image: Roadside Pictures/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Finally, more than a quarter of a year after the last week-long Burning Man event ended, BMOrg has given some official answers to the many concerns raised by the community in the wake of Caravansary. They gave us a double whammy:

Turnkey/Plug-n-Play Camping in BRC (written by “Burning Man”, probably several authors)

Equality, Inequity, Iniquity: Concierge Culture (written by Larry Harvey)

These posts only went on the “Voices of Burning Man” – their official blog. They weren’t posted to the 817,000 people on their Facebook page.

I recommend you read both posts in their entirety, because this article is going to be discussing the aspects of them that are relevant to the 115,000 Burners.Me readers. I’m going to talk about the concerns they addressed, directly or indirectly; and the ones they pretended don’t exist.

If you were expecting me to say “everything is wonderful now, BMOrg are so amazing for listening to us, let’s hug it out and party up!”…you should stop reading now, because you’re at the wrong blog. If we got the transparency we’d been promised, or got answers to most of the questions raised as “Community Concerns” here and at burningman.com .org, then I might be able to say that. But we didn’t, so I can’t – blame me for whining, rather than them for ignoring and misdirecting, if that is your wont.

Whether or not the community’s concerns get addressed, Burning Man will go on, and we can all have a good time there. Hey, it’s just a rave – who cares? “If you don’t like it, start your own”.

For those who do care, because they think there’s something special about this event – it’s more than just a festival, more than just a big drug- and sex- fuelled party, more than a corporate networking event – please read on. I care about this unique culture that we’ve all been creating together, and that’s why I’m taking the time to write this.

While it is nice that finally they have acknowledged some of our concerns, these posts raise as many questions as they answer.

Summary

As predicted, BMOrg have tried to downplay everything: “it was less than 1% of 1250 camps”. They make a big fuss about “policy changes”, but in the end the only real change is promising to end the practice of selling invite-only Donation tickets which we caught them at red-handed. Commodification Camps will have to have an interactive component, but they did this year too. Burning Man’s Board of Directors have nothing to do with the Burning Man event, so what they get up to at the event is nothing to do with BMOrg. Sherpas don’t even get a mention, they’re a non-issue. So are workers’ and artists’ rights. 58 Burner theme camps applied for placement and didn’t get it; 12 Commodification Camps got prime placement near the Plaza areas. Because none of them actually made a profit, it’s no big deal. BMOrg held on to 5,700 tickets all through the year, on top of the 61,000 official tickets. The Ten Principles are not rules, they’re just an “ethos”. On to the Carnival of Smoke and Mirrors now, Burners, they listened and they made a policy change so we can all be happy now.

Introduction

They are still trying to use language to re-define and diminish the issues.

The term “turnkey” has been used to describe camps with paid teams that set up infrastructure before other camp members arrive. This general definition could be applied to many camps, including many well-known, beloved and highly participatory theme camps.

[so why persist in using it? The community is calling them Commodification Camps, because this definition clearly explains the problem – Ed.]

Turnkey is a category that includes a variety of camps along a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum are camps that offer major contributions to the playa and depend on infrastructural support to do their work and provide their offering on the playa (the Temple Camp, for example); these camps have a team that provides support services, enabling their fellow campmates to focus on giving in ways that benefit the wider BRC community.

On the other end of the spectrum are “plug and play” or “concierge camps” (A.K.A. hotel camps, resort camps, commodification camps), where vacation-type experiences are sold in package deals at exclusive prices, often with no expectation or commitment by campers to contribute to the larger community. It is this latter type of camp we are addressing here

Why not just call them Commodification Camps? At least they acknowledged (once, in passing) that some people call them that. However, their response of saying “they’re all turnkey camps but some people call them concierge camps, so we’re going to talk about rich people and their luxury lifestyle, which exists in the Default world too”…is answering the wrong questions. If BMOrg really thinks this is what the community’s concerns are, they need to go to a listening workshop. Other than a few “Radical Revolutionaries” on *.burningman.com advocating vandalism, violence, class warfare, and communism, most Burners couldn’t care less how much money someone has. The whole point about this party is what you bring to the middle of nowhere to give to others, not what you do in the Default world. No Burner should be “Burnier-Than-Thou”, and no camp should be closed off to Burners.

It is the idea behind the Commodification Camps that is the problem: turning something free, based on Gifting by the whole community, into something packaged up and sold to profit a few. Burning Man is supposed to be based on principles such as Radical Self-Reliance, Participation, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leave No Trace, and particularly, Decommodification:

In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Decommodification was presented to us as a core Principle that Burners live by. It wasn’t supposed to be a for-profit LLC, extracting cash from “Burning Man” which has “fully transitioned to a non-profit” – except, it seems, for the annual event called “Burning Man”.

Being a member of the Burning Man Project Board does not grant any authority to make decisions about, or influence the operations of, the Burning Man event.

Say what?

BMOrg’s Questions

In their post of November 11, “Turnkey Camps – Moving Towards Effective Solutions“, BMOrg told us they were listening, and posed the following questions as their summary:

Is the Burning Man organization profiting off turnkey camps?
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? If so, why?
Are turnkey camps undermining the practice of Decommodification and Self-Reliance?
What is going to happen to the turnkey camps going forward? Is there accountability for poor behavior?

Since they didn’t bother to directly answer these in their “FAQ”, let me do it now.

Is the Burning Man organization profiting off turnkey camps?

No – not any more than they profit off any other camp. If any Burning Man Project Directors were trying to, they didn’t end up making any profit, so it doesn’t count. Anyway, Burning Man Project Directors have nothing to do with the Burning Man event.

How did turnkey camps get all their tickets?

As well as through methods available to “rank and file” Burners, it was via Invite-only Donation tickets above face value, and buying them from scalpers. They would have us believe that not a single ticket went to any Commodification Camp in the Directed group sale (aka World’s Biggest Guest List).

Concierge camps purchased tickets through all of the same avenues available to other participants and other large camps, including the early Pre-Sale, the main Individual Sale and on the secondary market. A few of these camps also purchased tickets through the Burning Man Project’s Donation Ticket Program

Invitations were sent to participants who had previously contributed to Burning Man Project, or who had expressed interest in doing so, including some in plug and play and concierge camps

Do turnkey camps get preferential treatment?

Officially, no. Pretty much every camp is a turnkey camp. They all said they would have interactive elements, and pick up their MOOP. Commodification Camps get no preferential treatment whatsoever, other than special access to tickets, placement in large, dedicated areas in K street, early access passes, and a lifting of the requirement to be packed up by Tuesday. Sure, they can leave tons of MOOP – but this will be noted by the Placement team when next year comes around.

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

Yes – technically, not in the last 3 weeks before the event. To raise money for BMP.

Are turnkey camps undermining the practice of Decommodification and Self-Reliance?

Yes. No big deal, the Principles aren’t rules.

What is going to happen to the turnkey camps going forward? Is there accountability for poor behavior?

Nothing. Poor behavior by a camp in the previous year and a bad MOOP score will be considered by the volunteer placement team in the future.

These answers are far from satisfactory. And the questions themselves left a lot to be desired, as they did not really address the community’s concerns.

The Community’s Questions

Earlier in the year, Halcyon chimed in on the Burning Blog. He got slammed for defending Plug-n-Plays, and to his credit took time to understand the issues, then posted again. He listened to all of us, and his swift response showed that he listened. In the comments during the controversy, he made a good attempt at summarizing the community’s questions:

I think this is a better description of the community’s actual concerns, rather than just the ones BMOrg cherry-picked to address. So how did they do with these questions?

1) Isolation / exclusivity of safari-style camps (wristband areas)

ACKNOWLEDGED, BUT NOT ADDRESSED. Commodification Camps can continue to be exclusive, even though it is “frowned upon” by BMOrg.

2) Use of paid labor of ticket holders during the event. (Some people working as gifts to community while others are working to make money)

NOT ACKNOWLEDGED OR ADDRESSED

3) Camp organizers running turnkey camps for profit. (Commodification of the Burning Man experience)

DENIED. They acknowledged (a) that there were Commodifcation Camps – 12 of them – but none of them made a profit. Therefore (b) no-one created a camp to make money. This is a logical fallacy known as a non-sequitur – (b) does not follow (a). “Attempted murder” is a crime, even though no actual murder occurred.

4) Unfair attainment of tickets by wealthy donors. (blocks of $650 tickets offered “discreetly” – while others use STEP)

ACKNOWLEDGED. They sold 1200 invitation-only Donation Tickets for above face value.

Invitations were sent to participants who had previously contributed to Burning Man Project, or who had expressed interest in doing so, including some in plug and play and concierge camps

They’ve cancelled this program for next year, though they still haven’t announced how the ticketing will be handled in 2015, or if there will be any price increases.

The door remains open for this type of thing to re-emerge under a different name. Will Chase, commenting on this blog a couple of weeks ago, said “Actually, charitable donation tickets are tickets that Burning Man donates to charities for their fundraising raffles, etc.” So it appears that VIP Donation tickets might be gone, but Charitable Donation tickets remain.

What remains unsaid, is blocks of tickets being sold by BMOrg insiders – possibly on the secondary market.

5) Unfair placement of turnkey camps (Inadequate interactivity while others do not get placed)

DENIED. They said there were 58 Burner camps who applied for placement and didn’t get it. This is supposedly fair. “Thousands” of Burners camp without getting placement – this used to be tens of thousands. BMOrg claim that all the Commodification Camps that got special placement were “committed to providing interactive experiences”, and they were placed deliberately around the 3, 6, and 9 o’clock plazas to create community.

6) Board member connections to above practices.

DENIED. The Board of Directors of the Burning Man Project have nothing to do with Burning Man. Involvement of any BoD in any Commodification Camps was not acknowledged. It appears that directors can break the rules at Burning Man, and act outside the Principles, without consequence.

Being a member of the Burning Man Project Board does not grant any authority to make decisions about, or influence the operations of, the Burning Man event. This also applies to resources at the event.

They denied that any tickets were taken out of the STEP queue. However, they stopped short of telling us exactly how many tickets were sold via STEP. We just have to take their word for this, since there is no audit, no transparency.

What they did acknowledge was that they added another 2500 tickets to be sold via STEP. They also added 2000 tickets to the last-minute OMG sale, and they sold 1200 Donation tickets. So this is 5,700 tickets that they sold IN ADDITION to the 61,000 tickets they “officially” had.

Why keep nearly 10% of the tickets in reserve until about a month before the event? It seems a little shady to me: artificially creating scarcity. The main effect of this was to keep ticket prices high on the secondary market all through the year, which was no doubt useful to justify the above face value asking price of the Donation tickets. Their permit specified their population for 5 years, so it’s not like they didn’t know they had these tickets to sell. $780,000 for 1200 Donation Tickets, plus $1,710,000 for 4500 tickets at $380 – this is an extra $2.5 million that they kept “up their sleeves”. If the event could break even with 61,000 tickets, then this is pure profit.

I know that certain BMOrg insiders get access to blocks of tickets they can sell. Do any of these get sold above face value? Other than illegally recording someone in a “sting”, this is impossible to prove. We’ll probably never know. Even BMOrg may not know. Their creation of extra scarcity sure helps this hypothetical scenario, which would be a way to award bonuses without actually paying out any extra cash.

Sherpas

Many Burners were dismayed to hear about the acceptance of paid employees in camps, which was highlighted by the New York Times before the event, and by whistle-blowers afterwards. The sherpas take tickets away from participating Burners. Other big concerns for many Burners were the slave-like working conditions imposed on these employees – including “if you quit, we’ll dump you in the desert” – and Commodification Camps putting up “help wanted” ads at the event hiring people for cash.

The impression you would get from BMOrg’s post is sherpas don’t exist. Perhaps it creates a sticky situation for BMOrg, who rely heavily on free volunteer labor to produce the event. If they acknowledge that there are many people out there getting paid, they bring to the attention of thousands of volunteers that they’re not. There was no mention of worker’s rights, which were demanded by some DPW volunteers, or a more fair treatment of artists.

Special Access to Tickets

They have finally admitted that they sold tickets to VIPs above face value – 1200 of them. They insist that none of these tickets were sold after August 1, which conflicts with reports from our sources. How did they work out who got a VIP invitation? That has still not been adequately explained.

Invitations were sent to participants who had previously contributed to Burning Man Project, or who had expressed interest in doing so, including some in plug and play and concierge camps. Other well-established theme camps also purchased Donation Tickets to cover a shortfall in tickets for their build crews and campmates.

What was the breakdown between existing donors, Commodification Camps, and Guest List theme camps?

Board Involvement

Their argument is that the Board of Directors of the Burning Man Project have nothing to do with the Burning Man event. This seems absurd, and is possibly necessary due to the self-dealing laws which prevent non-profit directors making profits off the tax-exempt organizations they volunteer for. Following this logic, the directors of Decommodification, LLC should also have nothing to do with the Burning Man event – even though, according to their lawsuit, they are DBA (doing business as) Burning Man.

Being a member of the Burning Man Project Board does not grant any authority to make decisions about, or influence the operations of, the Burning Man event.

If the Burning Man Project exists to promote the values of Burning Man around the world, shouldn’t it be important for its Directors to promote the values AT BURNING MAN?

Selective Rule Enforcement

2 of BMOrg’s Board of Directors are now working for AirBnB. AirBnB had listings at Burning Man this year. AirBnB’s “ironic” Burning Man advertisement is still up.

BoD Jim Tananbaum was behind Caravancicle. If such camps are completely against BM, how was he allowed to get away with it?

BoD Chip Conley made a video at Burning Man to promote his Fest300 business. DJ Sander van Doorn got shut down by BMOrg’s IP team for making a video of his trip this year. Meanwhile, Conley’s Fest300 commercial is still up. The video shows multiple violations of drone safety rules. Both videos are great, but that’s not the point. Why was Sander’s video bad, but Chip’s is fine? The same rules should apply to all Burners, whether they volunteer for the Board, Gate, DPW, or on the decks at a sound camp.

image: Sid Penance/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Disabled Vehicles

In 2014, we heard of the rumor, but can find no evidence internally that any camp received handicapped stickers for non-disabled golf carts or other conveyances

A very interesting choice of words. Could camps have non-decorated utility golf carts or “other conveyances”, that weren’t for handicapped people? This statement certainly allows for that – as long as they didn’t display a handicapped sticker, it seems like it was fine. If they had a handicapped person and received a sticker, it doesn’t seem like there was much enforcement about who was actually using the vehicle.

The information leaked to us by Burners is different. If you have any further knowledge or photos, please share.

Does the Board even care?

We gathered information internally and externally, and held a roundtable discussion with the Burning Man Project Board of Directors.

We then held a series of internal meetings with participation from three of Burning Man’s founders, event operations leadership, and the key teams poised to address this issue directly (Placement, Community Services, Ticketing and Communications).

What about the other 3 Founders? Is there some sort of internal politics going on behind the scenes? Or have they retired already, and just can’t be bothered with it all any more?

It took time to respond because we were determined not just to say “this is what happened” but also to say “this is what we plan to do about it.”

So what do they plan to do about it?

Cancel the Donation tickets. That’s about the extent of their policy changes. Although Commodification Camps will be required to have a strong interactive component, that was their policy already.

bringing a VIP lifestyle experience — with velvet ropes and wristbands — introduces an element of exclusivity into a culture that values inclusion, and those that opt in to these kinds of camps miss out on the transformative power of the event.

OK. So what will they do about that? Nada. Those camps are “missing out” and showing “bad manners”, but otherwise, no problem to be addressed, no policies to be changed.

What is the Burning Man organization doing to stop this?
Each year, we encounter a handful of companies advertising luxury, all-expenses paid package tours of Burning Man. When they make use of the Burning Man name or logo, our intellectual property team works to curtail promotional efforts by forcing any reference to ‘Burning Man’ to be removed.

So as long as Caravancicle doesn’t advertise, no problem. If Billboard wants to write a story promoting VIP festival packages on “Billionaire’s Row”, well, nothing BMOrg can do about it.

Meanwhile, artists still cannot in any way use Burning Man to market their art or fund-raise.

If Burning Man stops businesses from selling things in BRC, how can it allow for-profit theme camps that package and sell experiences in our gift economy?
Burning Man does not condone this activity. Commodification camps are not only in direct conflict with our culture, they are also not allowed by the terms of our permit.

BMOrg were clearly aware of the 12 Commodification Camps that they placed. They even gave one of the organizers a seat on their Board. They also gave those camps access to the invite-only Donation ticket program, that regular Burners didn’t get the chance to participate in.

You can find a list of the 45 permitted vendors in 2014 here. It doesn’t seem like all 12 Commodification Camps were on the list. The idea that because they didn’t end up making profits, it doesn’t matter, is not what the BLM Permit says.

Will tickets still be “packaged up” for Commodification Camps, which are now disguised as “turnkey camps on a spectrum”, and sold directly (and discreetly) under a different name than “Donation Tickets”? Some say this is the 800-lb gorilla that is still in the room. If they are, it is unlikely to be easy for us to track, unless the promised transparency somehow manifests.

Larry Harvey said “This issue of equality almost amounts to a straw man”.

Yeah it does. Equality, or lack thereof, is not the issue for the majority of Burners. Commodification, exclusivity, and Selective Rule Enforcement are the issues people have been complaining about.

It is as if these camps have been allowed to parade past the Main Sale ticket queue and insert themselves at the head of the line.

Yes. Not only is that how it seems – BMOrg have now acknowledged, that’s exactly what happened.

What I think these camps are really guilty of is being gauche. This is not so much about morals, it is more about manners, and we’re convinced bad manners can be mended.

Actually, it’s about Principles. Those who espouse them, should also be seen to be living by them, not flouting them. Can this be mended? Only if the leaders feel it’s important. Larry says:

these principles are in no way commandments. They represent an ethos that arose from the lived experience of a community; this means these values need to be internalized, they should become a kind of second nature, not a set of literal and unyielding rules that are imposed upon us

The Tin Principles. They’re not rules. They’re an ethos. Burn on.

The Community’s Response

Lest you think that we are an isolated voice in the wilderness, “being mean” because we have a “grudge against BMOrg” – here are some of the Burner community’s responses to these posts, completely independent of this site. There’s starting to be a lot of messengers to shoot.