Back Once Again With The Renegade Master

The Teapot, by Kyonica Von Houten – placed on a trailer to comply with BLM regulations. Photo: Kyonica Von Houten. Source: Black Rock Renegade

Best of luck to everyone attending the official Burning Man Commodification Man event this year. Look out for monkeypox! Hopefully everyone in the Orgy Dome is max-boosted and fully butt-masked at all times.

Burning Man hasn’t happened for the last couple of years…officially. In fact it has happened, and every account we’ve heard from those who attended the last two decentralized & decommodified burns said burning without the Org was even better than Burning with them – and the $250,000 hotel room camps that their leadership inspired [see Plug-n-Play Goes All The Way…to the Top of the Pyramid, A Sherpa’s Tale, Radical Sherpa Reliance, JT Finally Speaks]

Here’s what Burning Man looked like in 2021, without the Org:

Just like the last couple of years, Renegade Man is free once again, and completely decentralized. This time it starts on Labor Day, just North of the Commodification Man site. There are no tickets, organizers, or purposes. Yet there is a big fuck off glowy Man, portapotties, and all the other accoutrements of an epic Burn. Only: without the Org telling everyone who’s in and who’s out, who can Plug-n-Play in hotel camps next to them and who gets banished to the Outer Rim just for attending Renegade Man last year.

We hear some of the major art cars are very nervous about attending Renegade Man, fearing they will be punished by BMorg if they do; while at the same time there are Billionaire Burners who have their own Utopian visions who could care less about the rules of the Org. Sounds like all the ingredients for a fun time, with many less of the ingredients that can take away fun times.

If you make it all the way through to the other side of the Temple burn, congratulations: you managed to do more than 70% of your fellow Burners this year. Many didn’t make it past Monday, or show up at all. Now it’s Labor Day, what are you gonna do? Ready to go back to reality yet? Or do you really need just.one.more.dance…

Whether you partied like a rock star librarian, bailed out early, or didn’t even go to Burning Man at all…you might be interested in Black Rock Renegade’s free After Party, out past the trash fence. Join their Facebook group, if you have an art project that would need resources to bring out there hit them up for crowdfunding…there are definitely some high rollers involved, and the more art (cars) the better.

Here are the instructions from Black Rock Renegade on how to find the event, using the What3Words navigation app:

As a decentralized non-event, the exact location of the Renegade cannot entirely be defined either, however, some of it is expected to take place North of the Playa in the vicinity of what3words location fostering.stun.hopping or GPS coordinates [40.95161, -119.09563] (Google maps). For good form, we recommend avoiding camping at what3words location annual.harmless.substitute.

Some folks have created a “directory” map for dispersed campers wishing to indicate where they intend to camp.

There will also be a gated event temporarily privatizing 77% of the Playa and the 8 Miles Playa entrance, but the 12 Miles entrance will be open to individuals “traveling through, without stopping, the public closure area on the west or east playa roads” (section J.(1)(a) of the closure order) – see our info on getting there.

For more information see blackrockrenegade.org


Flashback 2016

The Scandals – Further Details

Plug-n-play has got out of control in recent years, ever since BMorg made a movie complaining about it called Spark. They moved almost immediately from throwing Playa)'(Skool under the bus for having RVs in their camp to promoting bus tour packages and concierge culture. We’ve seen the escalation of executive luxury from Chip Conley’s catered celebration camp to Billionaire’s Row with wristband-only cocktail bars and $54,000 a “head” swinger camps. Burning Man’s own airline now offers a VIP helicopter taxi service. Even the cops are cashing in, with BLM-branded art installations, multi-million dollar air-conditioned compounds and helicopter joyrides for their families to lavish dinners. We’ve had a War on EDM which saw long-time participants given the cold shoulder and resulted in the creation of a DMZ. And all of this is happening while Reno becomes the latest tax haven for oligarchs fleeing the Panama Papers scandal.


in 2022 at Commodified Man there will only be MORE plug and plays paying even more money. Some of the things we’ve heard are outrageous…but we’re sworn to secrecy. You’ll be able to spot them though…let us know if you see any BMorg big-wigs there enjoying the 7 star hospitality

Whatever happened to the new 2019, green, emissions-free Burning Man, anyway? World domination, as planned from the hot tubs at Esalen? Time is running out…maybe decentralized Renegade Man will lead the way by Leaving Less Trace than centralized Commodified Man does. Last year they created a carbon-neutral Burning Man out of battery powered drones.

Featured image: Josh Wolf, via brokeassstuart.com

Burning Man 1990. Image credit: Stewart Harvey

What Happened to Safety Third? Cancelling Two Years in a Row is Taking “Leave No Trace” Far Too Literally.

A guest post from Burning Man’s original DJ Terbo Ted

What Happened to Safety Third?

As expected, on April 27th the org canceled 2021 Burning Man, the second year in a row. At this point, the organization behind the Man have forfeited or absconded their role and they should step out of the way, or face competition from other groups for the BLM land rights for Labor Day Weekend on the Black Rock Desert.

Back before Burning Man was profitable, they would come up with some clever new LLC name for the man each year. And the artists making theme camps would change themes each year. Whatever intellectual property the org is clinging to is flimsy at best. Burner culture is bigger than the org. I think people would gladly attend ‘Torch the Sucker 23” if it involved camping in a temporary city on the playa and actively expressing our lifestyle there.

I am far too busy to write a scathing retort to the org, but I must. Here in Las Vegas- the same Battle Born State of Nevada as the Black Rock Desert- things are rapidly ramping up back to normal. This coming Saturday, May 1st, Nevada Counties are taking control over their own Covid mitigation measures, with most opening 100% this week, or sometime around June 1 at the latest. Already I’m furiously busy with public art and music projects- that’s what us Burners do- and we haven’t even made it to May 1.

Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak is as proud and overt a bleeding heart liberal as possible, issuing dozens of Covid mitigation Emergency Directives over the past year, even recently. He’s enacted every sort of micro-management of public interaction as possible, keeping pace with Governors Whitmer, Newsom and Cuomo. And even Sisolak is ready for Nevada to be 100% open, weeks before this Summer. Keep in mind that in rural Nevada Counties- like where The Burn happens- these folks openly loathe Sisolak and have been refusing to comply with his directives since last year.

A year ago, global elites were warning us that based on computer modeling and simulations, that something like three and a half percent of all Covid patients would die, and that between sixty and seventy percent of the world would catch it. In simple terms, imagine if two percent of the world died off: if you have one thousand facebook friends, it would have meant that twenty of them would be dead by now. This scale of death never happened anywhere on earth, mitigation methods in place or not.

We were told by the news media that superspreader events like the Sturgis motorcycle rally, or the Super Bowl, would lead to mass casualties. We never saw thousands of deaths or hospitalizations afterward due to those gatherings. Remember the godawful non-stop Trump airport campaign rallies last year? Those events full of fat old people with hand lettered signs with spelling errors, the folks who refused to wear masks and didn’t socially distance? Those people didn’t die off in a mass extinction event either.

We have enough telemetry and data by now to know that approximately forty percent of all Covid deaths are from nursing homes, and that a huge percentage of the deaths are from the elderly, especially obese or diabetes patients. In all my years on the playa I can’t ever recall a theme camp full of geriatrics in medical gurneys with attendant staff, or any sort of dialysis station on the Burner Map. Burners are not the at risk people.

The Burning Man event itself has always been full of mask wearing attendees. Even at HUGE playa events like Robot Heart or Mayan Warrior- even the Burn or Temple Burn- there’s so much space Out There that social distancing is already kind of part of the culture.

In my opinion, Larry Harvey, if he were alive, would not have canceled last year or this year’s event. I worked closely with Larry during the early and mid 1990s, I’d walk over to his apartment on Alamo Square in The City all year long to discuss our plans for the desert. When the disastrous HellCo year in 1996 happened, about a third of us organizing the event- including myself- quit going. It was no fun to promote a festival (Larry himself proudly called it a Festival back then) where someone had died, multiple people were seriously injured and even more were arrested. I remember running across Larry near the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco near City Hall after we got back to SF from the playa that year; he was solemnly and forlornly staring into space, ruminating on the horrors we had experienced. But Larry made 1997 happen at all costs, and the event continued, even with so many of us distancing ourselves from it.

The early Burners were pranksters and anarchists. The early events were about creating an experience that was as disconnected as possible from the default world. Today it seems the Burner culture is very deep into the red and blue state culture war, siding with whatever comes out of MSNBC or the New York Times. This evolution is infuriating. It does seem to match what has happened to Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone arose out of 1967 San Francisco, and it was originally about LSD and opposing the Viet Nam War. Today Rolling Stone can be outright hawkish, or spewing out hagiography extolling the virtues of the visibly corrupt and privileged Kamala Harris.

Right now, here in Nevada, we are seeing lots of proudly vaccinated people- including local Burners- out and about socializing.

Reading through the org’s distancing themselves from doing any actual work this year, it’s clear that they have let their torch go out. I’m pretty sure that the vendors leasing the porta potties could figure it out between now and September. I’m pretty sure the org could come up with A-Z street names over a couple of pizzas delivered to their office. I’m pretty sure the org could continue to exploit free volunteer labor to do much of the staffing, as usual. Heck, I’ve got all my playa gear packed up and ready to go- for years now- all I need is fresh water and batteries and a few other things and I’m out there.

Really, we need to figure out how to disassociate the current org from the Burner culture and have full scale, organized and permitted events on the playa without their involvement. And that seems like that’s what the org’s vibe is right now too.

About the storyteller:
Terbo Ted first visited the Black Rock Desert in 1992 when there was no gate, no perimeter, no road, no trash fence and you could drive your car as fast as you wanted in any direction. Terbo was the first DJ to play in Black Rock City, with no one there to hear his set on a dusty Friday afternoon. Later, in the early years he was the only one ever to be called “Mayor of the Techno Ghetto.” His playa self and default world self can be remarkably similar these days.

[Featured image: Burning Man 1990, Stewart Harvey via Trippingly.Net]

Image credit: reno gazette journal

BURNILEAKS: Government Ramps Up Secrecy Over Burning Man

Has Burning Man burned out? Just like last year, this year you can go for free to “Not Burning Man”. Same place (but more to explore), no tickets, no fences, nobody searching your car at the gate and making you ring some cowbell.

Source: NPR

It’s hard to imagine a more pure expression of Radical Self-Reliance, Gifting, Radical Self-Expression, Immediacy (no multi-hour lines), Radical Inclusion (no dress codes, truly open to anyone of any means) or Decommodification than Not Burning Man. There’s probably even more stuff that gets burned there, just like in the good old days.

Meanwhile BMorg are still selling tickets for $475 to the non-event (annual subscription encouraged). This in itself is audacious enough, but they also rather ingeniously invented the idea of “pre-tickets” – a $2500 ticket that gives you a guaranteed right to purchase a ticket in the future. For an event that doesn’t happen any more. Fyre festival, y’all just a bunch of rank amateurs. Meet fire festival, masters of the Principle of GrIFTING!

They’ve also kept busy scooping up $5 million+ in donations and another $5 million+ in COVID loans grants and doing who-knows-what in their hipster HQ.

We’re saving the world! Even without having Burning Man any more! Please donate everything you have and more.


Radical Transparency

Thanks once again to our source who has been filing FOIA requests about the Burning Man Project for many years now.

People have been FOIAing Burning Man since 2013 – including us. This time BMorg – who hailed themselves as Unlikely Leaders In Transparency a few short years ago – went so far as to sue the United States Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management to block FOIA requests about their festival.

This was covered in VICE.

The case was dismissed with prejudice after Burning Man reached a settlement with the BLM to redact information from their FOIAs. Now even stuff that they used to share has been redacted.

We have long speculated that more expensive tickets and vehicle passes are sold than are officially revealed, or perhaps even permitted. Redacting the information does nothing to dampen down the speculation – if everything was legit, why would you have to do that?

It seems that for some reason the Feds find it imperative that BMorg maintain their false narrative that “nothing is for sale on the playa but water, ice and coffee”. Inquiring Burner minds want to know how much “nothing” a year is made from fuel sales, aircraft operations, the Burner Express bus service, and a smorgasbord of licensed vendors. The details of who sells what to whom on the Playa are considered SECRET information by the government. Ask yourself, why? What other rave would be able to achieve something like this?

What is in this tax-free “charity”‘s information that necessitates spending your tax dollar and your ticket dollar on lawsuits to hide? Trade secrets? There are no competitors! What other festival runs its own airport and airline?

Burning Man is supposedly a non-profit dedicated to making the world a better place by promoting its Tin Principles. It’s definitely not a rave or anything, it’s just a coincidence that everywhere you go in Black Rock City you find the world’s top DJs playing on massive sound systems with lasers and video walls while everyone around you is on drugs wearing glowy shit. At least…that’s the official story.

Burning Man has been the largest annual event held on Federal land and a big money-spinner for all kinds of agencies. It has also been a crime statistic disaster for the local Sheriff’s county, who see a massive spike in all kinds of crime, some quite violent, from tourists during the time of the festival.

There were 41 arrests during the 2019 event. Another juvenile went missing:

In the past Population and Public Health and Safety information was shared with the public by this public benefit corporation working with a permit to have their event on public land:

What changed? Burning Man didn’t happen last year and it’s not happening this year. It may never happen again, which would be welcomed by the traditional land owners the Paiute people, the local community, and the San Francisco community. So why such an extreme need for secrecy?

We know why.