Burning Man's Culture Is In Danger - Tales from the Global Leadership Conference

​I was at Burning Man's Global Leadership Conference yesterday - a gathering held to bring together leaders of regional Burns from around the world to the Bay for 3 days of sharing wisdom and knowledge - and I wanted to talk about one session in particular - Operation Citizenship (known internally in the Org as Operation Acculturation until a week or two ago). This session was premised on the fact that we're seeing a weakening Burning Man culture, and was led by Charlie Dolman - BM's Operations Manager - and Jim Graham - a key member of its communications team.  ​

Charlie opened by talking about how things they'd been seeing the last few years really came to a head last year, including:

• A marked increase in consumerism vs. participation. Basically, people expecting things to be provided for them and to be taken care of. One way they've objectively measured this is in increased visits to Rampart (emergency services) for things that are laughable. One person this last year literally showed up looking for a band-aid for a paper cut. Not a joke. 
  
  
• Volunteerism is in trouble, and it's not just at Burning Man itself. Some regionals are having a major problem getting people to volunteer as well. This probably has a two-fold cause: First, you've got the festies/ravers coming in who treat a burn like it's just another version of EDC or something. Second, that entitlement culture, where they expect they'll be taken care of while not giving much back, ends up making hard-working existing volunteers feel unappreciated. Why work so hard to give back to people who don't appear to really care?
  
  
• There's a significant uptick in vandalism. I covered this in the 2016 entry of my Burning Man History. A lot of people heard about the incidents at White Ocean, but that was just disgruntled insiders taking revenge on the assholes who run that camp. What less people seem to have heard about is how the Iron Monkeys' (a Seattle-based metal-working collective) entire forge setup at the base of the Man, where they were teaching people how to forge, was vandalized. Stuff kicked over, peed on, etc. It was very intentional, and nobody seems to know why it happened. These weren't the only incidents either.
  
  
• The rise of people - often popular Instagrammers - treating the Burn as a fashion show, wearing elaborate outfits made by designers that they model in on the playa, post to Instagram, and tagging the designers of the outfits in order to promote them. Gross, right? (If you're one of the people Instagramming yourself or Facebook Living yourself or whatever while you're actually on the playa....please just stop.)
  
  
• They're hearing an increasing number of comments along the lines of, "This doesn't feel like my family any more."
   
• There's an uptick in moop, and this is an existential issue for Burning Man. It can't survive bad moop problems.

Now, none of this is new to anyone paying attention - it's pretty obvious the culture is in trouble. Charlie (the BM Operations Manager) said that when they came back from Burning Man this year they realized that what their #1 focus this year has to be isn't anything to do with improving gate operations, or whatever: It has to be addressing the slow dissolution of the culture that made Burning Man what it is, or was. I was really shocked - pleasantly - to hear this, as it was the first time I'd heard the Org so forthrightly admit that there's something slowly going rotten in the culture. 

Ultimately, the worst case scenario is that we end up with an event dominated by idiots like this (not sure where this was taken or who took it, but it's not at BM....yet.)

What is the Org going to do to combat this?

Recognizing there's a problem is the easy part though. Doing something about it is much more difficult, and let's not kid ourselves - this is a very tough nut to crack. Once Burning Man started entering the mainstream consciousness (around 2011, the first year it sold out), the problems we're seeing were, I believe, inevitable in the absence of action to address it. Six years on, that mainstream, touristy, consumer-y influence has gathered a fair amount of momentum and I think we're coming near a tipping point, where the culture could rather rapidly head south.

Jim Graham, of the Org's Communications Team.

The good news is the Org has clearly put a lot of thought into this, and correctly, I believe, it's a diverse, multi-faceted approach. 

To begin with, they've got four high-level areas of focus:

1. Encouraging people to be nice to others and themselves. They're starting a "You're doing it right" campaign, for instance.
2. Focusing on pushing back against the moop increase since this is, as I mentioned earlier, an existential problem for Burning Man.
3. Self-reliance. A decrease in self-reliance ultimately spills over onto the Org's volunteer services, and this, combined with the aforementioned volunteerism issues, is bad news.
4. A push to get people to think of themselves as citizens of BRC rather than "people at a festival."  

Ultimately, most of what they're going to do boils down to communication and education, focusing on about 75 different ways they have to reach individuals, and getting better at boiling down their messages into short, digestible chunks.

For example:

• They're going to (or already are) start highlighting cool homemade outfits for Burning Man, in response to the Instagrammers and their commercial fashion show. They want to show people that the spirit of Burning Man is more about DIY expressiveness.
  
  
• They're going to insert mini-messages into ticketing communications, as they know ticketing communications actually get read by a lot of people.
  
  
• They're finding ways to segment Burners and target different segments with different messages. For instance, people who acquired tickets in the DGS sale are, on average, considerably more experienced than the average person getting a ticket in the main sale, and so the latter might need more in the way of education around the culture.
  
  
• Along those lines, they're going to start targeting Burner Air Express passengers with Burning Man Culture 101 info, down to even potentially putting info in the seatbacks on the planes. 
  
  
• They've started doing reddit AMAs, including a recent very-successful one with the ticketing department, and will be doing more. For instance, they may do one to help de-mystify gate operations and explain why gate seems inefficient to some people.
  
  
• They want to put together high-level "top 10" lists that are helpful. Top 10 reasons NOT to go to Rampart, for instance, or top 10 ways to help a birgin acculturate. 
  
  
• They're creating 'acculturation in a box'. Presentations on the Burning Man culture that camps can use to help educate birgins.

Individually, all these (and they're just some of the tactics that will be used) probably don't seem that impressive, but there's no silver bullet here. This has to be a communication and education war waged on as many fronts as possible, because we're ultimately talking about influencing peoples' attitudes. We can't force people to give a shit about our culture, but I do think that most birgins would, if they understood what the culture is, enthusiastically participate. There'll always be some we can't reach, but we shouldn't let perfect by the enemy of good. Let's do what we can!

What Can We Do?

Correctly, Charlie and Jim also pointed out that this isn't just the Org's problem. It's the problem of everyone who doesn't want to see Burning Man's culture further deteriorate, meaning we veterans. How can we help? Some ideas from the session included:

• Theme camps can appoint culture ambassadors to make sure birgins and non-birgins both understand the culture. 
  
  
• One thing some camps have tried that was successful was 'assigning' a birgin to someone in a theme camp who they weren't previously friends with, so they get exposed more to the culture. It's sometimes easier for someone who isn't your close friend to educate you here.
  
  
• Camps can and should take care of their own. Why is someone going to Rampart for a paper cut? Why is their camp not taking care of them? Burning Man is a do-ocracy, not a takecareofme-ocracy. 

I'm hoping the Org provides some suggested action items for individual Burners to take too, as I think there's a not-insignificant population that would respond to that with passionate action.

I'm really happy to see the Org taking this growing threat to the culture of Burning Man seriously, and I hope that as they start to get the message out to the veteran Burner community, we respond by, collectively, enthusiastically joining in the fight to save our culture. I also hope this is only the beginning of action by the Org, because this will not be enough.

So...are you with us?
​