May 28 2021

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.

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.

Apr 12 2017

Thought Police: Don’t Call It A Festival

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Yet another preachy Burnier-Than-Thou post at the BJ telling Burners they’re doing it wrong.

For all the things that Burning Man certainly is, one that mindful Burners will vigilantly note that Burning Man is not, is a festival.

The word “festival” encompasses a lot of ideas (film festivals, music festivals, taco festivals etc.) but usually it expresses a period of celebration. Burning Man contains some of the same ingredients, but it’s a totally different recipe. At Burning Man an effigy is raised and eventually burned, but the experience is accompanied as much by tears as by laughter.

Do we celebrate at Burning Man? Absolutely. Ask any Burner why they’re involved, though, and their response will often sound much more purposeful, like you might expect from a teenager running away to join the circus or a monk on a pilgrimage in a foreign land.

[Source]

Barf. Hate to break it to you, BMorg, but not everybody goes to Burning Man because they want to be a monk on a pilgrimage. Some go to have a great time, that is: entertainment. That is the product that is being offered here.

Hey, if the culture is suffering, it couldn’t be because of Caravansicle or VIP tickets or all the cool celebrities and 100+ licensed vendors on the Playa, or the luxury chopper flights for the Sheriff’s family to 18 course dinners, or BMorg starting their own private airline. These are all important parts of ~~a circus for teenage runaways~~ radical self-reliance and civic responsibility.

Cultural challenges can’t be because of the founders starting to celebrate their 70th birthdays. And there’s no way that a year-round organization of more than 100 full time staff dedicated to spreading the culture could be doing a bad job, because they all got together at Esalen and the GLC and told each other how great they are in a group hug. So that only leaves one group left to blame. We, The Burners. And if we could all just stop calling it a festival, then we wouldn’t have to radically include so many of those gosh darned ravers!

black rock helicopter da vinci

burner air express helicopter

Friends don’t let friends call Burning Man a festival? If that is true, then it proves that BMorg is no friend to Burning Man. Here’s their web site:

“Burning Man isn’t your usual festival”. Makes is sound like it’s a festival, albeit an unusual one.

Here’s the trademark, part of the actual ownership of Burning Man which the founders did not transfer into the non-profit structure, instead creating a new company which earns revenues from licensing Burning Man’s intellectual property that they ironically named Decommodification, LLC.

Screenshot 2017-04-12 10.02.21

[Source]

That sure makes it sound like an art festival (with live entertainment). Seems pretty clear.

Burning Man’s press kit in 1995 described it thus:

“an arts festival, a ritual sacrifice, a spiritual quest, and a post-modern carnival of the absurd” [Source: Burning Man archives, Bancroft Library]

This is also how it was seen by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, the charity non-profit pre-cursor to the Burning Man Project of today:

Here’s Burning Man founder/owner Danger Ranger calling it a festival on their board of directors page at burningman.org:

Screenshot 2017-04-12 14.16.09.png

[Source]

Being on the boards of both Esalen and the Burning Man Project, Chip Conley swings both ways. Image: Fest300

And while we’re talking about the Board, we also have Burning Man Project Director Chip Conley and his site Fest300, which tracks the top 300 festivals in the world. Not only is Burning Man a permanent feature in this list, but so are several of its regional subsidiaries. If you look at the mix of the content on the site, Burning Man certainly gets far more coverage at this festival site run by a Burning Man director than any of the other 299 festivals.

In the original August 15, 1994 partnership agreement between Larry Harvey, John Law and Michael Mikel to form Paperman LLC and operate a business under the name Burning Man with its principal place of business in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, it is specifically called a festival:

[Source: Case 3:07-cv-00134-WHA Document 15-1 ]

In 1994, they had no problem making net profit from the sale of the Burning Man Festival videos:

Here’s some bragging from BM founder Harley Dubois that she knows a thing or two about how festivals run. Presumably completely irrelevant experience to Burning Man, since it’s not a festival. So why bother even mentioning it in the BJ?

As founder of Burning Man’s Community Services Department, she knows a thing or two about how festivals run…

“What a treat to be invited to Boom to sit on a panel with founders from other festivals.” [Source]

That sure sounds to me like someone who sees themselves as a founder of a festival.

A search for “festival” on Burning Man’s web site turns up 1130 articles. Sure, there are a few saying “we’re not a festival”, but that seems to be a more recent development.

Screenshot 2017-04-12 14.19.16.png

You can also read about the Burning Man festival in their academics and books about Burning Man sections.

For many years they have had no issues with Burning Man being described as a festival in TIME, Dezeen, Wikipedia, Bloomberg, NPR, Stubhub, ABC News, The Atlantic, Hollywood Reporter, Wall Street Journal , Washington Post, the New York Times…it would be easy to find more, but I think I’ve made my point.

Conclusion

It’s either

a) all these sources, including respected media publications, the founders and legal documents like the trademark registration, are in error and it’s not a festival. In which case Chip Conley needs to do the right thing and remove all references to Burning Man from his Fest300 site. Burning Man themselves need to say “it’s not a festival” on their web site, instead of “it’s not your usual festival”, and submit a new trademark application.

Or,

b) of course it’s a fucking festival. It’s a huge fuck-off party in the desert, with tons of stereo equipment and lasers and glowy shit. In which case this latest bullshit about “friends don’t let friends call it a festival” is simply more “social engineering” from BMorg, a minority group in Black Rock City who think they’re important and leading the way when in fact they are creating the problem. They are trying to keep the ravers out to clean up the city for their VIP spectators, and pointing fingers everywhere but the right direction. This battle was lost a long time ago. The ravers are part of the DNA of this “event”. Look elsewhere for the causes of your cultural decline.

As one commenter so aptly put it in the epic Burn.Life discussion, the fish rots from the head down. Arguing semantics about such matters as if it’s a festival (after 30 years) or if hundreds of choreographed fire dancers and a multi-hour pyrotechnic show are live entertainment seems like pointless navel-gazing to me. What’s the deal with all these plug-n-plays and on-Playa vendors? What’s the vision for Fly Ranch? These are much more pressing issues that the Burner community would like to see addressed. Who cares if people want to Instagram their burn, so long as they pick up MOOP and be kind to one another. It’s 2017, most of the people at the festival never knew a time without Internet and cellphones. Let them call it anything they want, as long as they participate.