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[edit] THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BLACK ROCK CITY
One unique feature of Black Rock City (BRC), the locale of Burning Man, is the total absence of commercial transactions. Instead, the economy is entirely constituted by one way gifting. Individuals bring their own supply of food and water, the necessities for survival. In the middle of the alkali desert, everything else is icing. All the amenities of living, the various elements of an economy, are freely given from person to person, from group to group. A division of labor arises in Black Rock City, thus capturing important economies of scale.
In the default world, the world outside of BRC, industrial organization is driven by the private sector, which in turn is fueled by a certain mercenary ethic. The center of the capitalist economy is the price system which aggregates information about supply and demand for various goods and services. Specifically, when there is a large gap between the demand and supply of a product, the price of that product on the market will be relatively high. Producers of those goods will receive respectively high wages; individuals driven by the mercenary ethic are drawn to produce those goods as opposed to other goods, for which provision awards a lower wage.
This system is complemented by a public sector, which among other things, taxes individuals and then provides public goods. These public goods tend to share two characteristics. Public goods are non-excludable, or extremely difficult to charge individuals based on their use, and non-rival, or undepletable based on increased use. Good examples of public goods in the default world are street lights, security and playgrounds. Unfortunately, the social understanding of the differences between the public and private sector is limited. The mercenary ethic too often governs the behavior of individuals who operate in the democratic and pseudo-democratic processes of public sector decision making. This results in certain public sector failures in the default world.
Alternatively, the BRC economy is fueled by the Burning Man ethic�a vague understanding of social participation that is expressed differently by different individuals. As opposed to a price system organizing economic behavior, individuals have to directly assess social supply and demand for the various services and goods they can provide. This changes the question one asks from, �What do I want?� to �What might others want?� Fortunately, the Burning Man ethic�s effect is not limited to provision of standard economic goods. People do give away alcohol to strangers, throw parties for strangers, and generally provide for their fellow man. But people also ruthlessly innovate with their generosity. From that generosity, the bedrock of the Burning Man ethic, emerges a radically divergent supply of goods and services. The goods and services provided by the participants, the producers, of Black Rock City, are fantastically unlike those existing in the default world. The physical expressions of generosity saturate the desert stage, and include costumes, decorate cars, theme camps, and art installations. Black Rock City, resulting from the absence of commercial transactions and the Burning Man ethic, is a landscape of landmarks. ~Vinay
[edit] TWO BLOG ENTRIES ABOUT BURNING MAN
by Erin
[edit] flowers are the things we know - 9/14/06
The most concrete thing Burning Man has changed for me is my dreams. For the first five or six days after I left the desert, it was literally all I dreamed about. This startled me, because it usually takes a period of weeks or months for new places and people to appear in my dreams-- I always imagined that it just took some time for my unconscious mind to absorb and process things. When I was thirteen years old, my family moved to a new house just a few blocks away from the one I had grown up in, and the process that my dreams went through to accommodate this change was fascinating. For a week or so, nothing changed. Then came the nightmares: every night I would find myself being chased by some evil and thinking, "home, I have to get home"-- but the home I was running to was inevitably the old house where I grew up. As the weeks went by, these dreams took a more sinister turn: when I finally got "home," it would be wrong somehow. Sometimes the floorplan had been changed around, sometimes somebody else's furniture was inside, and sometimes it was just plain empty. Finally, after more than a month, these nightmares subsided and I began to dream about my new house. Interestingly, now that I am an adult and living on the other side of the country, it is my childhood home that I dream about much more often than my adolescent one-- but Freud would be unsurprised.
I've observed similar processes throughout my life-- I never dreamt about CTY until weeks after it was over, I didn't start dreaming about college until well into my second semester, and even after two years I rarely dream about California. So when I woke up the day after Burning Man having visited a camp in my dreams where they constructed toasters out of recycled electronics, I was amazed-- never before had something penetrated my unconscious mind so rapidly.
Burning Man makes a fantastic dreamscape because just about anything humans can do is possible there. If at the real event I'd told my campmates that I had come across a toaster-construction camp, they would not have batted an eye. Their response would probably have been, "Awesome, did you totally make a toaster?". Almost every night since then, I have found myself out on the playa and encountering people doing amazing things-- in addition to making a toaster, I have sung songs, sewn a quilt, and been in a very makeshift production of A Winter's Tale, all with interesting and wonderful dream-people.
As near as I can figure, the reason I started dreaming about Burning Man immediately must be that it has some kind of immediate sympathy with my unconscious mind. The greeters at the gates of Burning Man say "welcome home" as you enter, even to first-timers like me-- at the time I thought it was cute, but now I am giving the idea some serious weight. My unconscious struggled violently against the idea of leaving my childhood home, but it instantly adopted the playa as a place to roam free. This may have something to do with the Burning Man credo of "radical self-expression"-- while there, you are free to do and be whatever on earth you want, as long as it isn't destructive. I had previously called this idea "freestyle existence," listing it sometimes as an "interest" on various online profiles-- I have even been known to identify myself as a "freestyle existence artist," by which I mean I am very well practiced in being exactly myself, in knowing what I want and doing what I want and being who I want. It might be tempting to misidentify this as selfishness and/or egotism, and in my sour or self-deprecating moods I do exactly that-- but usually it's a lot more like unselfconsciousness, unabashedness, forthrightness, being comfortable in my own skin.
In what burners call "the default world," it is of course not always possible to practice freestyle existence-- one has to fit the expectations of one's teachers, one's bosses, one's parents, and even one's friends. One of the many startling lessons I learned at Burning Man, then, is that "freestyle existence," which I had previously imagined as a strength of character, a peculiar quality of my individual mind, in fact depends radically upon other people. I developed the ability to be slightly more immune to social pressures than many others because of the people I have been privileged to know-- I have had easygoing, accepting, quirky and generous friends all my life, and that is why I have been able to develop this attitude.
Radical self-expression is possible at Burning Man because being on the playa means being in a state of radical openness-- I found that anytime I went anywhere with particular expectations, they were frustrated; I did much better when I just wandered around and let myself be open to whatever people and things and experiences came my way. People who are down on the idea of Burning Man tend to say that it's terribly self-indulgent, but I think it would be more accurate to say that it fosters selflessness-- openness-- readiness.
And that is the stuff that dreams are made of.
[edit] it will be a grand tomorrow - 10/12/06
I don't know if it's Burning Man or Henry James or both, but I've been paying a different kind of attention to interpersonal interactions lately. This afternoon I ordered some veggie korma to go at the local Persian grocery store, and the man behind the counter asked if I was a vegetarian. I was a tiny bit startled, as it's not the kind of question one usually is asked by a man behind a counter, but entirely pleased. I said "yes" and I smiled, wondering if he'd spotted the fake turkey in my basket, or if my order itself had tipped him off, or if the giant Sanskrit character for "om" on my chest had given me away. Then he pointed at me and asked "what is that?," and I assumed he was talking about my shirt. I started to explain, and he pointed more visibly to my wrist. Ah, the wooden beads I was given by the Buddhist nuns in Japan. I explained, smiled, thanked him for the food, and left. Immediately I was caught by surprise by a feeling of mild regret-- I wished I had talked to him longer, I wished I had asked him whether he was a vegetarian too and why he had asked me at all. His reaction to my answer about the bracelet seemed to indicate that he wasn't a Buddhist himself-- he didn't show any particular enthusiasm, at any rate, but I wish I'd found out why he was interested in it in the first place. Did he take it for some other symbol?
I've been reading The Golden Bowl by Henry James for the past week or so; it's the first James that I've read and I'm kind of in love with it. James' elliptical prose is infuriating at times, and sometimes I downright hate the book for requiring so much of my time, but when his characters talk to each other I positively swoon. He portrays consciousness in a level of detail that is simply astonishing; a two-second pause in a conversation will get, for example, two full pages of detailed prose about the instantaneous thoughts of each of the characters involved. It's exquisite, humbling, and terrifying all at once-- it makes me realize how little attention I pay to my thoughts sometimes, and how careless I often am in conversation. After the conversation detailed above, I felt not only regret but shame that I had not given that man more of my time and attention; I felt as though in responding to his questions but not asking any of my own, I had put into that conversation only the minimum required effort and I had failed to acknowledge his attempt to reach out to me as another human being and not just as a function of our economic transaction.
James' characters, by contrast, pay attention to one another with every fiber of their beings-- when they talk, they strive carefully to articulate every nuance of their thoughts, and when they listen they are infinitely patient and engaged. Conversations in this book are painstaking collaborations in which the truth-- frequently the truth of the characters' endlessly complex relationships with one another-- is constructed bit by bit.
At Burning Man, I had some of the best conversations I have had in my life-- with complete strangers, people who I will never see again. During these conversations, we knew we would never see each other again, and that didn't matter. Or maybe it's exactly what mattered; maybe we had to pay such close attention to each other because we knew that our two minutes or two hours together were all we were ever going to get. As usual, Buddhism helps me understand this: mindfulness is necessary in a world of impermanence. If you're not paying attention to the present moment, what are you paying attention to?
Here is the part of The Golden Bowl that I just finished reading-- it's not from a conversation per se, but it's beautiful:
"He would have been uncomfortable, as these quiet expressions passed, had the case not been guaranteed for him by the intensity of his accord with Charlotte. It was impossible that he shouldn't now and again meet Charlotte's eyes, as it was also visible that she now and again met her husband's. For her as well, in all his pulses, he felt the conveyed impression. It put them, it kept them together, through the vain show of their separation; made the two other faces, made the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the lights, the flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, a mystic golden bridge between them, strongly swaying and sometimes almost vertiginous, for that intimacy of which the sovereign law would be the vigilance of 'care', would be never rashly to forget and never consciously to wound."
I must give thanks each day, for each bridge, however rickety, and I must work to reinforce them, bit by bit.
