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Carmen Mauk, the director of Burners Without Borders (BwB), agrees that Burning Man began representing a number of related cultural movements.
"I remember when we got back from [disaster relief after Hurricane] Katrina, I thought we were on the leading edge [of communal problem-solving] — but it turned out that everybody else was thinking it too," she says. The "sharing economy" and open-source movements and Maker movements that all emerged into public consciousness in the last 20 years are part of the same wave that made Burning Man culture so attractive to so many.
"People stopped saying 'Let's look to the government' and started saying 'We need to know our neighbors and pull together. Otherwise nothing will happen,'" Mauk says. "Kickstarter, Indigogo were emerging; people were looking for ways to take their energy and their resources to solve problems themselves."
And Burning Man came to symbolize all that.
The Burning Man organization (which became official in 1996) was creating a space where all this could thrive, but it wasn't leading it. "We were running alongside it, and we still are," Burning Man co-founder and board member Marian Goodell says. "We're fortunate in that, unlike other movements, we value self-governance and individuality and could let this happen, rather than trying to mandate and over-prescribe. That was crucial."
Chip Conley, a member of the Burning Man Project's board, offers another reason Burning Man had such immediate appeal to so many people: During the time Burning Man took off, he says, we were increasingly living in a "URL-based culture."
"Burning Man is a unique opportunity to connect with others in a human way, without gadgets or devices or a screen," Conley says. "The more digital we get the more ritual we need — and when I say ritual I mean something face to face, connecting in person."
That's an element that many of the movements that spun out of Burning Man, or that look to Burning Man for their metaphors and inspiration, generally have in common: Freespace is about meeting in person. The Maker Movement is about building things with your hands. There's nothing in Burning Man's philosophy or 10 Principles that specifically eschews the digital, but in practice its call to live direct, unmediated lives of self-expression, inclusion, and community pulls people away from their screens. For all that the tech industry has passionately embraced Burning Man, it has an uneasy relationship with Burning Man's culture, which is happy to use the latest tech to find new ways to get people to relate to each other without tech.
But don't we live in a digital world? Yes, says Mauk — and it's become a problem for these movements.
"When crowdsourcing first hit the mainstream, people were using it for disaster relief and community projects, and it was an incredible way for people to come together to accomplish common goals," she says. But when was the last time you saw that? Now crowdsourcing is swamped with cool-but-useless inventions and celebrities with movies.
Far from leading to an era of mass empowerment, Mauk says, "this world on the internet has distracted people, and many of the movements that really inspired me have become lifestyle vehicles for first-world problems, rather than a way to solve global problems. I see fewer game-changing ideas."
There are new ideas about Burning Man and its place in the world. They're just not happening at Burning Man, which while it remains incredibly unpredictable at the micro-level — in the desert, you have no idea what you're going to encounter when you cross the street or go around the corner — has become predictable at the macro-level: The city's shape is set, the rules are established, the Man always burns on Saturday and the Temple always burns on Sunday.
But as Burning Man culture attempts to take root in the world, surprising things happen.
Burning Man is perhaps the world's greatest circuit party, but Burning Man's 10 Principles include more community-minded entries like "Civic Responsibility," "Communal Effort," and "Gifting," than they do self-gratifying items like "Radical Self-Expression." To understand what "Burning Man" means as a culture, here are some things you should know:
In Los Angeles, the regional Burner community planted a community garden at a South Central Los Angeles middle school, and is proposing to partner with the school district to fund and develop a new model of high-tech urban farming in collaboration with a South Central high school.
In Singapore, the regional Burner community is planning an event on the site of recent ethnic riots in a minority neighborhood; the intention is to restore the sense of community that was lost in the violence.
In South Africa, the Burner community is repairing and sponsoring schools, community centers, and roads, as well as a local employment program.
In Nicaragua, BwB helped construct and equip the first independently operated midwifery clinic in the nation's third-largest city. Its volunteers provide thousands of treatments annually.
In Kenya, a BwB spin-off project has created a "complimentary currency" to help impoverished villagers better use their resources, potentially creating a new model for addressing systemic poverty.
In Haiti and the Philippines, Communitaire — a disaster relief agency that emerged out of BwB — is helping create community centers in disaster areas to help local populations create the recovery programs that they need.
This doesn't include the thousands of free solar panels installed in schools and community buildings by Burning Man offshoot Black Rock Solar, or the hundreds of art projects supported around the world by the Black Rock Arts Foundation. The list goes on — and virtually every one of these initiatives is led and supported by volunteers. There are as many charitable efforts emerging from Burning Man as there are official Burning Man parties.
"I wish we'd started a tree that mapped everything that grew from Burning Man from the very first year on," says DuBois. "We've had a huge impact on a lot of businesses, a lot of technology, a lot of innovation, a lot of different groups." Elon Musk has said that to understand Silicon Valley you have to go to Burning Man — although this might just be another instance of the tech industry flattering itself, which it manages to do with twice the narcissism every two years.
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