Our man at Burning Man: A dispatch from the surreal desert gathering | BY Matthew Broersma | ZDNet
September 3, 1998
BLACK ROCK CITY, NEV. -- September 2, 1998. Burning Man, the temporary autonomous community that springs up every year way up in the Nevada desert, is just getting underway. A steady stream of cars have been making their way from the road toward the encampment, moving very slowly so as not to stir up dust. ("Dust is bad" say the ubiquitous handmade road signs.)
Even so, a disturbingly huge cloud of alkali matter has been wafting along behind them into Black Rock City all day. "People drive five miles per hour," said one of the Rangers, a band of volunteers who keep things running here, "But still, we're having major dust issues."
Dust will be a problem, because people are going to spend the next four days here mostly outdoors. Besides coating everything a uniform yellow-grey, the alkali dust gets into eyes, throat, socks, laptop computers... It can feel like bad allergies.
At its peak, Black Rock City, a civic entity that exists for about one week every year, is expected to grow to about 14,000 people.
“Burning Man is about the process of spontaneous culture.”
The majority of them found out about Burning Man over the Internet. During the part of the year when Black Rock City is merely a dry lakebed, they keep in touch online, through e-mail mailing lists and Websites.
In fact, this event is, as founder Larry Harvey puts it, "an analogue of the Internet." It's a real -- if temporary -- community arranged along the same decentralized, democratic lines as the virtual community of the global computer network.
Burning Man takes up where the Internet leaves off, according to Harvey. "Community doesn't begin until you can smell people," he says.
Two hours from civilization
Note to self: Next time, bring the following items to Burning Man.
More water. Something to eat other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. An outsized mobile home including: air conditioning; shaded front porch; refrigerator for perishable food; stove for cooking; generator for recharging laptop, mobile phone, other modern necessities; satellite telephone like the guy in the CyberBus has.
It's amazing the sorts of things you start to miss when you're two hours from civilization...
Burning Man began in 1986 when Harvey and some others performed a ritual for the summer solstice, burning an eight-foot wooden man on San Francisco's Baker Beach. In 1990, the ritual was moved to the Black Rock Desert, by way of emphasizing what's really important, i.e. life versus death.
Nowadays it's difficult to say exactly what Burning Man is all about, only that it seems to have taken on a real momentum.
People arrive during the week before the Labor Day weekend, notified of the time and place primarily over the Internet. The city they build is slightly different each year: in 1998 it's a broad semicircle, arranged around the Man, which is now over 50 feet tall.
Nudism is pretty widespread
A lot of the citizens invest considerable time and money in building projects designed to entertain and enlighten. These theme camps range from a Zen meditation area, shaped like a gigantic yin-yang symbol carved into the ground, to an enormous synthetic tree which spouts shower water, to the annual ice sculpture.
One group's effort is a flotilla of kayaks, canoes, and sailboards. "They're convinced that they're either several million years too late, or a few years too early, for Nevada to be under the ocean," we are informed.
Short-range radio stations -- broadcast out of vans or mobile homes -- are also popular this year, and come in handy for sending out messages to the community, calling for volunteers and the like.
Those who don't build a monument to their own fantasies are encouraged to participate in some other way, whether it's wearing a costume or wearing nothing at all. Nudism is pretty widespread.
There are few rules in Black Rock City, and those that exist are there to foment a sense of community, the organizers say.
Community is what the event is about, if nothing else. The symbolism of burning the wooden man to the ground, which will cap things off Sunday night, stands in for the sense of higher purpose Harvey believes is necessary for a culture and a community to form.
"We're trying to reverse the process of the commodification of everything in our lives," Harvey says. "Everything we do here is to show what has been lost through this modern commercial system.... Burning Man is about the process of spontaneous culture."