Letter to Jim Tananbaum

Dear Jim,

You posted your letter recently explaining your side of the Caravancicle debacle.  We don't know each other, and though I have a friend who stayed in your camp, I didn't visit it and so have no first-hand experiential knowledge of it, to be clear.

You're getting pretty overwhelmingly negative feedback on your post, based on comments on Facebook, the Burning Man blog, and the ePlaya forums. You may be wondering why and thinking to yourself that the Burning Man community was going to deliver harsh judgment no matter what you wrote. That's probably partially true, as there is a small contingent of Burners that simply react poorly to anything that smacks of wealth greater than their own. I'm not one of those people, however. 

Perhaps unlike some others, too, I'll grant that you meant well in organizing Caravancicle and that you meant well in posting about it today. I know others don't believe it, but I'm fairly certain you had no reason to care about making a profit from a Burning Man camp even had you intended to - the opportunity isn't particularly large or attractive (much less scalable) and you've had enough success that you don't need it. Beyond that, it's obvious you're a huge Burning Man fan. Nobody comes 6 years to cross something off his bucket list. Tourists come once, possibly twice.

But the entire camp, and your response to the controversy, comes across as a bit tone-deaf to me:

• Please stop bringing up the straw man of wealth. It's not what any of the intelligent criticism is about. 
  
  
• You say that "No one in Caravancicle made money off the camp." Isn't that simply because plans didn't work out? Surely the person you hired to manage the building of your camp planned to make money doing it. Again, I believe you didn't care about making money off it, but your vendors were surely planning to.
  
  

• You wrote that, "Although many of the more physical aspects of self-reliance were lost on the Caravanciclers, camp members were encouraged to exercise and rely on their inner resources." 
  
  In other words, you pampered them enough that they didn't have to do anything. I mean, really, isn't that the truth? That your camp members actually didn't have to do anything unless they chose to? How is that acculturating anyone to Burning Man? My first year there, I was setting up and taking down domes and cooked two full meals a day, every day, for at least two of my campmates. Sure, I "relied on my inner resources" too but that's no different than at every other point in my life where I'm not unconscious, sleeping, or dead. 
  
  Look, I think that radical self-reliance is mainly important insofar as it means you don't annoy your neighbor by being unprepared (vs some kind of holy commandment), and by that measure you succeeded, but let's not pretend that there was anything self-reliant (radically or otherwise) about your campers. You paid people to take care of them, no different than a hotel (that has some major unplanned-for hiccups in service). 
  
  
• You wrote that, "all members were still responsible for chores around camp including, but not limited to, picking up trash and being responsible for washing their own dishes."
  
  Did they have to wipe their own bums after using the private toilets too? Come ON man. You've been coming to Burning Man for 6 years now. I really start questioning what kind of experience you have out there if this qualifies as even worth mentioning. Picking up your own trash? Responsible for washing your own dishes? Are these small children for whom these acts represent something admirable on their way to learning that it's just expected that you can take care of yourself like adults do? 
  
  Again, I believe you mean well, but this comment is stunningly tone-deaf if it's calculated to garner any empathy from most Burners, who do far more than this.
  
  
• You wrote that, "I urge everyone to remember that for some of our campers, this was their first burn. Personally, I contributed substantially less my first year than I have in years since."
  
  I think most people would say the same was true for them, but the relative amount you contributed between your first year and other years isn't really the issue. The issue is that you created a camp that explicitly invited people to pay large sums of money in order to come and be taken care of. You went out of your way to attempt to eliminate any sense of self-reliance. You created a space where your members didn't have to participate. First-time burners should be cut some slack, I agree, but it seems like you did everything you could to avoid acculturating them to our event, and that's what reasonable Burners object to.
  

Here's my feeling: As Larry and many others have pointed out, the Principles are a reflection of the principles of the community in 2004. I'd suggest you consider that what you did with Caravancicle has deeply offended a good portion of the core, repeat-attendee Burning Man community, which should tell you that what you did probably does not reflect the principles of the community in 2014 (or 2004 for that matter, but that's ancient history).

I think you're a highly successful guy used to dealing with people who like to be pampered. As such, it may not seem weird to you that you are literally lauding fully-functioning adults for washing their own dishes  or picking up their own trash. The level of "gaaah!" is pretty high for the rest of us though.   

You would have been better just saying nothing, or, if you wanted to actually take responsibility, doing so in a forthright manner, simply apologizing, and pledging it won't happen again. Instead you've left us with a bunch of defensive-sounding justifications and no reason to believe it won't happen again based on what you wrote.

You obviously love Burning Man and you're passionate about it. I'd imagine you're going to be involved with running or contributing to camps in the future, as so many veteran Burners are. I hope you'll consider what I've said (not that you have any obligation to) and just think about whether you want to build a camp that is designed to bring people into the Burning Man culture, or one that is designed to make it easy and painless for people to come play tourist.

You can reach me at [email protected] if you want to chat about how to get your newbies to high-dive into the culture like champs rather than tip-toe around the edges. I'm friendly!

Best,

Dr. Yes / Matt