What It Means for Black Rock City to Go from “Prototype” to “Outlier”

This is a very interesting time for Burning Man culture, and Burning Man institutions. 

So naturally we’re all fighting about it.

But before we talk about that, let me tell you a bit about how I’ve been “Burning” these last few years, as a way of illustrating a point.

How I Burned: Then and Now

I started my Burning Man participation a little over 20 years ago, going to Regional events. 

I went to Black Rock City, and then started volunteering with work camps (I was the Volunteer Coordinator for Media Mecca) and helping out at theme camps, starting wars, and trying to create large scale mischief. When I wasn’t doing that, I was involved with institutional initiatives, most particularly co-founding the Burning Man Philosophical Center. 

That was then. Now… 

I haven’t been to a Regional in maybe seven years or more.

I missed the last two Black Rock Cities (although one was a funny story… I tried to go…).

I didn’t go to any of the “Renegade Burns” (a name that always bothers me because … who’s telling you not to do this? Literally everyone I know inside and out of the Burning Man Project is supportive of these things). Instead, I turned my apartment building’s backyard into a makeshift theme camp and created art experiences there that I would invite friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers to come and participate in. 

One of those backyard art experiences was designed to be unrepeatable, it could never be done again. But the second one — The Demon Garden — could be repeated and, though I never planned this, has turned into something that I have taken on the road, offering it at venues across the country and internationally. I don’t do it often, but it has become one of my signature offerings.

But that’s not all. 

While I was on a recent trip, a group of people I was briefly with were prompted to talk about (of all things) gifts, and so someone I’d never met, who knew nothing about me, sat down next to me and asked “What’s the gift you’re most proud of giving?”

“Well,” I said momentarily stumped, “the kind of gifts I am proud of giving are actually art experiences that…” 

I saw the baffled look on his face. 

“You know what? It will be easier if I show you. May I give you a gift?” 

He said yes, and I reached into my pack and pulled out the art project I brought to Black Rock City in 2019. It’s small enough to fit in my hand, and so I often have it with me. I took him through it, and his jaw dropped. The next day we ran into each other, and he told me he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it, that it gave him a new perspective he needed, and may be helping him in this time of life. 

Not long before that, I had been talking with a small group of people about creating magical experiences, and when they’d wanted more details I again said, “It would be easier to show you,” and pulled out the project that I brought to Black Rock City in 2016, which is not so small that it can fit in my hand but is small enough to fit in a backpack. Once again, minds blown.

A few days later, I was asked if I could come up with an exercise for a group of around 20 people to help unlock their creativity, and once again I had a project on hand. This one I’d created in 2020 as a way to help ease the psychological suffering of people who were experiencing a sense of nihilism in the pandemic. It didn’t originate at Burning Man, but I knew I could create it because by that point I had done so many small, human sized, experiences at Black Rock City that I knew I could create a project like this outside of it. I invented a new use for the project and it had a great impact: people threw themselves through it and into their own Radical Self-expression.

This has become the essence of what I’m doing now. I rarely show up at big, or even medium sized, events, but I have a number of art projects that I can do spontaneously — “magic on tap,” I call it — that directly came out of my experiences at Burning Man, and often debuted at Black Rock City.

Now… Twenty year ago, if I had told people “well, I don’t go to BRC any longer, and I haven’t gone to Regionals in a while, but I do have these art projects that I learned to make through Burning Man that I use when the moment requires some magic,” I think a lot of people would have argued that this was a very nice thing — a great thing — for me to have taken away from my time at Burning Man, but that it didn’t make me an active participant in the culture any longer. To be a “real Burner” back then, a lot of people thought you had to show up at a very limited number of events, especially BRC.

Today? Nobody says that. When I say, “Oh, I have my own path through playa magic that I do wherever I am,” they have a very different reaction: they are happy for me that I have found a way of participating in this culture that I am passionate about. No one accuses me of not really participating.

That’s a major change, and the essence of this new era of Burning Man culture that we’re in.

How Black Rock City Went from a Prototype to an Outlier

Burning Man is experiencing a new cultural era. The pandemic was the beginning of what I’ve referred to as Burning Man’s “Diaspora” period, when we went from a highly connected, even bureaucratic, global network trying to do difficult things across cultures, with Burning Man Project headquarters (BMHQ) at its center… to a super-localized environment in which the way Burners interact with their neighbors is far more important than the ways they interact with BMHQ. 

Back then, there was a relatively centralized vision for what “Burning Man” looked like and did in the world. Now there are a lot of local visions. 

The globally interconnected network still exists, of course, but it has a very different relationship to Burning Man’s “centers” — Black Rock City and San Francisco. No one is comfortable in this new relationship yet, which is probably why there’s so much controversy around Burning Man’s recent fundraising appeals. People are asking “What are you doing? What are you good for? What do we need from you?” And these are very appropriate questions. This stuff needs to be figured out. But the existence of differences of approaches is being seen as a threat, a challenge, rather than — as is usually the case in Burning Man culture — an opportunity for people to support each other in making their visions happen. 

But even more than that: “Black Rock City” emerged during Burning Man’s earlier cultural periods, and became the prototype, the aspiration, for the Regionals and events that followed. It was what we pointed at to say: “Burning Man events are kind of like that, even if they’re not really.” 

Now, in the Diaspora period, Black Rock City is no longer a prototype — it is an outlier. People “doing Burning Man” are getting more experimental with form and approaches, and Regionals are more likely to point at each other as an example of what they are doing than they are BRC. And then there’s organizations like Burners Without Borders, and people creating civic institutions based on Burning Man Principles… 

In Burning Man’s earlier cultural phases, people were experimenting with the kind of theme camps they could create, the kind of art projects they could develop, and the kind of organizations they could have to manage all this — but they were still working on the model of Black Rock City. In this cultural phase people are still experimenting with these things, but they are experimenting with the container itself, figuring out ways to do “Burning Man” that is based on something besides that model. 

Where once Burning Man was a thing that we were working to make happen around the world, now Burning Man is a thing that happens differently wherever it touches. 

And there’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s an indicator of success: this is what a healthy culture, that people love and care about, does. 

But it’s not the only thing a healthy culture does, and this era, like any other, comes with its own distinct opportunities we can live up to and challenges we have to meet.

The Same Challenge from the Other Direction

In many ways the challenge of a Diaspora period is the symmetrical inverse of the High Culture period. 

During Burning Man’s High Culture period (which I would say ran from about 2013 to the pandemic), we had (relatively) strong institutions that were able to communicate and function clearly across cultures, but those institutions threatened to choke off local creativity. All too often it felt like Burners needed to get the Burning Man Project’s permission to try to do interesting things, which is fatal to our culture. (And part of the reason I wrote that we needed to “decommodify permission”)

The challenge therefore was to “make bureaucracy Burning Man compliant” — to keep the benefits of cross-cultural institutions without making everyone ask their permission. To make sure everyone felt (and really had) agency.

This is a really difficult challenge and — I’m just going to say it — I think Burning Man was failing to achieve it. Maybe it would have succeeded given more time, but I can say pretty explicitly (I was working for the nonprofit at the time and talking with Larry specifically about this) that figuring out how to square that circle was still being actively experimented with, and that no clear path forward (that was being tried) had emerged.

Then the pandemic hit.

Now we have the opposite problem: the Diaspora period is opening up the valves on local creativity and engagement. People have new ideas and are not looking for permission to do them. It’s amazing. 

But we are in danger of losing not just the organizations that keep us connected and better able to pool our resources, but the very lines of communication that a culture needs to stay coherent across distances and borders. There is a level of cultural coherence that we have long taken for granted — so much so that we have often fought against it! — that we are now in danger of losing, which will make everything we want to do that is not strictly local (and maybe even then) more difficult. 

We don’t need to recreate the center we had, but we do need ways of coming together, communicating clearly, supporting one another, and solving larger scale logistical problems. If along the way we can share best practices and help those new creative ideas travel, that’s even better.

And we need to do it in a way that feels representative — and helpful — to the people who are diversifying what it means to be a “Burner”… to the artists, the “renegades,” the creators of Regionals, and people doing things we haven’t even thought of yet.

The job is still, in that sense, to make a Burning Man compliant bureaucracy. And it is still a very difficult challenge. 

It will be that much harder if we succumb to the terrible mistake — so common among subcultures — that people who are doing things differently than we would are an enemy. That somehow Renegade burners and Black Rock City burners are on different teams, that Regional burners and smaller event burners and Burners wandering through the world practicing art magic (like me) are in a zero sum game. 

We’re not. We’re all stronger when we all thrive. A healthy Black Rock City makes renegade burns easier, not harder. Regionals are more empowered the more people are successfully engaging in different forms of Burning Man culture. We are on the same team.

This is especially important because perhaps the truest expression of Burning Man culture is to offer to help. To participate. To see someone doing something weird and wonderful that you don’t really understand, and instead of criticizing it or condemning it, to ask: “Can I help?”

That’s who we are at our best. That’s what we need to make sure we preserve in this Diaspora phase, a time of wondrous and brilliant diversity. To see other Burners trying to do difficult things and ask: “Can I help?”

That’s what we need to succeed in this moment.

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Cover image of “Earth and Beyond” by Karel and Marie Machalek (Photo by Jane Hu)