http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2010/09/13/burning-with-desire/
In Nevada's Black Rock Desert, it is better to be awesome than rich
Posted on September 13th, 2010
by Jon Evans
I'm just back from Burning Man, the surreal festival of 50,000
artists, anarchists, hippies, ravers, engineers, and gawkers who
gather annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to build a temporary
city, throw the world's biggest party, and show off their latest
artistic creations. Whatever you may have heard about the bacchanal
is probably true… but there's more to it than that.
The event's ephemeral metropolis, Black Rock City one of Nevada's
five largest urban areas, during the week that it exists defies all
rational economic analysis. Even its least-involved citizens spend
about $300 for an entrance ticket, and much more to carry their own
food, water, and shelter to and from one of Earth's most barren
pieces of real estate. Those who construct their own art, technology,
and/or theme camps playgrounds for passersby, essentially
collectively put in many thousands of hours of hard labour, and
millions of dollars more in materials.
Why? Not for money: commerce is strictly forbidden in Black Rock
City, aside from a few essential services provided by the Burning Man
organization itself. Instead the city runs on a gift economy. Its
many bars, for instance, are hosted by groups who buy carloads of
booze, drive it into the desert, construct some kind of (frequently
extremely elaborate) structure, and spend many hours pouring drinks
for endless crowds of random strangers, while expecting nothing in
return. Art created for or during Burning Man is rarely if ever sold
afterwards in fact, much of it is burned and I'm not aware of any
startups seeded with technology originally built for the playa.
(Mind you, attendance can have unexpected benefits; Google's
co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, hired Eric Schmidt as their
CEO in part because he was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man.)
Instead, this epic frenzy of creation and construction is fuelled by
purely personal (and routinely unselfish) desires. People dedicate
money and countless time to projects like Syzygryd, the Kinetic Cab
Company or Toronto's own The Heart Machine. They do it to give back
to the community; to show off, and earn bragging rights; and, most of
all, to be part of something awesome. Call it a reputation economy.
Those desires aren't limited to Black Rock City. During the last
decade, a whole community of open-source, build-it-yourself artists
and engineers has erupted. The explosion has been chronicled by both
Make magazine (which now hosts regular Maker Faires, designed to
"celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects, and the
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset") and Wired whose editor Chris
Anderson's latest book is, not coincidentally, Free: The Future of a
Radical Price.
Anderson has been accused of plagiarism because he copied much of
Free from Wikipedia with minimal attribution and he has blithely
admitted as much without a trace of guilt. He does, after all, claim
membership in a collective, open-source movement; building on the
work of others is not just accepted but assumed. Hackerspaces such as
San Francisco's Noisebridge, Toronto's Hacklab.TO, Vancouver's
HackSpace, and Montreal's Foulab, along with art spaces like Site3 in
Toronto, act as focal points for entire collaborative communities of makers.
Tinkerers and hardware hackers have always been around but today's
are far more ambitious than those of yesteryear. I have friends with
their own space program, but even they pale next to the all-volunteer
Danish group that plans to launch its own passenger-capable rocket
into space from an ocean platform towed out to sea by their homemade submarine.
Why now? In part, the movement is a collective backlash against our
money-obsessed, mass-produced society in which almost no one knows
how to build anything anymore. But it's also because that same
society's technology e.g. Italy's wildly successful Arduino
open-source hardware platform, cheap new 3-D printers, and lasers
cannibalized from PlayStations has quietly made making things a
whole lot easier. Most of all, it's because today's relatively
wealthy creative classes increasingly care more for accomplishments
and esteem than cash.
As the world slowly but steadily grows wealthier, our reputations
will matter more, and money less; in other words, at some point it
will be better to be awesome than to be rich. Burning Man is so
different from the real world that it might as well be a parallel
dimension but at the same time, Black Rock City is an interesting
testbed for tomorrow's reputation economy. So keep an eye on what's
happening in that desert, and on today's community of makers. They
just might be the vanguard of the future.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment