Digerati Are Unlikely Celebrants Of a Primitivist Conflagration
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
A naked couple poses on the baked desert plain, wearing black net face masks, goggles and snorkels. A bald man in blue lipstick wears a baby dress and carries a pinwheel. A man squats in ersatz tribal gear complete with a stick through his nose.
Celebrants like these have come to a five-day festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert that takes place annually on Labor Day weekend with 115-degree temperatures, parched earth and ritualistic spectacle (last year about 10,000 people arrived).
The focal point of the Burning Man festival by day...
At their center is a five-story-high statue of a man, constructed of wood and lighted with neon. On the final night, the statue is set ablaze as celebrants dance in painted skin and loincloths and scream in ecstasy.
The festival is called Burning Man and in preparation for this summer it is being commemorated in a new book containing devotional essays and photos of elaborate revelry. But despite the mock primitivism of the festival, the book is being published by Hardwired, a label usually more preoccupied with Web-ites than Luddites. And the festival itself has a promotional and inspirational World Wide Website that is heating up in anticipation of this year's event.
In fact, the Internet seems an unusually comfortable home for Burning Man devotees. Anthologies of burning-man sites have been posted; regular participants in the festival provide links to photos and archives and the press provides eyewitness accounts as well as mainstream newspapers.
What's going on here? After all, primal screams are usually prompted by something other than the hunger for more bandwidth, and cultic conflagrations seem to have little to do with the languages of programming like HTML and Java.
Yet the association is unmistakable. Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, has called Burning Man "the holiday of choice for the digerati." Among its motorcycle freaks, urban dropouts and thrill seekers, are media professionals and technology cultists.
Is this a form of technological slumming? An escape from venture capitalists? A novel approach to brainstorming?
Atavistic reactions to new technologies are not that unusual. And sometimes they seem to be in homage to otherworldly forces like the ones summoned by advanced technology. As Arthur C. Clarke once famously put it, any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Technology worship can become a form of religion.
Some of that is surely latent in contemporary cyber-devotion; it even seeps into another book about technological communities, coming in September from the MIT Press, "A World's Fair," in which Carl Malamud gives an account of his creation of an Internet-based international exhibition of sites in 1996. He reminds us of the technological temple of the first World Exhibition in London in 1850: the Crystal Palace, an extraordinary invention, covered with the largest roof ever built, its 293,655 panes of glass revealing a massive assemblage of every machine ever invented.
Now technology worship may just be taking a slightly weirder form. One cannot look at the costumes in the new book, the painted bodies, or the elaborately bedecked cars with their Mad Max design, without thinking of machinery. People are on display, showing what they can make of themselves, proclaiming their liberation from constraints, declaring a new kind of social technology in which anything can be done or made. Technology has been displaced from metal to flesh; perhaps it is even celebrated in flame.
This was not the original intention. The festival began in 1986 when Larry Harvey, the Burning Man impresario, held a miniature gathering on a California beach to burn a human effigy. In following years, word got around, crowds accumulated, fire marshals got upset, and the festival migrated to the remote desert, where each year attendance has more than doubled.
In the desert, the impromptu festival became a full-scale countercultural declaration of independence. "The essence of the desert," says Harvey, "is that you are free to create your own world, your own visionary reality." It provided a social blank slate. Kelly finds a "deep parallel between desert and cyberspace.
...and by night. The Man is burnt at the climax of the festival.
That idea has had much resonance. This is not really a festival like Woodstock, which was partly a Romantic paean to the natural world. At Burning Man, nature is an opponent, with unforgiving windstorms, dust, lightning, heat and drought. The festival's Web site almost boasts of the spiked branches, snakes and quicksand. Instead the paean is to technological artifice and invented identities.
The paean, in fact, is to a state of being that can be found in the precincts of cyberspace, which libertarian celebrants hail for its invented identities in Multi-user domains, or MUDs, and chat rooms, its sexual license and lack of restrictions, its virtual communities and fantasy games. In Harvey's words: "Both Burning Man and the Internet make it possible to regather the tribe of mankind."
Perhaps. But there also may be opposing forces at work in Burning Man; this homage is also a rejection. Technology may be celebrated, but Harvey hints that Burning Man also satisfies a religious desire that technology cannot sate. Burning Man helps reveal technology's limits. It may even be partly an exorcism. The Burning Man is Technological Man, worshiped and destroyed, a robot demolished by its masters before being rebuilt again.
This year, the festival itself will also start to reveal the limitations it once denied. With the prospect of more than 10,000 celebrants, Harvey writes on his Web site, "it's time to assume more responsibility for what we are." There needs to be a "higher level of commitment" from participants. Admission will be $75, and the celebration will be held on private property. Speeding cars will be controlled. A fee will be charged to limit access to the local hot springs.
The libertarian spirit, organizers promise, will remain intact. But it may be that at Burning Man, as in cyberspace, and as with technology, limitations are inseparable from possibilities, absolute freedom is an illusion, and there is never a blank slate even in the desert.