Can We Make Our (Terrible) Online Conversations Feel More Like Amazing Theme Camps?

I’ve heard nothing but glorious things about this year’s Black Rock City — lots of people saying that it was their best year ever. 

But most of the online discussion about it was still as awful as ever. Honestly, if I didn’t already know and love us from all my in-person experiences, I probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with us based on what I see on my social feeds.

So I was struck by a social media post by Halcyon noting that “the magic of Burning Man community has never translated into positive online socializing.”

He explains that:

In my 26 years of Burning Man participation, I have continually been disappointed by how quickly the positivity of Black Rock City disappears when we start to talk about it online.

Without the face-to-dusty-face element, something significant is lost.

I agree, but it’s not just “in Black Rock City” as opposed to the “default world.” It’s all the conversations that we try to have online. Over the years I’ve gone across the U.S. and (to a much more limited extent) the world, having challenging conversations with Burners about this thing we do, its philosophy, and its cultural implications. And every time — literally every time — the conversations that we had in person went much, much, better, than they ever do online. Even when the same people were involved. Often, the in-person discussions of difficult topics felt very much like Burning Man — playful, experimental, courageous, kind. The online discussions almost never do.

This isn’t unique to us, of course: pretty much the only thing we can count on in this world is that talking about something online makes it worse. It’s a difficult dynamic because we are social creatures. Just as it’s harder to live the 10 Principles in the default world because everybody around us is living as if they’re in the default world, it’s even harder to live the 10 Principles online because, well, everybody is behaving the way they’ve been conditioned to behave online. The way the structure of online communications is essentially designed to encourage. 

As I wrote a few years ago:

The problem with thinking about the internet as the “new Black Rock Desert” (and I’ve been guilty of it, too) is that for virtually everyone who first goes to Black Rock City, the open playa is a completely alien environment. We see it, we feel it burning our skin, and we are in a new and unfamiliar world. We don’t know shit about how to exist here, and we are crushingly aware of our ignorance. That ignorance also happens to be opportunity: we know so little that we get to invent everything, including ourselves. We are all, suddenly, amateurs.

The internet, on the other hand, is an environment that we already know intimately. We have developed a lifetime of habits around it, many of them terrible (if we’re being honest about it). Most of our internet habits involve not connecting with and humanizing one another, but keeping other people at a distance — both presenting and seeing only our facile representations of who we want to be — and dehumanizing one another.

It’s not our fault, but it is something that we have to deal with. Because while we have tried, with some success, to use digital avatars as means of improved communication (the talks in Burn2 and the VR Burning Man tended to at least be civil), we are clearly not reaching the standards we hold for ourselves. And so either we need to figure out how to be keep our standards online, or we need to be upfront: Burning Man is fundamentally an in-person phenomenon. You have to show up, in person, to get the experience right.

Is that true? Can we not do online what we were able to do in one of the harshest physical environments on earth?

Here’s What I’ve Tried

I’m open to that possibility, but right now I’m betting against it. 

First because I don’t think we’ve really put our minds to trying. We collectively put so much more effort into our BRC theme camps than we do our online dialogue — we shouldn’t conclude we can’t do anything until we’ve really tried something.

Second because my own experience trying to create “Burning Man” type experiences over Zoom during the pandemic taught me a great deal about how to successfully shift from in-person to online experiences. And while “making art experiences” is different from “having a positive community dialogue,” I think some of the lessons will cross-over. Or at least support the search for a new approach.

My general design elements for creating “psychomagical experiences” in the style of Burning Man and the San Francisco art underground are quickly summarized here. All of those apply, but interpreting them for an online environment was not a simple task.

I wrote about my efforts to create Burning Man-like experiences here, here, and here (and a few other places), but a summary of what I learned is below. I want to be clear about something first, though: this is not my list of how I think things should work, or how I want them to work, this is my summary of what did work. The ideas emerged from trial and error. It is also not meant therefore to be an exhaustive or exclusive list: if other people get results that “feel like Burning Man” doing other things, great! Tell me how you did it so that I can try it too!

That said, here goes:

• Time and Place Still Matter: the internet (literally) encourages “browsing” experiences, stepping in and stepping out, jumping in and saying something when you have the chance, then going about your life. This seems to be poison for Burning Man-like experiences online: every successful online experience I created or was part of involved people committing to show up and be present, be actively engaged, for the full duration of the experience. You can’t create magic with people who are distracted and don’t really show up. 

I suspect the same thing is true of online conversations. Part of the problem with those conversations is that people jump in, throw a grenade, and then hop out again, repeating the process at their leisure. A better online dialogue might require people to stick around. 

• Structure It So That Everybody Gets to Participate: Even in “real world” experiences it’s very easy to let the loud and extraverted people take up all the time and bandwidth of the experience. It’s even easier online, and it’s even more harmful. I discovered in the online experiences I was trying to make “feel like Burning Man” that some kind of turn based system often needed to be included in the structure of the event itself: it needs to be explicitly set up that everybody gets a chance to do the Main Thing (whatever that is), and that nobody gets to go twice until everyone has gone once. I’m sure there are other ways, hopefully less heavy handed ones, to make sure everyone feels like they have participated fully, but so far this is the only thing that worked for me. When people know that they’re not going to have to fight or struggle to participate, it tends to make everyone calm down and more open to the experience and each other. 
  
  Once again, I suspect this is true of creating online conversations that “feel like Burning Man” — it seems like it goes against Radical Self-Expression to tell people “you’ve had your turn to talk, wait for other people to express themselves,” but this is an area where Participation, Communal Effort, and Civic Responsibility, seem to matter just as much. Perhaps there are ways in which giving people fewer chances to chime in actually makes each opportunity more precious, and so will be better used. I dunno, but it seems like it helps in some circumstances. I don’t actually like this personally, it feels overly controlling to me, but I found it necessary and effective al the same.
• You Need to Take Risks: getting together just to hang out and “have fun” may be okay for people online. Not so much for me personally with groups, but some people definitely get something out of it. Creating experiences of art and whimsy that “feel like Burning Man,” however, requires more. To bring that element up, people need to take risks. They need to put something on the line. 
  
  Burning Man events, particularly ones like Black Rock City that exist in harsh and unforgiving environments, present many risks as a basic part of the experience — and that’s in addition to whatever personal risks people take once they’re there. Online experiences rarely seem to have that element built in in the same way; indeed, our social media and conferencing software is designed to be as frictionless and seamless as possible, to minimize risks and keep everything easy. Real risk is an ingredient that can be very difficult to add to an online gathering when we’re sitting at home.
  
  But it can be done. In particular, I found there were four kinds of risks that could be added to any experience with a webcam and a microphone:
• Physical risks: do something difficult, spontaneous, or intimate, with your body in your own surroundings;
• Emotional risks: do something, reveal something, that feels emotionally risky to you;
• Social risks: go out on a limb to learn about and connect with the other participants;
• Absurdist risks: do something so utterly bizarre that no one can predict what will happen next.

The more of such risks you manage to tie into an experience, especially one that does last for a prolonged period, the greater an experience of authentic engagement, connection, and even magic is likely to emerge.

This works great for art experiences, but seems like it is going to be particularly difficult to transition over to community dialogue, where you want people to feel safe expressing themselves. Social media is also a places where too many people see edgelord behavior as “risky,” when in fact it is perfectly safe from behind a keyboard dealing with people who you’ll likely never meet. It’s so convenient to flame someone, so easy and risk free it is to just pile on someone you disagree with. Which brings us to the next point:

• Make Communication Inconvenient: Much in the way that we get so much out of how goddamn difficult Black Rock City and other Burning Man events are to access, how much better everything gets because of how much we had to put everything in just to participate … online art experiences can benefit from a substantial helping of inconvenience. This goes against the nature of the medium — social media is designed to be convenient and easy! — but that’s precisely the point. Experiences have more gravitas, and people put a lot more intention on what they’re going to do and say, when participants have worked so hard to get here.

There’s a few other things but this list has gone on long enough and those are the big ones … I think. Again, the point isn’t that I’m right about anything in particular, the point is that this is what I’ve found works for creating online events that actually “feel like Burning Man,” and maybe there’s something helpful here for other efforts to better ways to communicate online.

Trying Together Is More Important Than Being Smart Alone

But it’s also worth remembering that biggest reason Black Rock City and other Burning Man spaces are so different isn’t just that we have better ideas; in fact, Burning Man had been going on for 18 years before the 10 Principles were developed. 

The important thing was that we decided to actually do things differently when we were in a Burning Man cultural space, and enough people committed to that and joined in the ethos that new people who came looked around them and saw a culture that truly worked differently. The reason it’s so difficult to be your best Burner self in the default world is that you have very little support for it — most strangers give you weird looks when you try to give them gifts, you have to really coax people into acts of Radical Self-Expression, and there’s an active hostility to Radical Inclusion these days. It’s so, so, much harder to carry the torch alone.

But when we come together, we find brilliant ways of making it work. Culture is not like physics — it can be changed by people who commit to it. The important thing wasn’t just that our ideas were better, it’s that we threw ourselves into the experiment together and followed what worked. 

I suspect the same dynamic is true with online spaces. The problem isn’t that we’re bad people (or at least no worse than anybody else), the issue is that we have inherited a set of terrible behaviors for online conversation, and we revert to them. 

It’s a free country (more or less) and so we’re not going to ever stop people from saying whatever they want on their own social media forums, nor should we try. We don’t need to be scolds, we don’t want to be scolds — in fact, the endless rounds of accusations and bad faith attacks are what we want to move away from. We can do this playfully. We can try to do better in a spirit of experimentation, a spirit of “what happens if?” 

And if enough people get together and try to have important conversations online in a different way, if in their own spaces they develop alternatives and try them together, it will so much easier to change the way we relate online than just handing people a sheet of rules. Seeing other people do it is far more effective than being told how to do it, especially when it looks like the people doing it are having more fun, and being more productive. 

We are social creatures. The point isn’t necessarily that we succeed so much as that we are trying together, and having a better time for it. I believe Burning Man culture can create better internet conversations — it will just go through some phases where we fail first and look absurd doing it. That’s okay, that’s our happy place. We can make our online communities feel like theme camps if we apply the same creativity and effort. 

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Cover image of “Broken but Together” by Michael Benisty (Photo by DustToAshes)