The Secret Ingredient to a Bureaucracy That Feels Like Burning Man Is …

Caveat has been writing about Burning Man culture and community for years. His writing does not represent the official views or opinions of Burning Man Project. Because we value Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, and Participation, the Burning Man Journal has always been a space for sharing the many diverse voices, unique experiences, and colorful stories within our incredible global community. If you are interested in sharing your perspective, please submit your story for consideration here.

Play is an invitation. If you do it right. 

Cultures live and die by their ability to communicate and develop systems that simultaneously connect and ground people — to each other, to their shared principles, and their common good — while giving them the freedom to explore their intrinsic passions and live lives that matter to them.

Burning Man does these things very well when it exists on a small scale, but as a global cultural movement it struggles because … so far … we don’t know how to build systems, bureaucracies, that do both of these things at the same time. 

In part 1 of this series, we looked at why building bureaucracies that are “Burning Man compliant” is the fundamental challenge of our current era, and in part 2 we examined the state of the conversation that’s happened about this in the past, and what such systems might look like in practice. 

In this post, I want to tell you about times I have experienced where this really seemed to work. They involve a lot of play. Whatever else they may or may not demonstrate, people had a hell of a lot of fun. Which I think is not incidental to why these approaches worked — a bureaucracy that is genuinely fun to engage with is a bureaucracy that people are going to support more than they complain about.

In fact, I think a shorthand is that a bureaucracy that is Burning Man compliant will ideally do three things in addition to its overt functional purpose:

1. Be fun to engage with.
2. Encourage radical self-expression on the part of the people engaging with it.
3. Connect people to each other in a way that allows them to build social capital.

A bureaucracy that can do that is a bureaucracy that people will fall in love with.

When Volunteering Gets Weird

In 2008 I was made the Volunteer Coordinator for Media Mecca. My job was to recruit the other volunteers who would be working with the media, especially when they were on playa. 

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were interested. We needed maybe 60, and couldn’t fit more than 80 in the camp.

Figuring out who would make a good volunteer and team member — mostly over email — was one of the challenges I faced; the other, which was not in my job description but that I felt keenly, was to give our volunteers an immediate experience of Burning Man. I wanted the experience of volunteering for my Burning Man team to be as weird and unpredictable and whimsical as Burning Man itself. 

To solve these problems, I fucked with my volunteers. 

Anybody who I thought might make a good addition to the team, anybody whose application I was interested in, immediately had their application process turned into an act of play that was deliberately unpredictable and confusing.

My intention was to rattle them in as fun a way as possible and see how they responded. Media Mecca could be a chaotic environment where weird and unpredictable things happened, and entitled members of the press sometimes throw tantrums or make unreasonable demands. It mattered, as a qualification for the job, how volunteers would handle situations like this. What better way to test that than to create such a situation?

What did this look like? It depended on the person and what they’d written in their volunteer application — this was artisanal fuckery, boutique and individualized. So when people mentioned esoteric interests, I asked them to write short essays on absurd topics in those fields; when someone said they knew a member of Media Mecca who would vouch for them, I denied that any such person existed and demanded (in an over the top way) to know why they were trying to fool me. When someone bragged about the university they’d attended, I said that I had inside information that the university was a mob front. 

I had an applicant who emphasized in his application that he worked for National Geographic and so was really good with photos. After introducing myself, I began my response to him by saying:

I can totally see how a job at National Geographic would be an ideal job. Especially for a geographer. I don’t want to brag, but I was pretty good at geography in high school. In fact — I’m very proud of this — I actually discovered a new continent. Yes, Mr. Mirkarimi said it was just a smudge on the globe, but how is that any different from New Zealand when you think about it?

I’m not sure what a photographer would do at National Geographic, though. Do they run photos?

He responded by saying that yes, of course they run photos, and that they’re one of the premier publications for photography in the world.

I replied (among other things):

I had no idea the National Geographic Magazine had started running photos! That’s really exciting. It sounds like it’s a big new push. When did that happen? Is this a web 2.0 thing, and they’re user generated? (“Send us pictures from your vacations around the world!” kind of deal?) Because that would be very cool. 

Unless you mean the ads. I’ve definitely seen ads in the magazine before. They’re cool too, but obviously in a different way. On a strictly professional level, I have always admired the World Wildlife Fund’s facility with graphic design. They make saving the tigers look so affordable. 

The people who understood that they were being fucked with and either established boundaries about it gracefully or took it as an opportunity to play back, were usually let on the team. The people who freaked out about it or got angry and defensive never did.

Everyone, however, got an experience that felt like Burning Man. And it made a difference in morale; the new people on the team felt much more personally connected. They had stories about how they’d gotten on the team to tell to each other. It was something they could bond over. The response from the long service team captains at Media Mecca was ecstatic: they had new team members who were excited to be there, who were ready for the utter weirdness that some of these shifts involved and could handle it gracefully, and who felt empowered to add playful touches of their own because doing that kind of thing was what got them on the team. 

Are there downsides to this approach? Oh, absolutely. First and foremost: it’s incredibly labor intensive. Instead of sending a bunch of form emails out, responses that could mostly be automated, I was having hundreds of personal (and creatively engaged) conversations. It was a massive commitment of time and energy. 

And of course there’s the potential for hurting people’s feelings or offending them … always a risk when you fuck with people. Anyone trying this approach has to be careful that they don’t cross a line from “playful fuckery” into outright meanness. Not everyone can do this well. If you can’t make play and fuckery an invitation, then you’re just being an asshole.

While the idea was always to invite people in rather than keep them out, to invite them into our weird fun, if you use this approach you’re also going to lose good volunteers — people who surely might be otherwise great for the team are going to drop out. This can be a serious issue if you need every volunteer you can get. But in the situation I had, there was simply no way for me to use every qualified volunteer. I was going to lose many good people anyway, no matter what approach I took. And I think it’s insulting to the volunteers who weren’t chosen to pretend that I had some objective criteria by which they were rejected. I didn’t. No one did. I was going to end up rejecting good people; it was only a question of how I was going to do that. Under those conditions, I chose to screen for people who could keep their heads about them when they were in a confusing situation, and especially get playful with it. Those were qualities that mattered.

And it worked. It turned what could have been a boring and superficial encounter with a system into an experience of Burning Man that people were excited to get to be part of. If we assume that no system is free of problems, this is the system and the problems I’d choose to have.

Of Course You Know This Means War

In 2012 Media Mecca and the Census went to war over a volunteer. There were pranks, stickerings, camp invasions, and more. It ended inconclusively, with no real resolution, which meant that it didn’t really end at all, and low grade “hostilities” (of the most fun kind) continued for years. In 2016, representatives of each side sat down to hammer out a peace treaty, and realized that a peace process can actually involve even more fuckery than a conflict. You can read an account here. (Note that the terms of the treaty listed there are incomplete.)

For Media Mecca, it was entirely a whimsical adventure — there were no stakes beyond seeing just how hilarious a peace process we could make. The Census negotiators, however, came with fuckery, yes, but also with real concerns. They had felt for a while like the Burning Man staff leadership had been inattentive to their needs, both as a camp and as a scientific endeavor. Burning Man’s staff were affiliated with Media Mecca, so Census brought those needs to the bargaining table: they had actual issues they wanted raised and solved, and they were willing to commit to further acts of play as part of the peace process to get it.

To be clear: the war between Media Mecca and the Census was not sanctioned by Burning Man staff. They mostly rolled their eyes at it. Sometimes they tried to stop it. (We got yelled at by Danger Ranger.) Staff were not represented at the negotiating table, or involved in the peace process. So the Media Mecca negotiators had no actual power to give the Census team what they wanted. The best we could do was say “we’ll commit to bringing it up with the staff, with whom we have a closer relationship than you.” But … we knew the staff were probably going to roll their eyes again. 

So it seemed like the Census had put a lot of hope into a fool’s promise. We had no power to give them what they wanted. But … here’s the thing … a couple of years later, they’d gotten many of the things they’d asked for. And apparently (so I’ve been told) the peace treaty helped. So Census might have been right after all. The combination of Media Mecca people periodically lobbying for the Census, because after all we had signed a peace treaty, combined with the fact that even if it had no official force … even if it had all been a game, and negotiated in a state of play … the existence of that document, of that set of priorities and needs, seemed to warp the world around it. Seemed to add a kind of moral authority to the Census’ requests for support, because after all, aren’t we a culture that respects fuckery?

Somehow this peace treaty actually had helped. They’d been right.

Playful symbolic acts of conflict and negotiation can actually be good for an organization to settle disputes over resources and priorities. The original war actually did settle the issue of how we were going to handle the volunteer we both wanted, and instead of hurt feelings it brought us closer together than we’d ever been. The peace negotiations actually did end up getting everyone some version of what they wanted, and created a more playful and fun atmosphere that in some ways continues to this day. But the play has to come first: I’m not sure it would have worked if we had set out to take it seriously. The benefits from the structure are only possible if the play comes first. A system that can facilitate, and value, play can benefit from this approach — a system that goes through the motions but doesn’t really value play for its own sake can’t. 

Doing The Right Thing Is Always Inconvenient. Embrace The Inconvenience

I return to the shorthand bullet points for a “Burning Man compliant bureaucracy” that I offered above:

1. Be fun to engage with.
2. Encourage radical self-expression on the part of the people engaging with it.
3. Connect people to each other in a way that allows them to build social capital.

Both of these examples did that, and both of them worked. And when they worked, what otherwise might have been dull, even draining, bureaucratic processes turned into playful acts that people were excited to engage with and bring their creativity to. 

Play is much more risky than a conventional bureaucracy is. A conventional bureaucracy is designed to eliminate risk, even if it means eliminating passion and immediacy and inclusion. In a conventional bureaucracy efficiency and risk are more important than everything else. That’s why conventional organizations use it.

But Burning Man isn’t a conventional organization — it’s a culture. It matters that people in that culture have agency and feel humanized rather than commoditized. And so I think the greater danger to Burning Man is to make systems that are so “safe” that they deaden our principles. People hate conventional bureaucracies in part because they leave no room for self-expression or authentic human connection or play, all of which are themselves innately risky activities. Turning bureaucracy into play gives people agency: they are not victims of bureaucracy, they are participants in an open ended act of performance art. And you can solve some issues through play that are much harder to address in conventional systems. If you do it right it creates systems that people not only tolerate but are passionate about engaging with. 

Over time, I have concluded that Burning Man culture is incompatible with conventional bureaucracies, especially at larger scales. We need to recognize that the kind of systems we want to build — the kind that create experiences we want people to have — are going to be “efficiency third” systems that involve a lot of labor and personalized attention rather than streamlining. We need to understand that these systems will be periodically unpredictable, and we need to accept a level of risk with them that conventional businesses and non-profits would not. Because we inspire people who are looking for a better culture, rather than a dress-up version of the default world. 

Doing things the right way is always going to be hard. But we can make bureaucracy Burning Man compliant. We know how. And it can be a lot — a lot — of fun. 

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Cover image of participants at the BRC Box Office windows, 2023 (Photo by Mark Mennie)