Okay, let’s talk about big cultural challenges. Because … we’ve got them.
Burning Man has come to a point of unprecedented reach, scope, and diversity, with more people in more places “Burning” in a greater variety of ways than ever before. That’s the good news. The bad news is, that presents as many challenges as it does opportunities.
In my last post, I talked about how this represents a move from Burning Man’s “High Culture” phase, when it had a relatively robust bureaucracy for connecting all these pieces, and a relatively centralized idea of how it should all operate, into a “Diaspora” period, when how Burners relate to their neighbors is more important than how they relate to the Burning Man Project, or its centers in Black Rock City, San Francisco, and Reno.
That makes global “Burning Man” culture very different from what it was just a few years ago. And yet … and yet … the fundamental challenge of this Diaspora period is essentially the same (just from the opposite direction) as the fundamental challenge of the High Culture period: how to have a healthy relationship between the various parts trying to keep Burning Man coherent and centralized, and the various parts trying to decentralize and localize it.
I call this challenge: “Making bureaucracy Burning Man compliant.”
Are We Having Fun Yet? What’s Stopping Us?
I know, I know, we hate bureaucracy.
Except that we don’t. We hate the bureaucracies that we hate.
When we like a bureaucracy, we call it a “system.” We love a good system! Systems help us with all kinds of things! Or we don’t call it anything at all, it’s just a process we use. It’s only when we find a process onerous, confusing, or dehumanizing that we start calling it a “bureaucracy” and rebelling against it.
But in fact there are a lot of advantages to a bureaucracy that works! From a Burning Man standpoint, a good bureaucracy reifies the principles of Participation, Civic Responsibility, and Communal Effort (at least). Good bureaucracies are how different groups with different customs can work together, and how repetitive processes can be usefully automated.
Advantages to bureaucracy, which are essential to any large undertaking, include:
- Growth of infrastructure – this allows you to scale in ways that you can’t without it.
- Support for improving a process – you can iterate and improve without re-inventing the wheel.
- Forms – wait, why are forms on the plus side? Because if you do it right, filling out 1 moderately annoying form keeps you from having to write 12 really annoying emails. Yay forms!
- Saves time – an efficient bureaucracy means everybody knows what they need to do going in and can do their things with lightning efficiency.
- Gets shit done – an efficient bureaucracy allows you to just zip through tough tasks.
But there is a cost — and we hate the cost. A lot of times, we say it just isn’t worth it: all the pain points created by bureaucracy … the facelessness, the loss of personal agency, the way it can take time away from what you actually want to do and push you into serving the system … can kill what the bureaucracy is meant to support.
But let’s be clear about this: the Burning Man Project didn’t invent bureaucracy, nor is it the reason we have it. We have it because Burners get inspired to collaborate with one another. A need for these systems is going to arise any time diverse Burning Man groups, from Regionals to theme camps to art projects to initiatives like Burners Without Borders, try to collaborate on anything big. If we are going to be anything more than a bunch of isolated people with a common name who once shared a history, bureaucratic systems are going to develop.
If we want to be greater than the sum of our parts, we’re going to need to find systems that allow us to collaborate without reinventing the wheel every time.
The trick, then, isn’t to try to do away with bureaucracy, but to develop approaches to bureaucracy that “feel like Burning Man.” That express what we love about this culture in the first place.
To create systemic superstructures that also encourage local self-determination and agency, and to develop local systems that also encourage connection and collaboration across groups and borders.
Connection Over Convenience
Do I know how to do that?
No. No, I do not. I don’t think anybody does. Some people used to say “the internet will do it for us!” and most of those people are now either weeping at the state of the world they created or are trying to sell us crypto.
But I do have ideas. In 2017 I started holding workshops on “Making Bureaucracy Burning Man Compliant” at Burning Man staff events, to get ideas and inspiration. Back then we were coming at this from the other direction: our bureaucracy is stifling local initiative and agency, so how do we create something that encourages it while still holding us together and making us greater than the sum of our parts?
I was reminded of these workshops both by Burning Man’s current debates and by a recent column in the New York Times: Human Interaction Is Now A Luxury Good. Because Burning Man cultural spaces are a place where it very much isn’t. I’ve written before about how much people struggling with a “loneliness epidemic” in our culture can learn from Burning Man, and writer Jessic Grose insightfully explores all the ways in which “default world” world culture is pulling us apart. Our incessant drive for technologically enhanced efficiency and revenue maximization is uprooting all the ways in which we connect as human beings. And yet … ”Even with all the ‘extraordinary advances’ of interactive technology,” she writes, “humans lose interest in interacting with machines after a while, partly because of machine predictability. Most of us still crave the spontaneity that comes from talking to human beings, especially at our most vulnerable.”
Burning Man culture makes that easy, and abundant. This dynamic, I think, is also at the heart of what it means to make bureaucracy Burning Man complaint. It’s okay to have systems, but they need to “feel like Burning Man,” which is to say that they need to connect you to people, rather than to wrap you in rules, and they need to treat the people using the systems like participants, rather than spectators or objects. They need to invite the user to put their own humanity into what they’re doing.
That’s a lot to ask from a form or a process, but I think we’re up to it. The whole point — much like Burning Man itself — isn’t to make the experience more convenient for everyone, but to create opportunities for the 10 Principles to be applied, and magic to happen.
In the next post, I’ll show what the workshops I held with Burning Man staff and volunteers came up with.
Cover image of the Bureau of Needless Bureaucracy (Photo by Arthur de Smidt)