Saturday, September 5, 1998

Thank you. Hi y'all. Thanks for comin'.

I was reading a 'zine a while back and there was an interview there about Waylon Jennings. Somebody got backstage and talked to Waylon Jennings, the 'Country Music Star'. And he said, "You know it's funny. You play your music because you love it, you play it for the people you love. And it's a little community. And they come and you know them and they know you, and what's more, if you miss a note, they know it too. They're your best critics. Then one day you find your self up on a stage facing 10,000 people, and if you miss a note, they don't know it. They don't care. They came to see 'Waylon Jennings'".

You see what happened to Waylon Jennings is that he became commodified. Waylon became a product. And I'm sure his agent told him, "if you want to get into this or that musical style because it suits your sense of personal expression, you better not because you're a commodity now and you're turning out a product and people want that 'Waylon Jennings Music'." So it stunted his art career. And of course the community lost him too.

There's a whole industry out there, led by talent scouts, who go about and they look around and they see those places where culture shoots up like a weed through pavement. And when they see it; they grab it, and they pluck it, and they turn it into a product. It's called commodification.

Now, we had an article in the Reno News here, a deal_with_y'all_weekly out here, and they said "oh my god they've gone corporate, they're so commercial". Because we sell T-shirts - not here, we sell em through our newsletter and at a dusty little shop in Gerlach - and we charge to get in.

And I'll tell you that's commerce, but we've never been against commerce. I mean commerce is civilization, commerce was the Silk Route. Commerce was the Indians trading obsidian for sea-shells. Nothing wrong with commerce. We're against commodification. That's what we don't do here.

What happened to us is that people, about 200 years ago, I don’t know about the history, but I'll rehearse it, I'm interested in this stuff - they invented mass production. It started in England essentially, spread to Europe, and they found out that they could make these machines that would turn out textiles at an incredible rate, so they needed wool. And so the people with property decided to confiscate what were called 'the commons'. Now those were lands that were shared by everybody. That was a long tradition through the feudal days of Europe. And they said, "No, that's not in common with anybody. That's property, because we can make a big buck if we put sheep on that land and sell it to the mill owners."

And suddenly they created, overnight, a class of displaced people, who'd lived in the country, who had a culture that went back hundreds of years, that connected them to each other, and connected them to the land. And they said "get out of here, because money dictates it. Because this is 'Mass Production'." And they created a class of landless people that became what Marx finally called the Proletariat. And these were people who'd been deprived of their folk culture, and deprived of high culture, they'd been deprived of everything. And they turned into the 'trash' of the world.

And that process has been going on ever since. You see, there was a day in our world, when half of the economy out there was based on the conventions of culture and customary relations and sharing. The kind of values a community creates. Now I don't know if you've noticed, but we ban commerce from the city, because we're trying to create a gift economy. Now you've probably noticed that this is a gift economy were running on out here.

Now gift giving is interesting, because when you give someone a gift it creates a bond between you and them. Now, you may not always want a bond. If you're buying gum from someone in a subway, you just want gum, and you want to get on your train. You don't want a connection.

Well, what's happened to our world is that the economy of gift giving has shrunken down to almost nothing, and all of the commerce we have has been commodified. It exists still in little pockets within families - if you go out and get something at the store - if your mother-in-law says "get me some cigarettes" - then you're not going to charge her for it. 'Cause you know you're connected to her, in this heart felt way, in your little community of the family, but half of the American Families now spend their time sitting on their couches watching TV in a hypnoidal trance, and they don't talk to one another, and really about 95% of our lives have turned into economic transactions which don't connect us to anything.

The fact that five million people consume the same beverage at the same time doesn't mean a thing. We've created this world in which - they do these demographic studies, and they find out people think they want, and then in a kind of seance they summon up before you the Ghost of Your Own Desire and they sell it to you. And it doesn't connect you to anything. It connects you to your own individual desires, and then it turns out as it so often does in life, that what you wanted wasn't what you needed. So we spend all our time now, consuming stuff, consuming these dream images that nourish us spiritually like Styrofoam pellets. They don't do us any good.

Burning Man originally comes out of the Bohemian scene of San Francisco. Right? And we've given you all a chance to live like artists out here. Everyone of you can live like an artist. That means you can give everything away and live on the edge of survival. Just give it all away, live on the edge of survival, 'cause that's how artists live.

And a funny thing happens when you start doing that. A guy came up to me, he was working on a project out here a couple nights ago. It was really late, we stood in the dark, I was dead tired and I listened to what he said. And he said, "You know my girlfriend just left me" - well, I can identify with that - "I've quit my job, and about two months ago I realized that if I didn't give everything to what I'm doing, it wouldn't happen. So I just decided I'd open up my heart and give everything to it. And after I made that decision, the funny thing was, every time we came to a place where we didn't seem to have resources, and we couldn't do it, they appeared."

Well, that's because he opened up his heart and he started giving it all, and other people were inspired by that and so they started doing that, and pretty soon, they had all got together, and they were imitating one another, and they were emulating one another, and they were cooperating with one another, and they were collaborating with one another. I think this experience is going to change his life. 'Cause he'll go back to San Francisco, and he'll think "Well, it's only 364 days till the next Burning Man, it's only 363 days." Then it's going to dawn on him, what the hell's he waitin for?

People come out here, and all their lives they've said to themselves, "I'd realize my vision, except for circumstance. It's my family, I don't have training, I don't know anyone, I don't have capital. Otherwise I'd do it." Then they come out here and they see other people coming in here who have miracled up worlds out of nothing. And they did it through cooperating, and collaborating, and creating resources. You go back home and you think, "Well, that was a lot of bullshit. I was the only person stopping myself." And that's really the fundamental basis for our growth. What we'd like to see is the world get back to a point, where, ... (pause)

Years ago, people asked me why the cybernetic people were coming out here, why the Internet people were coming out here, and I didn't have a clue 'cause I was still using a bic pen. And gradually it dawned on me why they come out here. There's a great change coming over the world. These people've been inhabiting a world on the Internet which is non-hierarchic, radically democratic, essentially populist in character, in which you create your own reality and move where you want, and you wouldn't be judged for it. And they looked at this place and they said, "Geez, that's an analog of cyber.. that's cyberspace come true." What they are beginning to realize is that you're never going to fill the community in cyberspace, but it's been one hell of a means of communication. And it's possible then - and what I always say is you don't have a community till you can smell people, so by that standard we have a hell of a community out here.

And what happened then, they found out that this is the analog to cyberspace, but it's different, because it's not anonymous and it's not vicarious like the Internet can be. So it puts people in touch with one another and then we work hard all year round to contact them, tell them who lives near them and get them together and they start talking and they say "Why are we waiting for Burning Man? We can apply the same principles we learned out at Burning Man to our lives." And it turns out the world is changing fast and we're teaching valuable survival skills out here, this is about radical self-expression and radical self-reliance. There's a world coming where you're going to need self-reliance.

Someone asked me, "Well, how powerful do you think the Internet is? And how is that going to change our lives" And I said "well, there were these nomadic pastoral people who lived up north of Europe and descended in wave after wave and conquered it. For a simple reason: Somebody invented the stirrup. And it allowed you to sit on the horse in a saddle and shoot a bow and arrow. And suddenly they took over the whole civilized world several times over." Well the Internet is our stirrup. 'Cause you can be anybody on the Internet, and if you have an idea it will begin to pervade.

The state doesn't know how to use the Internet and they can't control it. Corporations are trying to figure out how to use the Internet but they think it's a big billboard. They don't understand that it's an interactive medium and you're not sitting there in a hypnotic trance absorbing all these ads passively. And if they get a thousand or a hundred thousand hits on their website it doesn't really matter.

But we know how to use the Internet because we use it interactively. We apply all the principles that we've developed to create and make a society, to create a community that foments a culture, and we've applied it to the Internet. And what's happening, is that all over this country right now, people are coming back from Burning Man, and they're beginning to try to live like Burning Man in their daily lives. I mean this event doesn't really mean a whole lot if it's just an entertainment event; just a way to blow off steam and then go back to what we call reality. What they call reality really isn't going to be reality in the future, and it never really was.

If you look beyond the horizons of this world we've created here, you begin to understand that there's an enormous appetite out there for a kind of community in which culture is created. Now I've said this again and again and I'm going to keep saying this till I die, that this thing called 'culture' is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It just happens. You can't plan it, and you can't control it - anymore than you can control the flow of a river or the growing of a blade of grass - you can't do it. It's something that we as animals are adapted to do and we spontaneously do it under certain social conditions. It ain't going to happen in an elevator, though that's an organized social situation. Standing there in the elevator looking up at the floors as they go by, it's not going to happen. It's not interactive in an elevator. It's not going to happen. Culture isn't going to break out standing in line waiting to get a ticket to some event. People aren't going to be emulating and imitating one another.

I'll tell you where they start creating culture. Isn't it funny that there are all these white suburban kids out here today in our nation who are imitating the dress, the walk, the talk of black ghetto kids. What the hell is that about? I'll tell you what it's about. The kids in the ghetto didn't have any money. The kids in the ghetto couldn't go pay for entertainment. So they began imitating one another, emulating one another, sharing resources, and collaborating with one another and they invented a new art form.

Then the headhunters came in, and they said, "Well, we're going to commodify that." And they sure have. They took, and they made stars of the rappers. Do you think the next generation in the ghetto is going to imitate their elder brother? No. It's gone way beyond them; it's a product now. It's dead to them. The white kids are imitating them because it has some savor or flavor of reality to it because it's the product of this deeply human situation that's enormously deep in our nature and enormously broad in the way it factors in all the varied experience of everybody.

Now, Walt Disney can't do that. Walt Disney can't create Burning Man. Walt Disney couldn't buy Burning Man. What's he supposed to do? Eisner's going to pay all of you to do your thing, so they can charge you to come here? I don't think it works. Doesn't make any sense.

Burning Man is spreading because we don't really have any competition. If you look at it just in a marketing way, there isn't anybody else that's competing with us. And the beautiful part of it is that if someone else starts to imitate us, we LIKE that. We're not going to sue them for infringing on the copyright. Because culture's about imitation, emulation, cooperation, and all these things. It hasn't happened in the western world for the last 200 years. It's just got worse and worse, till everyone is in their stalls, like a feed lot. You know. Just consuming stuff and not attached to everybody else.

It's kind of funny. In a way, coming out here you've embraced a kind of poverty. You're responsible for everything. You have to struggle with.. We've got the wind. We've got the rain threatening. It puts you in contact with the immediate realities of life. In a way it's a kind of poverty you've embraced, it's an immediate contact and struggle with the world around you. We thought it'd really be neat if everybody shared that together.

We've been working for a year planning this city. And if this were a normal festival, the essential concern that would inform our design would be "well, how do we get the vendors in to sell enough 'stuff'?" And the city would be completely organized around the act of consumption. But if you look at the city we created, it's not organized that way at all. It's organized around this notion of community, and sharing and giving to other people.

We have this big circle here. Then we've got the two village circles. And we thought, "Well wouldn't that be neat to stand in your village and you look around and it's just like the way it was back in 1986 when we got inspired, and we saw this circle of fire-lit faces you could see everybody gathered around this central thing that united us and was somehow was more powerful than we were." So we thought we'd just duplicate that and then let people start interacting. If it doesn't work, we'll redesign it next year so it works better. But the sole reason we plan any of this to let this naturally occurring phenomenon of human interaction begin to live again in our world.

There's another part of it too that's been planned: We've got the Man out there. We've been working at this for years, and from our experience, we've developed certain ideas, certain principles, and we realized early on that if you're going to get people together then they have to be finally and ultimately connected to something beyond themselves. Now historically that could be a war, it could be a God, but something out there that brings everybody together. So we place the man way out there, outside the world. Way beyond the world. In that sense he's sacred; he stands outside the world. He's the connecting point that unites all of you. It's really funny what's going to happen. The man's going to burn on Sunday Night, and about a third of you are going to get completely lost.

Here's how we designed this city. We went out and we put a stake in the ground, just like the beginning of the universe. There was nothing here, then there was a singularity in space. And from that point we surveyed every street. If you notice, every time you walk down a street, he's at the end of the street. So to find out where you are, you have to find out where he is. And you're going to get used to that, it's like a giant night-light out there. And then he goes down and you say "What the hell, where am I, I'm lost!" For about an hour you'll feel really lost and then you realize, "Well, I guess we have to build him again."

So we put the man out there, and they ask me what it means. I'm not so interested in 'what' it means, as 'how' it means, and how it effects all of you. The essential idea is that there is this final connecting point, that seems to connect you to yourself, connects you to the people around you, and ultimately connects you with the earth and the heavens. If you have that, it's a wonderful unifier. Every culture I know of that rose to greatness in the world had something like that. So we thought we'd just invent the function of it. And by God, it seems to work.

This whole experiment we're running is an effort to recreate culture in our modern world. Because if we don't do it, I can justly fear that when the machine stops, we're going to find ourselves so isolated from one another that none of us are going to be able to cope with it. So if you're going to survive in the coming world, you're going to have to learn radical self-reliance in an environment like this and then take that self-reliance and turn it into connection with other people, and then turn it into connection with the whole universe out there. And that's the way it always has worked, it's just got kind of screwed up in the last 200 years.

We think what's going to happen, 'cause we've been watching it, is that groups are going to form all over the country - they're already formed, we hear about it. We hear about individuals changing their lives, we hear about people going back, and they say "Well, why can't we do back here what we did out there? Why can't we cooperate, why can't we share resources?" And they begin to do it. And the world is coming where the great central controls that have guided things, the bureaucracies and the state, and all those things are beginning to dwindle down.

Given a sense of community, and given the tools to make it a reality, and the Internet is going to be a big part of that; I'd advise all of you to get on the Internet, not for the sake of having stupid, vicarious, anonymous experiences in cyberspace, but for the sake of meeting one another and getting together again. So when you go home...

You know, if this was just an event, I would get bored and I'd quit. But it's not an event, it's a phenomenon, and it's flowing out beyond our horizons. When you go home, don't say "I'm waiting 364 days until Burning Man, to get that wonderful experience that 'they gave me'." Realize that you can do it too.

And that's about all I have to say, uh, today.