Dec 11 2014

Gifting To Create a World of Plenty

It’s nice to be able to write a positive story about goodness. Free goodness coming to this community and the world, thanks to the generosity and innovation of Burners.

One of the great things about Burning Man is if you need something, the community will often rally to provide. Not everyone can afford a Private Concierge to arrange their camp, designer costumes, or a $1000 scalper ticket. Some Burners are left to be radically self-reliant. Others are happy to help whoever they can.

The Wolf and Snorky, Burning Man 2010

When I first went to Burning Man in 1998, I rushed back to Australia and told my friend Snorky all about it. “Sounds great man”, he said. “Can’t wait to go one day”. That day finally came in 2010. Burner Snorky hit the ground running, he was ready for Burning Man before he was born! The only difference being a virgin made, compared to the next year, was more people wanting to give him stuff.

His Burning Man experience inspired him to use his other experience: his background of being an Internet guru from the “Dot Com days” to create Mass Mosaic: a free service where anyone with wants can connect with anyone who has something to share. Maybe you can trade, maybe you can gift, maybe you can barter or sell. They are trying to remove scarcity from the sharing economy, and replace it with abundance.

Burning Man has always been an experiment in civilization without economy. The so-called “Gift economy” combines giving people things they didn’t know they wanted, and generously helping out Burners in need.

Mass Mosaic have now created Burners Exchange (any type of exchange) and Burners Gifting (gifting only), special mosaics just for Burners. It’s totally free. It helps Burners who Have something to offer, connect with those who Want something. Transactions can be gifts, trades, or for money.

Snorky describes it like this:

Burning Man teaches us that everybody is abundant in something and when that is brought to the playa, we see that really anything is possible. Mass Mosaic brings that energy beyond the playa. When everybody lists what they want and have and how they are open to exchange it, then the abundance of what is often peoples hidden value is brought to the forefront. Mass Mosaic has created a special group for Burners to exchange within. Burners aren’t limited to exchanging within that group though, they can create their own groups and exchange with anybody on the site too.

Abundance for all – sounds good to me. Try it now.

Mass Mosaic’s co-founder Snorky says:

We all are constantly exchanging with the world. From breathing air to getting gas for our cars, exchange is needed to sustain. The natural world can help us understand the fundamentals of this exchange. In nature, exact right amount of resources are exchanged for survival without the friction of money or social structures. At Burning Man, not having many of our modern comforts (i.e. being in nature) allows us to live very closely to the natural principles of exchange, and move with their ebb and flow. It unlocks an animalistic and tribal attunement in the process.

Burning Man reminds us, through the gift economy and the collective ethos, that exchange is about much more than making money. This unlocks a new dimension of potential that expresses itself as abundance, happiness, and cultural flourishing.

Part of the way that Burning Man helps us exchange is by removing the “zero-sum” dynamic, whereby the person with the resource charges the maximum possible and the person in need parts with as much money as they can bear. This essentially cancels out what otherwise could be a synergistic experience.

Mass Mosaic uses the same principles in nature and like Burning Man facilitates exchange with the environment in a more advantageous way for all parties. But Messed Mosaic goes further by allowing every type of exchange that’s possible in any tribe. The website allows gifting, borrowing, sharing, trading, renting, buying, selling, collaborating, reusing and open exchange. The holistic result is that everyone has far more opportunity to live abundantly.

Mass Mosaic models how exchange has happened with humanity since the beginning of time. There wasn’t always money! These means came to serve in need and have become overused in the process.

Burning Man teaches us about the village economy but in the context of a modern society. In the village, your relationships were the most important part of your survival – not your financial resources!

Another lesson from Mass Mosaic and Burning Man is that ownership is decreasing in importance. It’s the realization that all we are really after is the benefits of owning something, not the ownership itself! When you have the benefits without the maintenance, expenses, and other responsibilities that come with ownership, you are able to live more flexibly and economically.

Perhaps all we are seeking to learn is that we are complete. We are seeking to learn that the world loves us and supports us. We are seeking to learn that our communities well-being is inexplicably tied to our own. Perhaps we are seeking to learn that we are all one, expressing our individuality like an infinite mosaic of color that make up one big picture.

The structure of community is deeply connected to how easily that community sustains and thrives. It’s time we proactively design and define this structure so it is not dictated by the existing biased systems that rely dominantly on capitalism as a means to live healthy and happy lives. Both Burning Man and Mass Mosaic do this in a way that is proving relevant on larger and larger scales.

To further this experiment, Mass Mosaic has created different groups and hubs for Burning Man on their website with the hopes that it helps the Burner Community live abundantly on and off the playa using its principles. Check it out at [link]

Co-founder Rob Jameson says the system is modelled on “tensegrity“, a word coined by Buckminster Fuller

Tensegrity is a complementary pair of forces. One is continuous pulling in and the other discontinuous, pushing.

This can be seen all around us in the physical world. From wheel rims to bridges, there are examples of tensegrity structures all around us, often as strongest structures and systems we build. Another example of tensegrity structure is a geodesic dome. The struts connect in a series of triangles so that the discontinuous pushing and continuous pulling makes the dome get stronger as more weight is added.

Wants and Haves projected on a building at the O+ Festival in Brooklyn

…It is a shame that the mainstream society believes that in order to be productive, the requirement is to work 40 hours per week. The entire point of technology is to leverage its capability so that we can thrive together more easily. This does not mean that machines should replace us, but rather that a job that used to take someone 1000 hours to do, now takes someone one hour to manage and the machine can do the rest automatically. This is the nature of progress, and our lives should have less restriction because of it.

…We are beginning to see tensegrity models gain traction in society. Burning Man is a great example, which relies dominantly on the gift economy to exchange in a pop-up civilization. The gift economy is a simple type of tensegrity economy. It’s clear from the Burning Man events, which arise from nothing in the middle of the desert, that this model can produce tremendous cultural and social value.

Burning Man is the beginning of the shift, and eventually will be far surpassed by models that are more deeply connected to the principle of tensegrity, rather than a specific embodiment of it (like gifting economy).

New York-based Mass Mosaic recently won a place in Startfast, an East coast startup incubator and accelerator similar to San Francisco’s famous YCombinator. The idea behind their software is a world of plenty and abundance. Try out their Beta version and tell us what you think. I can see this idea being very useful to Burners.

Their CTO has some good words to say on workplace diversity and Radical Inclusion at SC:

I am not an expert on women in technology. I am an expert on technology. However I can say that for many of us, simply being female in technology often forces you to champion the cause. I have been asked to speak about women in technology at technical conferences (versus talking about technology at technical conferences) because the assumption is that being female, I would want to present on that issue.

When I evaluate potential jobs, I consider what impact that may have on the perception of women in technology, and when I get up to speak at conferences, I always have the nagging feeling that my performance on stage may directly impact people’s perception of all women in tech since they don’t see enough of us up there to have a broader view.

Whether I truly felt confident or not, I presented myself as very self-assured in almost every situation, which is different than many women, who are taught from an early age that being too confident, too self-assured, is unladylike. This self-assuredness leads to labels like “bossy,” and another one that starts with a “b” that SC Magazine won’t print. The same characteristics encouraged in young men are often considered problematic in young women. Maybe this played a part in my experiences. Maybe not. I know confident women that still had a much harder time than I did.

Technology is competitive, and I’ve seen this industry chew up and spit out men who lacked this perceived level of confidence, too. I don’t think that’s the whole story, but it may play a part, and it’s important to realize that being perceived as “tough” or “thick-skinned” often isn’t enough, nor should it be required. Would you rather have the most self-assured employee or the most talented?

…It’s time to realize that diversity in technology matters because the most arrogant person in the room isn’t always the most talented, and overlooking those people who don’t fit our arbitrary notions of what “real” techies look like severely limits our talent pool. When done right, technology is intensely creative, and diverse communities thrive because of, not in spite of, the variety of experiences we all bring and the passions that drive us.

Limiting our choice of candidates is what truly weakens us. This isn’t about holding hands and singing campfire songs, and it’s not about filling quotas. This is about growing up and recognizing that when you want to hire people smarter than you, sometimes they’re not going to look or act like you.

Peaceful Warriors, Hackers and Merry Pranksters

Dr Bruce Damer (L), Joe Rogan (R)

A couple of months ago, I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast, and heard an amazing tale from Burning Man. Joe, who is a very public advocate for hallucinogenic drugs, was interviewing Dr Bruce Damer, a long time Burner (’99). He was recommended as a guest for Joe by Dennis McKenna, whose brother Terence was called the Patron of Psychedelic Drugs in his New York Times obituary – Timothy Leary called him “the Timothy Leary of the 90’s”.

Dr Damer, a technologist and virtual world pioneer, gives seminars at the Pentagon, as well as lecturing Burners on psychedelic drugs.

They kick the podcast off with the “craziest story of all time”, which Bruce Damer originally told to Boing Boing, about being at Burning Man during Hurricane Katrina and hacking into military/intelligence satellites to watch the action:

JR: “You were partying at Burning Man with people who work at the Pentagon”

BD: “Yes”

JR: “That gives me great discomfort, to know that people who work in the Pentagon are partying at Burning Man”

BD: “Rocking! We called for Blackhawks…

Our camp was doing the Wi-Fi for the public and emergency networks, the private network…we had a dish, so we could take over satellites. One of our guys took over a recon satellite from the National Reconnaissance Office. He took this thing offline – this was a Pentagon move…Our Pentagon satellite phone rang, the general on the other side was saying “what’s going on” and then instructed the guy not to answer. We then had control of this satellite and could watch Katrina come in. The government wasn’t doing anything to help people, with all this equipment.

He worked on the Asian tsunami relief efforts, then he went straight to Afghanistan, then he went to Baghdad, then he came to Burning Man.

He works under Title 10 money doing extreme comms, extreme emergency relief efforts. This guy’s invented all this technology, cellphones in rubberized cases that come down on parachutes and run for a month… Here we have a natural disaster happening in our own country, barreling in. Nobody at Burning Man knows it’s happening, but we watched it come in.

You could watch video from orbit on this guy’s screen. You could watch people walking…we saw the first levee breach on this guy’s screen at Burning Man…hi-res reconnaissance imagery…the Iridium phone kept ringing. This is an innovative genius type guy that is totally respected in that organization. The general that initiated the enquiry was covering him, so that the general could then contact Space Command and say “I can’t get any information”. He had put the satellite in some kind of failsafe fall-back mode, so they would spend the next several days trying to get back into it…we could burn hydrazine and locate stuff on the Playa.”

Bruce then goes on to discuss billionaire camps with sherpas. It’s the first seven minutes here:

The whole podcast is worth listening to. Dr Damer gave a lecture at Burning Man in 2012 about shamans, the Pentagon and NASA at the Palenque Norte Psychedelic Salon.

The Palenque Norte journey began with the legendary Entheobotany Conferences held at the Chan Kah hotel near the ancient Mayan ruins just outside of Palenque, Mexico. There, Terence McKenna, Jonathan Ott, Ann & Sasha Shulgin, and a host of other psychedelic luminaries passed along many insights, discoveries, and wild tales to the fortunate Tribe members who were there. And it was at the end of the pool where Terence McKenna gave some of his last talks at the Chan Kah. Years later, then in 2003, a few alumni from those conferences decided to have a “Palenque reunion” at the Burning Man Festival, and so they organized a lecture series to continue the Palenque tradition.

https://vimeo.com/57887303

Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of “global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism” where you “put yourself on the shelf” and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss [bankers], Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says “there is no dominator culture” and that if we aren’t careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others’ unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop “critical intelligence”. If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn’t feel right, Bruce suggests that you think it through before you pass on their meme.

Great pants!

So this is the type of people at Burning Man. It’s not all drugged up hippies looking for an orgy. Some of them advise the Pentagon and NASA. Some of them can hack military/intelligence satellites, and get Generals to cover for them. Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Wesley Clark, is now a Burner. He ran for President, as did Denis Kucinich who attended for the first time this year.

Burning Man takes place on former military land. Many of the people who played key roles in its early years have a military/intelligence background.

Blackhawks on the Playa would not have been a big deal. Every year, military aircraft fly overhead. It is close to Naval Air Station Fallon.

Blackhawk military helicopter hovers low over Burning Man, 2013. Image: Patrick Roddie

image: Christopher Olewnik/Facebook

Other aircraft spotted flying over Burning Man over the years include Chinooks, F-14’s, F-16’s, F-18’s, F-22’s, C-130’s, even a flight of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotors.

Pacific Standard magazine published a great story last year by Brian Calvert, The Merry Pranksters Who Hacked The Afghan War, about the Synergy Strike Force – Burners who have serious juice in the military/intelligence world.

recognize anything familiar in this patch?

Their leader, Dr Dave Warner, is described as:

a former U.S. Army drill instructor, self-avowed “hippie doctor,” PhD neuroscientist, technotopian idealist, dedicated Burner, dabbler in psychedelics, insatiable meddler, and (weirdest of all) defense contractor.

From PSMag.com:

For a long time, the Taj Guest House was about the only place you could get a beer in Jalalabad. The provincial capital, about 30 miles from the infamous mountains of Tora Bora, has been the main staging ground for U.S.-led forces in the eastern part of Afghanistan since the early days of the war. When I showed up in the city in November 2011 to report on the propaganda efforts of a franchising Taliban, I found myself at the Taj. There wasn’t much to the pub—just a bamboo-covered bar, a fireplace, a glass-fronted cooler with some Heineken stacked inside, and a few bottles of vodka and other spirits lined up under the red glow of a lamp.

Plus there was an odd little sign: “We share information, communication, (and beer).”

…Looking like a cross between a mountaineer and a mathematician, he had a salt-and-pepper beard and curly hair that hung down to his shoulders, and he favored a uniform of black polo shirts over tied-dyed tees. His name was Dr. Dave Warner.

War zones attract a lot of sketchy characters. In Afghanistan and Iraq, where defense contractors have generally outnumbered soldiers on the ground, the cast of extras has been especially sprawling and inscrutable—security experts, mercenaries, aid workers, engineers, intelligence types, and consultants of every kind. It was just a guess, but given the array on the roof, I took Warner and his team for spooks of some kind.

I was at best half right in my guess about Warner’s occupation. He did indeed work for U.S. intelligence sometimes, he explained, but he wasn’t a spy. On principle, he refused to get a security clearance, out of a belief in something he called “radical inclusion.” The most valuable information in a conflict or disaster zone, he said, was information that could be shared with everybody.

image: Graham Smith/PSMag

The term radical inclusion stopped me. I recognized it from the summer of 1998, when I had gone to Burning Man, the hedonistic-fire-worshipper-art-festival that occurs every summer in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Radical inclusion is one of the event’s “Ten Principles.” When I mentioned this, Warner’s eyes lit up. He dug into his T-shirt and pulled out a shining Burning Man medallion. “Dude,” he said, grinning in the firelight. “This is a Burner bar.”

Warner’s entire team – which he called, in all seriousness, the Synergy Strike Force—had just attended Burning Man that summer. He himself had been attending annually since 2002. And the bar, it turned out, was his bar…It was not only a place to drink and flop but also a kind of grand social experiment—an outpost of the Burning Man ethos in the Afghan desert…

The war effort, in short, was sophisticated when it came to deploying lethal hardware like drones, but clumsy in just about every other way. A few people in the upper echelons of the command structure were painfully aware of this. Warner knew because he had their ear. He had connections in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the Army Special Forces, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He also knew what an unlikely figure he cut—a Burner among bureaucrats. When I asked him later why the Department of Defense had turned to him, he shook his head and laughed. “Oh,” he said, “they’re fucking desperate.”…

Eric Rasmussen, one of Warner’s early sponsors at DARPA, has come away similarly awed by the doctor’s capacities. “I was taught by multiple Nobel Prize winners, and Dave is the equal of any of them in intelligence,” Rasmussen told me. Warner has been “trendsetting for a number of very forward-thinking organizations, like the Strategic Studies Group for the Chief of Naval Operations, like DARPA, like the Office of Naval Research,” among others. “He has shaped curriculum for the Marine Corps. He has influenced curriculum for National Defense University. He is a remarkable intellectual force who has managed to hold on to his idealism through everything.” What’s more, he has done it all without a security clearance. “And that,” Rasmussen said, “if you remember the kind of work that he does—and for whom—is astonishing.”…

I was just beginning to get used to his way of talking, which alternated between turgid military jargon and gonzo flights of fancy. (“I’m dismantling the Death Star,” he told me later, “to build solar ovens for the Ewoks.”)…

The group was also engaged in various maker-ish side projects worthy of Burning Man. Gold was busy building a methane generator from PVC pipe and an old oil drum. The design, popular among self-sufficiency buffs on the Internet, allows you to filter the gasses that come off human waste into pure methane, which can be used as a fuel source…

Last summer at Burning Man, members of the team gathered once again, and Warner invited me to join them. So I headed out to the Black Rock Desert and pitched a small tent next to Warner’s giant RV. He came out of nowhere, from the dust and the wind, as I was struggling with some rigging for a tarp. He was drinking a beer, wearing a tied-dyed shirt and cutoff jean shorts, with a tie-dyed bandana on his head and another around his neck. “We’re going to the temple,” he said, “for a service.”…

Warner gathered with other members of the Synergy Strike Force. He nailed a pakul hat to the wall, hung an Afghan scarf around it, and added a Synergy Strike Force patch. Around us, Burners wept and prayed. And at the end of the festival, the temple was burned to the ground, with everything in it.

Read the full story here, it’s a great read. Dr Dave Warner sounds like a hero to me. Definitely in the running for the “best Burner” prize.

Here are some links to other stories about the Synergy Strike Force:

WIRED (2012): Cash, Time Run Out for Afghanistan’s Wi-Fi City

Synergy Strike Force Handbook – Public Intelligence Blog

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence

Human Geography: Dave Warner’s photos from Afghanistan

Their online hub, with links to many more photos, is at reachback.org

Image: Peretz Partensky/WIRED

Peace Intelligence. That seems like something that the world could use a lot more of. Sadly, the Synergy Strike Force’s Afghanistan operations have now stopped, due to lack of funding (they needed about $5,000 a month for their Internet connection). Now THAT would have been a good use of the non-profit Burning Man Project’s $30 million annual budget.

Dec 10 2014

“The Fox News of Burning Man” [Update]

“Burners.Me is the Fox News/National Enquirer of the Playa!”, cry the haters.

Is that really so bad? Both of these are successful, professional media organizations. The National Enquirer has been going for almost a century, and was financed by San Francisco media baron William Randolph Hearst as the testing ground for his new ideas. The Pulitzer Prize Board considers it a legitimate news source. Fox News is the #1 cable news channel in the US, a position it has held for 145 consecutive months. Fox has nearly 5 million followers on Twitter, and is primarily owned by its founder, the world’s most successful publisher, Rupert Murdoch. It broadcasts from Rockefeller Center to 100 million households in the US, and is considered “most trusted” by more people than any other news network.

Those who doubt us think it must be a terrible insult, to compare this free blog written by someone whose day job and education is in business, not journalism, to these professional for-profit media organizations with thousands of employees. What would the haters prefer Burners.Me was like? CNN? The Wall Street Journal? Vanity Fair? Playboy? The late, lamented San Francisco Bay Guardian? Or burningman.org, who openly admit they have no requirement to be 100% accurate?

Whenever I come across someone saying “Burners.Me is full of misinformation, there’s no truth there”, I ask them to provide an example. Which they never can. If everything here was lies, then it should be easy to show some examples. If this site was only 99% true, would it really be fair to describe it as “full of misinformation”? In that hypothetical case, 1% means there would be 14 posts of lies here. And yet so far, nobody has been able to demonstrate one example of deliberate misinformation.

Is everything BMOrg ever says true? Absolutely not! As well as stating that themselves, we’ve proved it here multiple times. Is everything Burners.Me ever says true? Yes, to the best of my knowledge at the time I write it. Why would I want to lie, in a free gift to the Burner community? What is in that for me? I get enough haters just from telling uncomfortable truths. Why would I want to give the trolls more ammunition to use against me? I don’t understand how people think that spreading lies would somehow benefit me. Or why the trolls seem to think it’s fine for BMOrg and their Directors to lie, spin, and employ a Minister of Propaganda.

One of the more controversial claims I’ve made here is that Burning Man charges site fees for professional film shoots at the event, such as $150,000 to Vogue.

bm french vogue 2010

I’ve chosen this example to drill into, because one of the “social” media haters over the weekend tried to use it as proof that Burners.Me lacks integrity. I will show you where the claim came from, and why I believed it; how I’ve updated my readers as new information came in; and how semantics are used by BMOrg’s spin machine to mask underlying issues behind their carefully-chosen words.

Here’s what the original front page story about the Spark movie by Scribe in the SF Bay Guardian said:

When I asked Brown about whether he paid the LLC for access and the right to use footage they filmed on the playa — something I know it has demanded of other film and photo projects — Brown paused for almost a full minute before admitting he did.

“We saw it as location fees. We’re making an investment, they’re making an investment,” he said, refusing to provide details of the agreement. “The arrangement we had with Burning Man is similar to the arrangements anyone else has had out there.”

Goodell said the LLC’s standard agreement calls for all filmmakers to either pay a set site fee or a percentage of the profits. “It’s standard in all of the agreements to pay a site fee,” Goodell said, noting that the LLC recently charged Vogue Magazine $150,000 to do a photo shoot during the event.

We covered this at the time in The Spark of Controversy.

About this time last year, someone with high-level BMOrg connections told me at a social event that the Guardian got it wrong. So the very next day I published an update to the story, entitled Not So Vogue? and said:

According to our source, that story is not accurate. In fact, Vogue offered them this much money, and BMOrg turned it down. Or perhaps, BMOrg named their price, and Vogue turned them down. Anyway, the exchange of $150,000 for a photo shoot for Vogue, apparently never happened.

The source did not want to go on record with this , but gave me permission to publish. Read into that what you will. If this is true, then it’s surprising that BMOrg didn’t try to set the record straight with an official statement.

They also never asked the Guardian to print a retraction.

At the time, I did not name my source because he asked me not to. I can identify him now because sadly, Paladin, who was close to BMOrg because he was Danger Ranger’s attorney, died of a heart attack before this year’s burn. I only met him the one time, he seemed like a good guy, and someone in a position to know what he was talking about.

As it turns out, Paladin was not correct when he told me that Vogue offered them that much money but BMOrg turned them down. I was correct in my speculation that BMOrg named their price and Vogue thought it was too high and declined.

Anyway, after learning that Marian may have been misquoted by Scribe, I emailed her directly, and asked her what really happened. She didn’t get back to me, which gave me the impression that Scribe’s quote was accurate. I published the Not So Vogue post, sharing with our readers that some doubt had been raised about the story. I continued to use the site fees as an example of ways in which commodification has been occurring on the Playa.

Just over 2 months after I published this update and asked for her version of events, Maid Marian sent a message via the Contact form of this web page:

Steve Jones quoted me out of context, and it’s picked up here as if it’s true:

http://burners.me/2013/12/05/not-so-vogue/

We NEVER ever took any money from Vogue to do a shoot. There has yet to be a shoot at Burning Man with our permission. What I said was that we always say no, and sometimes they come back and ask again…and that we sometimes use a high fee to just dissuade them from further conversation if they insist on being pushy. $150,000 site fee is absurd. And, if anyone said they’d do it, we’d just laugh. It’s like a dumb game with some of these companies, so we play along sometimes to just see how far they’d go.

When we say NO we mean no, and so many of them say: “pretty please”, or “why not”, or “for how much”….i mean really.

There seems to be a Vogue photo shoot in the 2010 November (or 2011?) French Vogue magazine that looks like Burning Man. If it is, we didn’t approve of it, and have scratched our heads internally about it since it was spotted several years ago.

Unfortunately, she sent this response long after I’d emailed her asking for clarification. Because she sent it through the site’s Contact page, rather than replying to my email, it slipped through the cracks when I was traveling and I didn’t see it for a couple more months. I thought she never got back to me; she probably thought I was ignoring her response. When I did see it, I decided to accept her explanation, and stopped mentioning $150,000 Vogue photoshoots in my commentary.

At the end of the day, does it really matter that Vogue didn’t hand over a check – that BMOrg was simply quoting them a six figure price? Charging site fees is Commodification, it’s as simple as that. Did Fest300 have to pay site fees, to film their commercial at Burning Man? Did AirBnB pay them, for their Black Rock City advertisement?

Search AirBnB for Burning Man, this ad is still displayed

I can see how casually easy it has been for BMOrg management to use this claim as their shining example against Burners.Me. “Hey Marian, did we get paid $150,000 by Vogue?” “Absolutely not!” “Well Burners.Me is claiming we did, they must be lying, it must be a disinformation site”.

The problem with that theory is, it wasn’t me who came up with the $150,000 site fee for Vogue. It was the SF Bay Guardian. And Marian Goodell doesn’t deny that she said that. I was just quoting someone else’s information, and providing a link to my source. If SFBG got it wrong, then why didn’t BMOrg demand a retraction – or correct us publicly in the comments to our story? Why didn’t their CEO just reply to my email?

I formed an opinion based on a front page feature story from a newspaper, from pretty much the most trusted source I could get about Burning Man. Scribe is not just a professional journalist, he was the editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian before its recent closure, and he’s also the author of an impeccably researched book, The Tribes of Burning Man. He based his 5-page long article on hours of recorded interviews with Larry and Marian. If that is not a good enough source for me to quote, then what is?

Some might say “well you should have fact checked it” – but I did do that. When Paladin raised doubts to me, the next morning I contacted Burning Man’s CEO directly. And she didn’t get back to me for months.

Yesterday I contacted Scribe and shared Marian’s version of events with him. He replied:

I believe the context of that quote was in discussing the site fee that the film crew paid Burning Man to shoot there, specifically because I was raising questions about its appropriateness and conflicts of interest. She raised the Vogue thing to say that such site fees are routine and no big deal, which is sort of the opposite of what she’s now trying to say. She never asked for a correction on that point, and I know that she did read the article and was unhappy with my criticism of the film and deceptions in the transition to nonprofit status. I have no idea whether Vogue ever paid them anything, that was simply an anecdote that Marian volunteered and not something that was a strong focus of my story.

Marian says they were just being ironic, playing a “dumb game”, laughing at the chumps who presumably thought they were having a professional discussion. Scribe’s memory of the conversation is different. Meanwhile, commercial news agencies are selling Burning Man photos, Google are running ads over YouTube videos filmed at the Playa, movies like Spark are paying site fees. Dumb game or not, this is part of BMOrg’s business model. And is it now the Burning Man Project getting paid for image licensing and movie royalties? Or is it Decommodification, LLC? This information has not been made transparent to Burners.

Even with the updated information that we finally got from the CEO – that BMOrg quoted a price, but Vogue didn’t want to pay that much – is it really Burners.Me that’s the bad guy here? What about BMOrg, proposing it in the first place? Isn’t this pure commodification: selling the art that gets created as a gift by Burners, to a magazine for profit? If an artist spends hours making an art car or costume that gets featured in Vogue, do they get a cut of these site fees? No, they don’t. Why should the detail that Vogue didn’t end up paying, completely over-ride the main point: that BMOrg is asking magazines to pay 6-figure sums as site fees for their productions? Isn’t this just another revenue stream, another nail in the coffin of a free-from-commercial-transactions Playa?

I don’t have all the answers, I’m not an insider, and those who are aren’t allowed to speak to me.

If we publish something that turns out to be inaccurate, I update the story. I spend hours doing research and fact-checking, and always provide links to the sources of my information. If I can’t verify something, I tell you that it’s unconfirmed; if it’s rumor or speculation, I highlight that. Just because something is a rumor, doesn’t mean it’s untrue – as we showed with this year’s Circus theme, and the VIP Donation tickets which BMOrg have now admitted to.

Yes, this site is opinionated, but that’s the whole point of blogging: commentary. I comment on what people are saying about Burner culture on the Internet. Someone writes an article somewhere, and I quote the part of it that relates to my point and give you my take on it. Then I invite readers to also comment, providing their own take. I always identify the source with links so that you can read the original stories in their entirety and make your own mind up. I treat my readers like intelligent adults, rather than dispensing propaganda and using the kind of trickery and slippery language we’re used to seeing from politicians.

Sometimes Burners.Me might get things wrong, or not get the full picture. Sometimes, as was the case of the fire-spinner flare-up at SF Decom, there will be conflicting versions of a story. In that case I try to present the different viewpoints, as well as my opinion. This is a blog, not the Bible; if new information comes to light, we update our readers. That’s why you frequently see [Updates] to the stories here. The comments are open, and anyone is encouraged to share facts, evidence, and their own opinions.

BMOrg can come here at any time, and correct anything they don’t agree with. Sadly, when they have commented here before, it’s generally been to criticize and launch ad hominem and straw man attacks, instead of to answer our questions.

[Update 12/11/14 8:13am]

Lemur has commented that this very post is an example of misinformation.

this is an example of misinformation.

you’re referring to this as if it was their policy for anything published on their website, when you know that their response to your request to have information removed was explicitly about their COMMENT POLICY.

i believe the direct quote was “nothing in this post violates our comment policy. A comment not being 100% factually accurate is not grounds for removal”

you know this, I know this..

this is why its misinformation.

If BMOrg does have a policy requiring everything they publish to be 100% accurate, where is it?

This post might be an example of interpreting the facts I have to form an opinion: but that is the whole freaking point of the post! If you’re going to condemn it, please at least read the whole thing.

Let me provide some further examples behind why I made that statement:

Burning Man’s founder, Director of the Burning Man Project, and owner/Director of Decommodification LLC, the private company that owns all the assets of the business, Danger Ranger, publicly doxed me and published maliciously false statements as well as personal information. When I corrected him, both publicly and privately, he chose to completely ignore the facts. He didn’t change a thing he’d said, didn’t remove them. Instead, he took to burningman.org and the Regionals list to repeat them again, even though at this point he now new without a shadow of any doubt that they were lies.

Then the tag team of BMOrg’s Minister of Propaganda and director of Communications, who were responding to the many comments on their blog post which the community had waited 3 months for, said this when I raised an objection again to their Director spreading both personal and false information about me:

This seems like an open admission to me. The context is important here. The context is not simply them being asked about their comment policy, the context is me asking them to remove false and personal information being posted at burningman.org by one of their Directors.

It’s also worth noting that none of us can post links on their blog, now called “Voices of Burning Man”. Any post with a link goes to the censors, who don’t seem to approve them if the link in any way supports a negative opinion about BMOrg. Many Burners have encountered their comment vanishing there, simply because they tried to back it up with a reference. BMOrg provide a field “web site” in the comments, if you put “burners.me” in that your post gets automatically censored. Yet somehow “Mortician” was able to post a link to Danger Ranger’s Facebook post that had been reproduced on eplaya.burningman.org. They also had no problem letting “The Man” post a link to a negative tabloid story about me, in which I was the victim of a frivolous lawsuit and the Murdoch organization’s global hacking scandal.

The comment policy actually says:

we expect commenters to identify themselves in their posts, and conduct themselves as they would as guests at a party, where spirited conversation is welcome, but unruly and rude behavior is not…Anonymous comments are not permitted here. Our contributors will identify themselves when we write Burning Blog; in turn, we want to know who you are and that there’s a real person behind the words you post. We’ve seen what can happen in spaces that make it easy for “hit and run” comments: things can go completely septic, fast.

And yet, rude, anonymous and septic comments against Burners.Me and myself personally get to stay. No problem there.

There is more to BMOrg’s desire to not be 100% factually accurate than just their comment policy.

First of all, there is nothing in the Bylaws of the Burning Man Project, their Mission and Values statement, or anywhere else about truth and honesty. If there is any document from Burning Man that states that they DO have to be honest and/or factually accurate in what they say, I’d love to see it; it should be easy for them to produce it.

Let me give you a few examples of the public falsehoods they’ve spread.

1. On November 25 Minister of Propaganda Will Chase came here to comment on our post Donation Tickets: Here to Stay and said:

“Actually, charitable donation tickets are tickets that Burning Man donates to charities for their fundraising raffles”

On December 3, burningman.org said:

“The Donation Ticket Program sold tickets between May and July. No tickets were sold through this channel after August 1. Tickets were sold for face value plus a $250 tax-deductible donation to Burning Man Project. “

and

“We have eliminated the Burning Man Project Donation Ticket Program”

2. We leaked that they were selling tickets above face value to VIPs, and giving a small amount of the money to their ~~charity~~ non-profit. On October 10 on the Theme Camp Organizers Facebook group, I asked Rosie Lila, a BMOrg employee who we understand is their dedicated Commodification Camp liaison,

How did these Commodification Camps get so many tickets, Rosie?

to which she replied:

I don’t have specific information on the tickets distribution at this time.

I pointed her to Steven Young, who works for Burning Man and sent the email that we’d leaked.

Then readers leaked us screenshots, which we published on October 30. At this point they were still trying to ignore the issue. Despite my assistance to help the left hand figure out what the right hand had been up to, on Nov 11 they were still pleading ignorance at burningman.org:

How did turnkey camps get all their tickets?

Do turnkey camps get preferential treatment

?Were people buying blocks of tickets through the Burning Man Project donation ticket program in the days before the event?

….The importance of these questions requires collaboration and input from a wide variety of people including staff, theme camp leaders, artists, Regional Network leaders, turnkey camp producers, and participants. We are still gathering information and identifying the most effective solutions.

Eventually, they “came clean” and admitted to what they had done. However, they still said:

No tickets were sold through this channel after August 1

Proof that BMOrg continued to sell tickets to the “sold out” event after August 1, and after the OMG sale ended, comes from this statement from Danger Ranger’s Facebook page that I captured before it was shut down for TOS violations:

On the 21st of August, 2014, the first Burning Man ticket was sold for Bitcoin in a face-value equivalency transaction as an experiment in on-line reputational trust between individuals. Now all we need is a ‘Pay in BTC’ button added to the ticket purchase section of the Burning Man website.

3. BMOrg published a page, not linked to anywhere else on their site, saying “We pay $4,522,952 a year to the BLM”. This was picked up and repeated by the Reno Gazette Journal and other publications as a statement of fact, despite their 2013 Afterburn report saying the $4.5 million line item was for “BLM and other usage”. I contacted the BLM directly, and their manager responsible for Burning Man confirmed that BMOrg only paid them $3.45 million. We exposed this here, and questioned whether “Other usage” included a payment to Decommodification, LLC or the other private companies owned by the directors. BMOrg have never corrected or explained their misinformation.

4. Earlier this year, BMOrg crowed to the media “we have completed our transition to a non-profit”, as if it was now a fait accompli. Larry Harvey said “the truth is we’ve surrendered all rights of ownership”. It was left to us to prove that no, they hadn’t. What they had done was to create a secretive company called Decommodification LLC, owned by the 6 founders, and transfer the core assets of the business into that. Larry Harvey then revealed:

My fellow founders and I are the sole members of this entity whose chief property is the name “Burning Man”. This too will be transferred to the non-profit in three years time, unless the partners elect “not” to do so

I could go on, because there are many more examples, but I think I’ve made my point. There is a consistent pattern of misinformation from this organization. There is no policy requiring them to be truthful – if there is, let’s see it. Meanwhile, if someone can show us we’re wrong, we correct it. I try very hard to be truthful, and provide links to the source of all my claims. This update alone took me an hour and a half because of the need to do that.

As for Lemur, this is far from an unbiased person. This troll went so far as to create a dedicated hate site about me last weekend, chronicling my “meltdown” over being doxed in the DangerGate scandal, which used the phrase “in this author’s opinion” 13 41 times:

Burners.me

Snarky. Cheeky. Grumpy. Dopey. Never Bashful.

Monthly Archives: December 2014

Peaceful Warriors, Hackers and Merry Pranksters

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