At burning man you can even get early access if you’re working on an art installation. It’s really fun hanging out, drinking beers, assembling art, and watching a mini Vegas sprout of nothing but a trash fence over a week or two.
It’s fun to read everyone's preconceptions about Burning Man. Its ten principles are published [1] and include stuff like “radical inclusion” and “civic responsibility” and “gifting” (the latter of which is taken very literally, there is almost no currency use on the playa and everything is gifted except ice and coffee at center camp).
Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists, but it’s hardly representative, especially when you include the family zone and all the specialized camps.
The idea that a stranger would effectively be a free Airbnb host (back when Airbnb actually had hosts) was baffling. Turns out:
1. Travel is expensive in time and money. Hosting someone gives you a travel-adjacent experience without having to leave home.
2. People who are willing to host strangers tend to be cool/open/interesting/friendly people. Opting-in to CouchSurfing is a good filter for someone you might enjoy spending time with.
Burning Man is similar.
One of the mainstays of Burning Man is the Hug Deli. It's like a lemonade stand, but instead of sugary beverages, they serve affection. You can order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server. Want an extra pep in your step? Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment.
The staff at the Hug Deli are all volunteers. You just roll up, toss on an apron, and start serving. (The guy who started it isn't particularly affectionate. He's a performer from LA who wanted a way to get strangers to try on characters.)
You would never stand in Golden Gate Park offering kisses to anyone who asked. Burning Man is a container that allows experiences like that to flourish, because opting-in to Burning Man is a good filter for the kind of people you might be willing to try stuff with.
Your post literally suggests that a customer spontaneously should kiss the employee. That kind of behavior is goes far beyond an innocent facade of "free hugs."
Consent is involved, everyone is a volunteer and willing participant. If you don’t want a hug or kiss or whatever you don’t get one. I fail to understand how this makes it anything but “free hugs”
Are you somehow operating under the impression that volunteers are being held against their will and forced to give and/or receive free kisses to anyone who demands it?
Don't get me wrong, but on one side you have the gift culture, and on the other side the exception that one of the only things sold the the community in one of the hottest, most arid deserts in the world is ... ice ...
There’s no in and out privileges to get ice elsewhere, so the organization coordinates huge ice shipments into the event. All the proceeds from the ice and coffee sales benefit the local schools and students, which is great because that area is doing pretty rough economically
I actually got to buy fuel there once. They were absolutely surly about it, too.
Why didn't you plan ahead and bring enough gas??!?
Well what happened was, we stopped at the gas station in Wadsworth where we usually fuel up the RV before heading to the burn. I put the gas nozzle into the RV and flipped the nozzle auto-shut-off thing up while I went inside to buy some last minute stuff. I came out, the auto-shut-off thing had popped and I thought the tank was full. But no, it wasn't. The scene there was a bit chaotic, I was distracted. So we only got about 4 or 5 gallons into the tank, and that's only enough to get the RV about 40 miles, so we roll into BRC with an almost empty tank. I did not notice this until we were actually inside the gate and the fuel tank was really low. Give me a break, I was driving for 14 hours, I just didn't notice the fuel level.
So we had some fuel for the art car, which I was hoarding, but when I heard they were selling gas for the first time ever at BM, I dumped all the art car gas into the RV and then got on the art car and headed over to the gas station with every available gas can we had.
It's mostly yuppie culture as far as I can tell with it's hangerons and other cleanup artists, whatever. There's no such purity, but it's definitely not a flat organization.
As it has become so large, naturally you're going to get the hangerons. You also get all of the people that think it is trendy and go for the likes. All of the rich people that go out with custom RVs and all of that type of experience are just going to exponentially increase the hangerons as they have way more followers that want to follow the trends.
Again though, any time you get such large numbers the "core" group will tend to get dwarfed. That's about time when people start noticing it more and think the hangerons are the event so the original culture is sort of lost to the zeitgeist.
The people who hate Burning Man don't care about paltry things like the principles it's based on, they simply don't like the people that go for completely unrelated reasons.
Are you trying to imply that these people aren’t counterculture? Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
No it doesn't. Fashionable people pretending to be counter-cultural love to talk about hating them, but look how many people are on Facebook, how many are using Amazon, how many are using Google products. Consider that "google" is now a verb and literally everyone knows what it means. The part of dominant culture is to show one's "independence" and "free-mindedness" by saying some words about how all those people are oh so awful - and then go and consume the products they make, exactly in the way the want you to use them, and pay a lot of money for it. That's no more "counter-culture" than a multi-millionaire Hollywood actor dressing in a six-figure dress and showing up at a six-figure-per-ticket gala to protest "the elites" is "counter-culture". It's just the elites' LARPing.
Maybe, some of them were poor young iconoclasts some day. That's not when they joined the fashionable trend of Burning Man though. When they joined their trend, they were well into their power (or at least, in the case of somebody like Holmes, pretense of it). Because that's what is fashionable, of course, and they couldn't afford not to be part of "counter-culture" - it's so gauche not to be part of it!
All of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
Millionaire is not some ultra privileged status in the United States, an upper middle class family with a paid off house in a somewhat decent area will have a net worth in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
They may not be right wing conformist republicans but they are certainly not opposed to any aspect of current power structures in any meaningful way (unless, perhaps, it is restraining them).
I think the counter-intuitive examples of people who attend that you and others in the replies are pointing out are a demonstration of how many contradictions exist in these principals.
I am the type of person who thinks many, many things about the way the world currently exists need to change, but I am incredibly skeptical of the purported mission of the Burning Man Project to "extend the culture" of these principles to the wider world.
"Civic responsibility" is a ballsy claim from a bunch of first worlders exploiting child sweatshop labor, wasting resources on aura farming.
Burning Man is to the stated principles what Kraft singles is to cheese.
Just more empty American platitudes, advertising, marketing; watch! as rich capitalists role play rural community their capitalism tore apart!
The Party in 1984 is not just metaphor for a government but any group that puts its rhetoric before reality. Just some first world LARPers telling a story about themselves while the output is there for all to see.
Once. Was impressed by the human effort in general, little specifically stood out.
Worked in low voltage wiring through college. Have been a part of groups rallying behind large infrastructure projects; on farms, new office buildings, rapid response to weather related crisis (tornado alley). It's actually a very common human thing.
Been to many an art fair around the world and the minutiae of Burning Man blends right in.
Leave no trace while blowing fossil fuels into the air hauling tons of stuff to the desert. Nice loophole.
Curious, is there an Andreesen Horowitz Agent MCP?
Let’s automate this end to end, from idea to raising capitals. Vibe Angels should just be multi agents managing how much capitals to allocate to each projects.
Fun coincidence! I just finished rereading No Way Down and started rereading Into Thin Air both of which are great books.
For the sherpa’s perspective I can recommend Buried in the Sky and Higher than Everest, although they’re more biographical than disaster store like the two books above.
You open up the GUI editor, drag a button onto the screen from the toolbox, give it a name/id, and double click on it which takes you to the source code file where a “buttonId_click” handler is auto created for you. Super easy to create simple GUIs without much work while still wiring together the bits that need code.
There was certainly some rough edges and I don’t know how well the workflow would have adapted to responsive design but line of business apps in controlled environments it was so powerful. VB6 and Delphi were like nothing else we have today (at least that I’ve seen).
Windows Form Designer in Visual Studio still works in that same way? This was one of the least differentiated things, really; while XCode’s interface building tools have always been clunkier they also offer the same functionality too.
The ability to rapidly build apps was amazing as a kid to learn, and I think Linux needs something similar so that small business applications can be built quickly and cheaply.
Honestly the biggest problem is the entire environment is very VCS hostile in a hard to crack way.
I've had some success getting a bunch of scripts to export MS Access database structures, but it takes over an hour to run and requires some post processing clean up so it's not really a great <feature> -> <commit> cycle.
Honestly I'd desperately like a similar experience for GTK development - a few things seem to exist, but they've never really got me building something as quickly as VB6 did.
EDIT: I mean thinking about it, the way people are using AI programming tools feels very much like a desire to actually get the VB6 - no data flow model or weird pipeline or whatever rendering BS, just "I want a control here and here's what it should do". I remain pretty sure that AI is a very expensive solution to the problem of we've been building the wrong tools and libraries for years.
Just look at the star graph on the bottom of the readme (itself a sign of a hype driven project with little substance). I highly doubt that hockey stick is organic.
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