burning Man–an annual bacchanalian, clothing-optional experimental community in Nevada’s Black Rock desert–is regarded as a weeklong end-of-summer party and escape from the outside world. But it’s now attracting real-world attention for how it balances drone use with freedom of expression, privacy, invasion of space, and commercialism–issues that have been vexing the FAA, law enforcement, and municipalities as hobbyist flyers and commercial potential proliferate.
“We’re kind of a Petri dish for what’s going to happen out in the ‘default world,’” says Graham, evoking the festival term for “real world.” “The FAA is looking at certain types of rules for civilian use of drones in the United States and we just happen to be a testing ground for them right now. The Bureau of Land Management is going to send in their aviation person to talk with our drone pilots and see what they can learn from it.”
Great news, Burners. We’re no longer just a petri dish for the social engineers and game theorists of BMOrg. Now the Federal Government is doing experiments on us too!
Currently, the U.S. is more restrictive than Europe on commercial uses for drones–also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the more PC term used by flyers wanting to distance their hobby from combat use. “In the U.S., the FAA is supposed to implement rules that enable commercial use of UAVs by 2015, but it hasn’t happened yet and no one really has a sense of whether it’s going to,” says Sergei Lupashin, a postdoctoral researcher in aerial robotics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Lupashin spoke at the first annual Drone and Aerial Robotics Conference in New York over the weekend.
“It recently approved two high-end UAVs that can be used commercially, but that doesn’t handle the 99% of people flying their own drones, who have to do it as a hobby,” he adds. “In Europe, you can actually make money as an aerial drone operator shooting for things like real estate, events, journalism, and surveying oil pipelines.”
(L-R) Video consultant Eddie Codel demonstrates his quadcopter for filmmaker Sam Baumeland NASA engineer Kevin Panik.
The BLM are taking a keen interest in drones, particularly for surveillance. You can bet their Pershing County Sheriff’s department special integration task force is looking at this too.
Back in Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management–which can’t comment on drone use for investigative techniques, like surveillance–is considering drones for firefighting, and is more interested in regulating safety than privacy. “As far as a long-term vision goes, you’re going to see the BLM state office and aviation manager taking a look at how this is run to make sure everything is as safe as can be,” says Mark Turney, the public affairs officer for the BLM’s Winnemucca, Nevada, district office. “We will certainly take lessons learned from this and perhaps incorporate it into a larger overview.”
Burning Man has always been a “hotbed of early technology adopters”. Perhaps – I know it was a long time before I saw a full-color laser out there. It’s not often that Australia leads Silicon Valley in technology.
The rise of the drones at this year’s event was hardly surprising. Burning Man has long been a hotbed of early technology adopters, applying real-world engineering to fire-spewing art cars, computerized LED-lit installation art and clothing, and solar and wind energy-fueled power grids. There are even science-themed camps, like Phage (offering science lectures), the Alternative Energy Zone (sustainable energy engineering tours), and Math Camp (invitations to “drink and derive”).
“There’s always been an experimental technology undercurrent to Burning Man, and a lot of R&D that’s tried out here and taken into the default world,” says Eddie “Ekai” Codel, a live video streaming consultant based in San Francisco. Codel’s footage (below), which he shot from a DJI Phantom Quadcopter, went viral within a few days of posting on YouTube, with more than 1.4 million views. “Technology is used to further art out here. It’s a giant sandbox to figure these things out.”
You can build your own drone from scratch. And, if you thought feathers were bad on the Playa, look what the birds got to contend with now: skydivers, light aircraft, multi-rotor helicopters, General Wesley Clark‘s Blackhawk, Mark Zuckerberg’s chopper and now – now we got giant Imax blimps too.
Most of the UAV users here fly ready-to-fly models, like the $700 DJI Phantom Quadcopter, and add GoPro HD cameras and gimbaled stabilizers for steadier views. But there are also serious professional aerial photographers and hard-core DIY enthusiasts who build their own from scratch. This year, Ziv Marom, a professional aerial cameraman now in Bulgaria shooting Expendables 3, operated a Red Epic camera from his octocopter, “Big Mama” (see lead photo), while a European IMAX crew used an elaborate multicopter-propelled balloon to guide their footage.
“I think I have about $1,500 invested in all of it,” says Ed Somers, a retired Los Angeles sound engineer of his self-made quadcopter. “There’s the airframe, motors, motor controllers, computer, five different kinds of battery chemistries to choose from, the chargers, and on and on. I thought it would be an incredible education, by forcing me to learn all that stuff. I’m a tech head anyway, so this is right up my alley. It’s just a gigantic learning curve.”
Drones offer a particularly interactive way into the Burning Man art scene and unique views of the event’s five square-mile expanse. Artists Bruce Tomb and Maria del Camino used a UAV with first person view (FPV) technology–allowing folks on the ground to see the craft’s viewpoint in real time–to display giant ground drawings only decipherable from above.Death Guild Thunderdome, a Mad Max-like cage fight with foam rubber clubs, attempted close-up combat footage with a drone before accidentally smashing it in the process.Aerial roboticist Sergei Lupashin and his self-made Fotokite quadcopter.
“It’s the perfect Petri dish to test the technology in very harsh conditions,” says Lupashin, who flies a tethered quadcopter drone, called a Fotokite, that he hopes to commercialize. “The scale of the event lends itself well to aerial photography. Once you reach those high altitudes–50, 100 meters–you get a whole different sense of how huge this thing is.”
…Wayne Miller, a San Francisco event planner and handyman better known as Sweetie, attempted to project live video footage from his fixed-wing Dynam C-47 Dakota model cargo plane, Duststar, onto two giant screens at a stage at his camp, Dustfish. “I’m also pretty sure I’m the first person to do aerial bombardment,” he laughs. “I just dropped six plastic paratrooperson the Esplanade. I have lots of ’em!”
It turns out that Free Bird wasn’t the only Temple controversy last year. We got Whirly Bird as well.
Discussions about UAV regulations began last year after a buzzing drone disrupted a silent, solemn burn of the festival’s spiritual center, called The Temple. It prompted a flurry of angry emails to the Burning Man organization, which responded with a Drone Summit in July at its San Francisco headquarters and online. Roughly 140 participants expanded theAcademy of Model Aeronautics rules to include Burning Man quirks–among them, don’t fly over crowds, at the Temple burn, by the airport, during the playa’s frequent dust storms, or near the Man on burn day.
Retired audio engineer Ed Somers flies his DIY drone by his camp
“What they really don’t want is people flying UAVs where there’s a potential of hurting someone,” says Somers. “You have to realize that, even a 10-inch plastic propeller spinning at 10,000 rpm can cut up a person real quick.”
This is as serious as flamethrowers people. A young guy was flying his drone helicopter in a Brooklyn park last month, and lost his head – literally. DUIs for drugged-out drone pilots might be difficult to dole out in the dust.
Other rules, such as registering drones with Media Mecca, the event’s media center, pertain to a grayer area of privacy. Despite the festival’s mantra of radical self-expression, Burning Man takes pains to protect participant privacy and commercialization. Professional journalists and photographers arrange photo passes and sales contracts with Burning Man granting different types of image use. Burning Man disallows sales to stock photo agencies, but takes a 10% commission on fine art sales, as well as joint copyright so it can stop inappropriate usage. It also urges all photographers to ask permission of subjects before taking pictures.
More secrets of BMOrg finances come out. They get a 10% commission on fine art sales. So much for no commerce on the Playa. The booming use of drones (140 people attended last year’s Burning Man Drone summit) also raise a controversial privacy issue – “I went to Burning Man and all I got was photographed”
“You may not have a right to privacy out here, but we try to give people the opportunity to express themselves how they want, and sometimes it’s a balancing act,” says Graham. “A drone with a camera is separated from its operator. That’s why there’s this extra sensibility training that we do with the drone pilots and we let the community know about it as well.”
The UAV community falls on both sides of that line. Sweetie, for one, balks at privacy restraints.
“I think that anybody who comes to Burning Man and walks around naked or wears a dildo on their head or whatever silliness they feel they need to do, if they need to protect their privacy, I think that should be on them, not on the rest of us,” he says.
Then you have Sam Baumel, a Brooklyn filmmaker and UAV flyer who believes privacy rules actually enable expression.
“There are a lot of exhibitionists. But there are also people like myself,” he says. “Yesterday, I went out to deep playa. I was completely by myself at sunset and got naked. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to photograph me. But the reason I did it was because, how often do I get to just stand on this Earth, in my body, and nothing else? If someone were to have flown a drone over my head, it would have made me uncomfortable.”
Carlos Abler, the global manager of online content strategy for 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota, found his reaction running that gamut when a drone interrupted a wedding he attended there.
“We were embracing the couple as a group when we suddenly heard this buzzing, whirring sound, and saw this thing hovering over us with a camera,” he says. “At first, it felt like a violation–it was really disturbing and distracting. But then we realized, ‘Oh my God, this is the best shot ever!’ So now we’re pretty excited to get our hands on the footage.”
This year’s rules were a good start, but need consensus, considering the vitriol spewing on the Burning Man drones mailing list. Subscribers clashed on how to define a crowd, whether to designate special flying areas, and how to penalize rule-breakers, like the wiseguy who flew his drone over the Man on burn day. Turns out, it was our very own Sweetie.
“They said to me, ‘Don’t you realize you could have set off the remote detonators?’“ Sweetie recounts. “I said, ‘If I can set off the remote with an RC plane, you guys are amateurs!’”
Apprised of Sweetie’s comments, Graham shakes his head and sighs. “Sweetie’s got a lot of self-confidence.”
And so this tug of war over UAV rules continues, while being watched by the outside. But what happens in the desert will be only so useful to bureaucrats dealing with drones in the real world. Because at Burning Man, freedom of expression will almost always trump anything else.
“I’m not only operating a camera, I’m operating a remote-controlled flying vehicle,” says Baumel. “I feel like I’m playing when I’m using it, and in that space of play, that’s where I can be most creative.”
[Images courtesy of Carolyn Marut (Top) and Susan Karlin]
More secrets of BMOrg finances come out. They get a 10% commission on fine art sales. So much for no commerce on the Playa. The booming use of drones (140 people attended last year’s Burning Man Drone summit) also raise a controversial privacy issue – “I went to Burning Man and all I got was photographed”