I usually talk about how to reduce the damage drugs can do to people, but today I want to switch it up a little bit. I’m going to tell you about the Mreah Prew Phnom trees of Asia, the Sassafras trees of America, and how our voracious appetite for drugs is hurting them. This isn’t a story about water usage or gang violence, but of appetites. The explosion in popularity of MDMA has ensured one of the trees that produce a precursor substance, safrole oil, is now critically endangered. It’s estimated (not verified) that more than 5 million trees have been destroyed over the last 10 years.
Formally named Cinnamomum parathenoxylon, the tree grew in Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan & Vietnam, but is currently most often found in Cambodia. The remaining population is clustered in the Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary, as cultivation of the tree is increasingly restricted. When the roots are chopped up and processed, safrole, an essential oil is produced. This stuff has been an herbal remedy, a critical part of perfumes, soaps & can be used to make MDMA.
Gizmodo yesterday had a fascinating story about the Black Rock City Ministry of Urban Planning contest to design a new layout for Black Rock City.
Burning Man is an experiment, right? So why should only Larry Harvey and Stuart Mangrum be the ones conducting the experiment, by setting the themes? Why not experiment with new ways of living together, a temporary, pop-up civilization? Personally, I always thought was what Burning Man was all about. These days, I wonder if the nature of the experiment has perhaps been different all along from the sales pitch we were given over the Kool Aid water cooler.
We have been pretty amazed by the scale of the response.
Since we announced the project last fall, 1629 people and teams from 168 countries have signed up to participate.
To date, we have received 72 submissions.
Gizmodo’s story goes through many of the submissions. I’ve selected a couple of examples:
This proposal offers elements for “neighborhood improvement” like the addition of designated parks and public squares that could become locations for cafes and other meeting places, by Phil Walker of CallisonRTKL, USA
A proposal to redesign Burning Man’s Black Rock City as a Navajo mandala, by Sergio Bianchi, Simone Fracasso, and Chiara Pellegrin of Italy
The founder is a double digit Burner and software engineer:
The competition was spearheaded by Brian McConnell, a software engineer and ten-year Burning Man veteran. The original idea was to create a site-specific installation at the festival itself presenting visionary ideas for the urban planning of Black Rock City. But as McConnell quickly realized, thinking about designing a smarter temporary city also surfaced some bigger ideas which might extrapolate into other areas of city-building. McConnell was particularly impressed by the quality and originality of proposals, he said. “There are some designs that have gone completely out of the box.”…
The submissions, as well as all the online comments, will be published in a book that will be available for purchase and will be given to the festival organizers. “The best-case scenario would be that the planners see something that’s very interesting or extraordinary and decide to use it in some way,” said McConnell. But he also loves the idea of delivering annual feedback through the competition format. “The real goal of this would be to make it part of the annual planning process and kind of a ritual,” he said. Planners could offer up concerns and ask for improvements that could be implemented the following year.
McConnell also sees the potential value of completely reinventing the city’s plan each year, perhaps with a layout that responds to the theme, which changes annually. “It’s gotten so large they can’t do radically different things,” he said. “What if each time you went it was a significantly different city plan, and you would have to figure it out?”
As someone who’s only been to Burning Man 11 times, that sounds like a great idea. They’ve already shown they can have a “2.0” of any particular theme, so we can always go back to the past. That’s part of it too. In the future we will probably have “Fertility 21”.
What is stopping us from making this experimental city in the desert an actual experiment?
Is it Tradition? Ritual? A lack of ideas, vision, leadership?
Or is it the nature of the existing experiment, that is still being done on all the rats in this alluring anarchic maze without walls – who ALL voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by participating ?
Rod Garrett was great, may he rest in peace; David Best is amazing, and doesn’t need Burning Man to be an artist on the world stage. Let’s give the fresh, young, new, unseen and untried ideas a chance. Why should only the Medici and their bankster friends get to decide the direction art, civilization, technology takes?
If you didn’t get it yet, I think an experiment to come up with different layouts for Black Rock City is an excellent idea. Bauhaus and the Panopticon have been tried, OK, let’s move on.
[Update 3/23/16 5:53 pm – added images and link to video clip of Burning Man Founder talking about the city design]
We recently caught wind of a Black Rock City Street Plan Design Competition hosted by an experienced group of participants calling themselves the Black Rock City Ministry of Urban Planning (BRCMUP). The Burning Man organization has nothing to do with it, but we thought, hey, this could be fun to watch. And then an architecture blog called ArchDaily wrote about the competition on August 16 without doing its journalism homework, so now we have to clear a couple things up.
Burning Man is not involved with this competition, and we aren’t “select[ing] a winner”. The BRCMUP organizers never said we were, either. They say they’ll present their winner to us, and then it’s up to us what we do with it. So the ArchDaily blog post was in error, and it has since been corrected.
As for the contest itself, the official description is worded pretty strongly:
“The final choice of design will rest with bmorg [sic] based on a combination of popularity, logistics and space considerations (including the option to retain the current city plan).”
We love the ingenuity of Burners and are curious to see what they come up with through this competition. We will certainly take a look at all the top designs in this competition, not just the winner, out of curiosity and admiration. The ideas generated by this competition could also be useful to Regional Events, which are in various stages of growth and planning, each with their own location’s design challenges, and we think that’s great. But there are no plans to redesign Black Rock City.
Thanks to BRCMUP for starting an interesting conversation, and we look forward to seeing what comes of it.
So, we started an interesting conversation. And so far 72 designs have been submitted. The designs show just how much unbelievable talent is available for BMOrg to tap into, if they truly chose crowd-sourcing, participation, civic responsibility, immediacy, and communal effort as their path.
You can view randomly chosen designs from the gallery and enter the competition at Black Rock City Ministry of Urban Planning. Seems to me that would be a much better official Ministry for BMOrg to have than their only one so far: Propaganda.
Let’s discuss these ideas. Many of them don’t even require the 0.666% of a circle pentagram design to change.
Or, even better than just talking: put on parties based on those designs and we’ll promote them here and go check them out.
We know that it’s not always sparkles and rainbows in the Burner world, especially on social media. There are trolls and sock puppets, shills, disinformation agents, propagandists, doxing, flame wars, admins blocking users then talking smack about them, and all manner of other antisocial nastiness to contend with [read our guide on how to do that].
TL;DR – he set up a doxing site and published court documents. A jury ruled even though there was no defamation, his lawyer stated the ‘jury saw it as some kind of vendetta’, and ruled the blogger has to pay his target a $2200 fine.
New court ruling holds Portland man liable for inflicting emotional distress by posting another man’s legal history.
A ruling last month in a Portland defamation case could have wide-reaching effect on what people can say about each other on social media—even if those statements are true.
A Multnomah County Circuit Court jury ruled that a local member of the Burning Man community intentionally inflicted emotional distress on another man with two Facebook posts and a website that described him as a danger to women.
The jury awarded Joseph A. Brown $2,200 for emotional distress, even though it found the posts and website created by Phil Hutchinson did not defame Brown or portray him in a false light.
That’s an unusual verdict, says Kyu Ho Youm, a media law professor at the University of Oregon.
“To find someone guilty of intentional infliction of emotional distress [without defamation] is extremely unusual,” Youm says. He says juries rarely find someone liable for intentionally inflicting emotional distress unless they’ve spread lies. “We are talking about something way outside the boundary of decency.”
On Jan. 30, 2015, Hutchinson wrote a public Facebook post about Brown, alleging he had been ostracized from multiple social circles “for not respecting boundaries and the withholding of sexual consent.”
In a second Facebook post on Feb. 11, 2015, Hutchinson posted a link to a website he created that features several public records related to Brown’s legal history. That history comprises an arrest for voyeurism, restraining orders—including one from his ex-wife—three stalking orders, and a conviction in a “complex burglary case” that culminated in Brown allegedly breaking into a woman’s house and climbing into bed with her.
In a sworn court declaration, Hutchinson stated he didn’t intend to harm Brown but felt he needed to “alert the community to behavior [he] believed caused danger to women who might interact with Mr. Brown.”
Hutchinson says he built the website because he wanted to substantiate his claims. “I thought it would be better than just another vague post on Facebook,” he tells WW.
Hutchinson made the posts and the website after Brown repeatedly broke a no-contact request from an ex-girlfriend (who was Hutchinson’s former roommate) and attempted to apply for services at the nonprofit where she was employed.
Jonathan Radmacher, Hutchinson’s attorney, says Hutchinson, in crafting the website, was acting within reason. “Phil used public record and didn’t delve beyond that,” Radmacher says. “But the jury saw it as some kind of vendetta against Brown.”
Civil suits, Radmacher says, do not set legal precedent, but Hutchinson still has to pay Brown the $2,200 in damages.
Brown’s lawyer, Rebecca Cambreleng, declined to comment on the verdict. Brown could not be reached for comment.
The verdict raises questions about what individuals can and cannot post on social media and what is and is not protected speech on the Internet, where the lines between traditional and social media are becoming increasingly blurred.
“[Hutchinson] was doing a kind of blogging, and his intention has to do with calling attention to very serious public issues,” Youm says. “More people are talking about these kinds of things through their own blogs and websites, and I’m not sure it’s so outrageous as to make a claim to intentional infliction—especially with the evolving journalistic landscape.”
One of the women who testified against Brown, whose name WW is withholding, says she’s hesitant to speak about Brown publicly.
“It’s scarier now to post anything, because you could be fined for speaking out,” she says. “It’s absurd.”
Being fined for speaking out seems extremely absurd in a free country. Building a web site to shower hate on someone is also pretty absurd.
The “explosive sex crimes allegations” story raises, once again, the issue of consent in our community. Some Regionals have made it the 11th Principle, others have talked about it. It’s time for action, BMOrg. How do we achieve radical safety from sex crimes in Black Rock City?
