Zappo’s founder Tony Hsieh sold his company to Amazon for more than a billion dollars. This wasn’t his first success – he also came up with LinkExchange (and their social networking subsidiary event, DrinkExchange), which was sold for tens of millions to Microsoft in the “dot com” hey day of the late 90′s. He’s investing $350 million of his own money on “The Downtown Project“. These initiatives are re-vitalizing downtown Las Vegas. His vision of transformation includes large public art installations, a shipping container park, thumping electronic music til late in the night, ziplines, and a cultural mix between Burning Man, TED (which hosts TED talks at Burning Man), and Austin’s South By SouthWest festival (where BMOrg premiered their Spark movie).

Hsieh bought sculptor Kirk Jellum’s 40×30 foot, fire-spewing “The Mantis,” which was at Burning Man in 2011 and 2012. It is at the Container Park development at 7th & Fremont Streets.

Hsieh is a big-time Burner, and his recent interview with Playboy is excellent, well worth reading in its entirety. Here’s the core bit for Burners:

PLAYBOY: You spent a lot of time at raves when you were younger. What did you get out of those all-night dance parties?

HSIEH: A huge amount. In the beginning, it was this idea of peace, love, unity and respect—the guiding principles of the culture. You could talk to anyone, with no ulterior motive; it was about being open to people. But the most important understanding was about something called the hive switch. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes about it in The Righteous Mind. Basically, if you look at nature, you discover that certain animals, like chimpanzees and wolves, compete for food and mates, while others—bees are the best example—organize themselves for the greater good. They live together as a unified force because the DNA is the same. Bees are always working together for the benefit of the hive.

As humans, we go back and forth between both states. Serving our self-interest is kind of the default mode. But certain things trigger the hive switch and cause us to behave in a way that makes us care about the greater good. When you experience it, it is pure awe, like when you see something in nature that’s bigger than yourself. A synchronized movement does that as well, which is why when you join the military you spend the first six weeks just learning how to march in units.

For me, the hive switch got turned on by raves. It was a feeling of unity with the other people in the space, unity with the music and with one another. That’s why I go to Burning Man. The art, especially at night, just puts you in a state of awe. These things are hard to describe until you’ve experienced them, I guess.

PLAYBOY: You really have an open mind. The question has to be asked: How much weed do you smoke?

HSIEH: [Laughs and pauses] Let me answer this way: I think there’s a lot of interesting research that looks at the health effects of pot versus alcohol, and pot certainly doesn’t have a negative health impact. And since Washington and Colorado have legalized its use, it’s something to keep an eye on.

PLAYBOY: You’re avoiding the question. What about ecstasy? Nobody was going to raves in those days without it, right?

HSIEH: Okay, my hesitation in answering questions like these is that there’s a perception that you need to do drugs in order to have certain experiences. People have a visceral reaction to that idea, so I don’t like to state a preference one way or the other. People think with raves, for instance, that ecstasy is what that scene was all about. I mean, there were definitely people who went to raves in those years and were on ecstasy. I don’t have a judgment about that, but for me it was really the feeling of unity I described.

Did you ever see the movie Milk? I generally don’t get teary-eyed or cry out of sadness in movies. In that movie there’s the scene where gay rights activist Harvey Milk gets shot. That didn’t make me cry. What made me teary-eyed was the scene toward the end when thousands of people show up for a candlelight vigil. That was really uplifting. To me, it wasn’t about Milk; it wasn’t about his politics; it wasn’t about his death. It was about the response he triggered in all those people.

PLAYBOY: Incidentally, you’ve been rather ambiguous in discussing your sex life. Can you explain what you meant when you told The New York Times, “I hang out with a lot of people, guys and girls. I don’t really have this one person I am dating right now. I am hanging out with multiple people, and some people I hang out with more than others”?

HSIEH: Oh that. Because of the way it was worded, everyone started assuming I’m bisexual, which I’m not. I meant it as an analogy.

PLAYBOY: You’re 40 and single. Is monogamy overrated?

HSIEH: I think, biologically, from a Darwinian perspective, it is. From a purely evolutionary point of view, the guy who’s monogamous will have fewer copies of his genes in the next generation than a guy who’s not. I think it’s pretty hard to find one partner and call it a day. Using the analogy of friends, why not find just one friend and call it a day? The answer is because you get a different type of connection, different conversations, different experiences with different friends. I would say the same thing is true on the dating side.

PLAYBOY: You’ve mentioned before that you’re a fan of the literature of pickup artistry, including Neil Strauss’s The Game. Do those techniques work for you?

HSIEH: I think I have different goals. The Game is more focused on how to pick up girls, but I found it interesting in thinking about how to use similar concepts to build relationships in general. I’ve read a lot of stuff by people in that world, so I don’t remember who said what, but I remember hearing that if you’re going on a date with a girl, the best thing to do is change locations every half hour or hour and do something different. Basically, at the end, if you’ve gone to seven different locations, it will have the same effect on memory as going on seven dates in single locations. So it’s about time compression and memory and so on. The point is to seduce a girl faster, but that technique has other applications as well. It’s part of what I’m trying to do with Downtown Project. When people come visit us we basically hop from location to location to location, so even though they’ve been here only two or three nights, it will seem as though they’ve been here two weeks. It’ll have a big impact on their memory. Humans remember things in terms of geography and number of stories. I want a city where all this stuff is within walking distance so you can have a bunch of different experiences.

PLAYBOY: Just to confirm: You’re designing a city based on techniques used to get into women’s pants?

HSIEH: Well, we’re not using the techniques to pick up girls. But I did have someone here from that world who said what we’re trying to do is basically seduce people into moving to downtown Vegas.

PLAYBOY: And have a Tesla in every garage.

HSIEH: It’s true. We placed the largest order in the United States for Teslas. Project 100 is going to have car sharing and bike sharing, and we’ll also have a bunch of ultracompact electric vehicles called Twizys. But yeah, we bought 100 Teslas.

PLAYBOY: What’s your opinion of Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk?

HSIEH: He’s not doing enough, that slacker. He’s got to think bigger. That was sarcasm, if you couldn’t tell. I have huge respect for all he’s doing. It’s definitely a company I admire.

PLAYBOY: What other companies make the list?

HSIEH: I definitely like and appreciate the Virgin brand. I’ve always been interested in anything that’s a consumer-facing brand. Red Bull, Apple, In-N-Out Burger. Great service for the masses. Consistency. The employees seem happy; the customers seem happy.

PLAYBOY: By the way, did you really order the “100 by 100” off the secret menu at In-N-Out?

HSIEH: Absolutely. I like a challenge. It was Halloween; we were hungry. If you don’t know about it, the 100 by 100 is a massive burger. It’s 100 patties and 100 cheese slices, all within two buns. There were eight of us, and we ate the whole thing. The plan was to go out and party the rest of the night, but we just ended up lying on the apartment floor in a collective food coma. But we were happy.

It’s good to see Burners sticking together, ordering from each other. Conducting commerce, off the Playa. The Burner ecosystem, thriving.

One of the biggest news stories of the year has been the Nevada stand-off between rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM. The Bundy family have been grazing cattle on the land for almost 140 years (although that claim has been disputed). The BLM claims that the Bundys owe $1 million in back taxes for grazing fees, and that they have to clear off the land because of an endangered desert tortoise. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the state, the BLM are killing thousands of these tortoises. The BLM ran over a tortoise den on the Bundy ranch, and PETA has called them out on their inhumane treatment of the cows. Ecologists claim that the cows are actually good for the tortoises: “more cows, more tortoises”. Further complicating the story is the revelation that the powerful Democrat Senator Harry Reid of Nevada wants to build a solar power plant with the Chinese on the land. The head of the BLM is a former senior advisor of Reid. According to a BLM whistleblower, there is also be a rare earth mineral with military applications involved, and long-term real estate shenanigans involving the Reid family.

The Feds have taken a heavy-handed approach, with death threats, cries of “domestic terrorism”, scuffles and tasering. In the latest skirmish, hundreds of Bundy supporters on foot and on horses advanced on dozens of heavily armed and armored BLM agents who were pointing assault rifles at them and threatening to shoot. They managed to free 389 cows without any shots being fired. The Feds retreated and the battle was won, but Harry Reid vowed “it’s not over yet”.

Enter, Burning Man.

“Burning Man Organizer Plans ‘BundyFest’ – 30 Days of Anarchy next to Stand-off Site”, reads the headline in the Washington Times. The Daily Kos said “this year, Burning Man will be held at Bundyfest — free land adjacent to the Cliven Bundy Ranch.  And it’s all free, free, free  – no permits, no rules, nothing!”

Here’s the official blurb for the clothing optional, gay-friendly, 24/7 event:

Come celebrate TOTAL FREEDOM at BUNDYFEST, just across the street from the Cliven Bundy Ranch, in Bunkerville, Nevada! 240 bands, 24 hours a day, for a SOLID ROCKIN’ MONTH!!!!

*NO PERMITS REQUIRED
*CAMP ABSOLUTELY ANYWHERE
*FULL NUDITY NOT A PROBLEM
*GAY-FRIENDLY ATMOSPHERE
*PENIS ERECTION CONTEST: Erect the largest penis in the open desert, win valuable prize! (tbd)

BACKGROUND: For years, we paid permitting fees to hold Burning Man on the beautiful Playa in Northern Nevada. But now, Cliven Bundy has shown us a NEW WAY! ABSOLUTE FREEDOM! Bundy has declared the entire area surrounding Bundy Ranch as a TOTALLY RULES-FREE ZONE! ANYTHING GOES! WOO-HOO!!!

Why should Burning Man end on September 1st? Swing down to Vegas for a few days for some R&R, a few good buffets, and then HEAD ON UP TO BUNDYFEST! All 50,000+ Burning Man participants are invited to attend — and as many more as can make the trip from anywhere in the world! 100,000? 250,000? THE SKY IS THE LIMIT AT BUNDYFEST! The desert surrounding Bundy’s ranch is LIMITLESS!

As well as Burners, they’re expecting the Hells Angels and the LA Gay Men’s choir. Should be quite a mix.

Security has already been arranged:

“That’s the point! This is anarchy. This is exactly what the founding fathers envisioned for America…go down to the river, pop a squat and let it all hang out, that’s your right as an American”

So, what’s the deal? Is Burning Man getting all political now, sending hordes of Burners out to stand before the gun barrels of the BLM?

Well, not quite. “Burning Man organizer Sean Shealy” actually has nothing to do with Burning Man – in fact, he has never even been. This fact is not important enough to make it in the papers, so the story has gone global that “Burning Man is now at Bundy Fest”.

BMOrg came out to make an official statement:

“The person is not a Burning Man organizer and we actually have no information on him,” Jim Graham, a Burning Man communications representative, said in an email today.

Additionally, Burning Man posted this on Facebook last night:

“For the record, the Burning Man organization has absolutely no involvement whatsoever with the so-called #BundyFest or its supposed organizer Sean Shealy.”

We hope Bundyfest happens, another month of desert partying, why not? It’s only 500 miles from Burning Man. The Facebook page for Bundyfest launched on Monday, and already has almost 4000 likes - so there definitely is some demand there. Quite how they are going to get 240 bands playing 24/7 at a free event remains to be seen, but anything’s possible. If you promote it, they will come…

Seems like September might be a busy month for the BLM.

Cartoon from Daily Kos

Watching Episode 5 of Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge’s new show Silicon Valley. It’s brilliant. We already covered how Tesla founder (and Iron Man inspirer) Burner Elon Musk said that Judge was missing the point of Silicon Valley, because he hadn’t been to Burning Man. Last episode, I noticed a Burning Man Cargo Cult poster on the wall of their shared tech house. Episode 5 just featured a Fertility 2.0 poster. They have clearly made peace and we welcome Mike Judge to the Burner world! Thanks mate, I have been working in Silicon Valley and the tech industry for 20 years and you nailed it, this is truly what it’s like and this show is what’s needed. Let’s take it back to the old skool…

Beats, hippies, hipsters, beats, dub step…the thumping doof doof doof of the Bay Area, twentieth largest economy in the world (if it was its own country)…

Happy How Weird, Burners. Meow!

The Burning Man Project are attaching themselves to other successful, Burner run non-profits like Reallocate.org and [freespace]. They’re hosting a free panel in San Mateo, to show examples of how Burner values are changing the world.

It’s good to see the Burning Man Project getting involved with charities in the Burner ecosystem that are actually doing meaningful stuff. Now let’s hope they put their non-profit foundation millions where their mouths are, and help these charities out with some hard to come by donor dollars! Without this, the link to Burning Man is tenuous at best, and BMOrg are just riding off the coat tails of others’ largesse and dedication. Reallocate and [freespace] are out there making the world a better place, not just hosting panel discussions.

Come to San Mateo on May 14 for an event hosted by Danger Ranger called “Building and Inpsiring the Community You Envision”. From the official blog:

On Wednesday, May 14, Burning Man founder Michael Mikel and a few other Burner artists and organizers are coming to San Mateo, CA for a panel entitled “Building and Inspiring the Community You Envision.” The panel will discuss how Burner values can guide and inspire urban life and growth on and off the playa. The City of San Mateo invites the community to participate as part of San Mateo Innovation Week from May 12-16. It’s the first city on the Peninsula to partner with the Burning Man Project.

The panel also includes Karen Cusolito, Oakland artist and founder of American Steel Studios; Dr. Mike North, host of the Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! and founder of ReAllocate; and Ilana Lipsett, co-founder of Freespace. Stuart Mangrum, Education Director of the Burning Man Project, will facilitate.

Building and Inspiring the Community You Envision
Wednesday, May 14
6:00-8:00 PM
Joe’s Garage, 308 E. 6th Avenue, San Mateo

Registration is free, but space is limited. You can register to attend using Eventbrite.

Check out San Mateo Information Week on the web or on Facebook for more info!

Reallocate founder, double-digit Burner: Dr Mike North

P.Diddy came to Burning Man this year, and rocked it. He threatened to come back with a real n___ga sound system. We shall see…personally, I doubt it.In the mean time, here’s Rabbit, aka Dr Dre’s tea boy, aka world’s greatest rapper Eminem…I’m hoping to hear these kind of tracks at Burning Man this  year. See second video if you think you know/don’t know about rapper skillz…[dub step]

Yes…that’s dope. However, it seems lame when compared to this shizzeh. Eminem, and Dr Dre, please come to Burning Man, we want you guys not pee dido…

Of course there’s the OG OG…

…or this…

American Museum of National History’s Camel Caravan creation

This year’s theme is “Caravansary“. It’s meant to evoke traditions of the Middle East, silk pillows and teeming marketplaces in caravan oases on the great Silk Road of Asia Minor. The original Silk Road ran from new Burner regional location Israel to new Burner regional location Shanghai.

Burning Man’s Silk Road homage is envisioned as a “bazaar of the bizarre”.

This year we will create a caravansary that occupies the crossroads of a dreamland: a bazaar of the bizarre wherein treasures of every sort, from every land and age, flow in and out to be flaunted, lost, exploited and discovered. This is not a tourist destination, but a home for travelers who come here bearing gifts. Amid the twisting and the turnings of its souk, participants will come upon an inexhaustible array of teeming goods and unexpected services. Anyone may pose as ‘merchant’ here, and anyone may play a ‘customer’, but nothing in this strange emporium shall have a purchase price — no quid, no pro, no quo — no trade at all will be allowed in this ambiguous arcade. According to a rule of desert hospitality, the only thing of value in this ‘marketplace’ will be one’s interaction with a fellow human being.

Is it just another coincidence that, at around the same time this theme is picked, and in the very same neighborhood – literally two miles away – a different “Silk Road” bazaar from San Francisco is the biggest news of the day? Or is this another case of BMOrg trying to attach themselves to the latest Silicon Valley trends? Recent examples of this are “the sharing economy”, the “Bundy Standoff“, and, arguably, Mike Judge’s hilarious new show Silicon Valley.

What Silk Road are we talking about, if not Caravansary? The “Amazon of vice” one, created (allegedly) by “crime kingpin” Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year old San Francisco resident who was busted in the science fiction section of a public library in Glen Park. Glen Park is at the edge of the Mission District, a 2.6 mile walk from where Burning Man just moved its headquarters.

They might have got the front man, but they couldn’t shut the Road down.

The Huffington Post headline reads “New Silk Road Selling Even More Drugs Than Old Silk Road”:

Silk Road is back, and it’s busier than before.

Six months after the FBI shut down the notorious black market website known as “the eBay for drugs,” a new version of Silk Road is offering even more illegal narcotics than its predecessor, according to a report released Wednesday by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a group that advocates against online crime.

The report found nearly 14,000 listings for drugs on the new Silk Road, compared to 13,000 listings found on the site at the time it was shut down last fall.

Ross and Pussy

“What we see on Silk Road today is more drugs, increasing vendors and an even greater commitment by this community to keeping their ‘movement’ alive,” said Garth Bruen, a senior fellow for the Digital Citizens Alliance, in a statement.

In October, the FBI shut down Silk Road and arrested its alleged mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht, a 29-year-old self-professed libertarian and San Francisco resident. Authorities alleged that Ulbricht ran the booming marketplace for illegal drugs, computer hacking tools and other illicit goods and services.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that there was a flow effect to the Burner community from the Feds cracking down on Bitcoins:

Cornelis Jan “SuperTrips” Slomp had more than $20,000 in cash and hopes of making a splash on the South Beach party scene when he landed at Miami International Airport in August.

But before he could pick up the Lamborghini sports car he’d hired, the young Dutchman was arrested by customs agents working with Chicago prosecutors.

Supertrips: a “very modern” Internet drug dealer

Just 22, Slomp was a very modern millionaire, the feds allege: an international Internet drug dealer who accepted payment in bitcoins for ecstasy, cocaine, LSD and other drugs.

Now, in one of the biggest cyber drug cases ever brought, his lawyer says he’s agreed to plead guilty to selling huge quantities of dope through the underground website, Silk Road.

Equipped with only a laptop, an iPhone and a backpack — he planned to buy clothes in Miami, the feds say — Slomp amassed more than $3 million in bitcoins shipping 104 kilos of MDMA, 566,000 ecstasy pills and 4 kilos of cocaine and other drugs through the mail, court papers state.

Some drugs ended up in Chicago, but Slomp shipped to almost every continent, boasting he had “big stockpiles of product, you literally cannot empty me out.”

On Silk Road, where anonymous traders sold illegal drugs and other illicit products, he developed a reputation for ecstasy pills marked with his logo, a green question mark. He was planning to hand off his U.S. business to an unnamed associate when he was arrested, the feds say.

According to a new release from the U.S. Attorney’s office, he has agreed to plead guilty and faces between five and 40 years in prison and a $5 million fine, plus the forfeiture of approximately $3,030,000 in alleged drug proceeds. The government says it seized the equivalent of that amount in bitcoins, a digital currency, and exchanged it for cash.

U.S. Attorney Zach Fardon — who formed a new cybercrime unit last month — said, “Illegal drug-trafficking is not new but drug-trafficking using a sophisticated underground computer network designed to protect anonymity of buyers and sellers presents new challenges to law enforcement that we are prepared to meet.”

Slomp’s attorney, Paul Petruzzi, agreed that “the Internet is the future of drug dealing.”

Asked about the huge sums Slomp was able to quickly make, Petruzzi added: “Young people are much more adept on the Internet.”

Petruzzi refused to comment on whether Slomp, facing up to 40 years in prison, is cooperating with authorities. But just two months after Slomp was quietly arrested and brought to Chicago, Silk Road was shut down by the feds.

Chicago’s Homeland Security boss Gary Hartwig described Slomp as “a prolific vendor on Silk Road.”

Silk Road’s collapse in October 2013 followed the arrest in San Francisco of its alleged founder Ross William Ulbricht — who allegedly went by “Dread Pirate Roberts” — and is accused in a New York federal court case of drug trafficking, soliciting murder, facilitating computer hacking and money laundering.

The feds say that during an 18 month undercover investigation of Slomp, they seized more than 100 packages he sent, including a large shipment of ecstasy seized at O’Hare Airport in April 2012.

The government seizures may be to blame for Internet chatroom rumors about Slomp being a scam artist who did not deliver the drugs he’d been paid for.

One Silk Road user complained two weeks before Slomp’s arrest in August that “I ordered a huge order from (SuperTrips)… it has yet to come.”

“Now the problem is I’m leaving for Burning Man in a few days… Can anyone give me some useful advice as to what I should do?”

Supertrips ratted out his partner, “Underground Syndicate”. As a consequence they arrested “the world’s biggest drug dealer” [yeah right!].  Angel Quinones faces a maximum of 20 years, which commenters suggest may indicate he is co-operating with authorities. Sundayworld reports via the Chicago Sun-times:

The 34 year old who went by the name ‘Underground Syndicate” worked with the Dutch drug dealer Jan “SuperTrips” Slomp to create the biggest illegal market for drugs, on the dark web’s Silk Road.

Angel William Quinones, was taken into custody after ‘SuperTrips’, his partner, turned state’s evidence and admitted all, before a Chicago Court.

Quinones was the U.S. arm of the ecstasy business and helped launder the funds through bitcoins, helping to convert them into cash.

However, one his partner was arrested at Miami airport Quinones’s days were numbered and he now too has decided to co-operate with the authorities.

His house was raided and agents reported finding €157,000 in cash and keys to several postal boxes used for the delivery of drugs, according to the Chicago Sun Times.

It looks like the Anonymous Burner and Silk Road user didn’t spend too long worrying. “Silk Road 2.0″, aka Dark Net, is back, and bigger than ever. From ExtremeTech:

You have to give it to shadowy, corporate-funded lobby groups: You can get some seriously cool data when there’s big money on the line. This week saw the release of the newest report from a DC-based activist group called the Digital Citizens Alliance, an anti-piracy organization that is often accused of astroturfing for large media conglomerates. The report focuses on the current state of the Deep Web drug market and how, despite the shut down of the Silk Road last year, Silk Road 2.0 is already bigger than its predecessor. If the FBI or other law enforcement agencies want to put a real dent in the Deep Web, it will have to try a lot harder.

The overall aim of the Digital Citizens Alliance is to create panic among those less informed about the internet… its latest report on the state of Deep Web drug markets …The core insight is that, following the Silk Road shutdown last year, the Silk Road 2.0 has risen to attract more drug listings than we’ve ever seen before.

It’s not just the Silk Road that’s grown, either. In the wake of the Silk Road’s temporary demise users naturally ran to alternatives, and though most of those quickly fell under the weight of scams and thievery, the basic diversification of the user base remains. Though SR2.0 is by far the largest dark market, it still only accounts for about 41% of all listings — down from more than 70% last year. Competitors like Agora and Pandora collectively hold the majority now, and that’s as assessed by a report which openly admits that it excluded a further 25 small dark markets of which its authors were aware.

TOR talk on Netflix’s House of Cards

While it’s true that the Silk Road is bigger than ever before, that’s mostly a result of the fact that the Deep Web is bigger than ever before, as well. The Silk Road bust was the single best thing to ever happen to the Deep Web — a criminal Streisand effect seems to be at work here, as the Deep Web makes its way into everything from political speeches to House of Cards. After the bust several new high-profile markets sprang up to sell drugs, hacking, assassination — though of course we have no way of knowing how legitimate most of it really is.

People seem to have forgotten that immediately after the raid, conventional wisdom warned against ever again buying from any vendor who was active at that time; anyone selling during the bust could now very easily be an FBI plant. (Read: How to use Tor and get on the Deep Web.)And that’s the problem. For every user exalting the rise of a new Silk Road, there’s another addressing the rampant scamming and theft it now hosts. Many users on the official Silk Road 2.0 forums are worried that drug vendors are being added regularly despite vendor registration having been closed for months — a sign many take to mean the site’s mods are instating fake vendors. Are they cops? Bots? Russians?

Ross Ulbricht’s arrest sparked interest in super-security, but that rush has ended. Now, popular Silk Road vendors like “weedgirlz” start Twitter accounts and “clearnet” websites advertising their illegal businesses. There’s simply no institutional or individual memory here — a fact that makes individual busts very easy for police, but overall victory almost unimaginable. Just as in “real life” crime, Deep Web rings are intractable, dynamic populations that resist the kind of social engineering these arrests aspire to be. As long as the technology to do illegal things online even might exist, people will use it.

The Deep Web’s true strength is not in encryption or anonymity, but in confidence. The FBI needs to imbue this community not with fear of prison, but with fear of their friends. If it can’t, then law enforcement will simply never get a handle on Deep Web criminals, and the markets will keep growing as they have been for years now. The occasional, aimless bust won’t change that.The best chance to really hurt the dark markets has already passed. If the Silk Road 2.0 has in fact been a honeypot all along (and many still suspect that to be the case), that would be a major and above all long lastingblow to the Deep Web. Not because of the arrests or the convictions, but because of the method by which they were acquired.

“We have no way of knowing how legitimate most of it really is”…ummm, newsflash, people. Drugs, murders, fake passports? This is clearly NOT legitimate!

Social engineering on the Silk Road? Hmmm, where have I heard that before…[32:50]

Ulbricht claims he is not “the Dread Pirate Roberts” that facilitated the online transactions and is wanted in relation to at least 6 murders. Reddit brings us an eyewitness report from the bail hearing:

We arrived at 11:15am, near the beginning of Turner’s remarks on why Ross Ulbricht should be denied bail. We got seats, although it was standing room only by the end. Two of six rows were filled with Ulbricht’s family.

The first thing we heard Turner mention is Ulbricht’s stash of Bitcoin; Turner argued that given the “sophistication” of the defendant and the rules of the Bitcoin protocol, it is plausible that he could retrieve and/or instruct someone to retrieve the stash from a remote location if he is released on bail.

Much to the dismay and annoyance of Judge Fox, Turner proceeded to repeat the complaints we have already read; after multiple attempts to steer Turner away from regurgitating content from the complaints, Turner began to outline some of the content found on Ulbricht’s computer. This included: a journal of Silk Road’s creation, extensive spreadsheets with costs of maintaing the site (murder-for-hires included), “emergency” to-do lists, general to-do lists (again, murder-for-hires present on list), among many other incriminating documents not directly mentioned.

Turner then segued into the redandwhite/FriendlyChemist story, and how redandwhite “reported” to Ulbricht that FriendlyChemist had implicated another individual (tony76) in the blackmail plot before he was “killed.”

Ulbricht instructed redandwhite to kill him, but redandwhite responded that he lived with three individuals and it wouldn’t have been possible to kill him while he was in the house; redandwhite said they could wait for him to leave the house and kill him, but they would then be unable to retrieve drugs/money located in the residence. Redandwhite offered to kill all of them. Ulbricht responded that ‘[he] would refer to their judgment on the matter.’ He ended up paying $500K USD in Bitcoin for all four hits. Turner mentions the blockchain here and says the transactions are visible there.

Finally Turner discussed Ulbricht’s attempt to secure dual citizenship in Dominica and used that to argue the flight risk Ulbricht posed. Turner painted Ulbricht as having “two sides” and given his alleged tendency towards violence, the stash of Bitcoin and flight risk potential they moved for him to be denied bail…

Turner mentions that there is evidence that Ulbricht solicited was planning to grow “magic mushrooms” to be listed on SR as its first product, there is also evidence that he has helped facilitate the movement of drugs and finally he loaned someone 500KUSD (not sure in what form) to start a joint drug operation. As such they believe Dratel’s argument to that effect is null and void.

Turner also states that Ulbricht’s family and friends do not know this “other side” of Ross and in no way could attest to his true character. On the subject of flight risk, they point out that he was living under a false name and ordered over 10 fake IDs, a sort of sophistication that would make it easy for him to disappear.

Despite the crime links, and his claim to lack of any connection to them, he insists the $34 $87 million of Bitcoins belongs to him and the Feds need to give it back so he can pay his lawyers:

After his arrest in October, 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht maintains that he is not the Dread Pirate Roberts, mastermind of the online drugs marketplace Silk Road. But he also says the Bitcoins the authorities seized from Silk Road belong to him, and the government should give them back.

Since shutting down the secretive online shop, the FBI claims to have confiscated electronic wallets containing more than 173,000 Bitcoins from Silk Road – an amount worth about $33.6m in real-world currency.

The authorities claim these funds are the proceeds of a criminal conspiracy involving drugs trafficking and money laundering. Ulbricht, on the other hand, says that’s got nothing to do with him – yet the New York Post reports that he has also filed papers with a federal court in New York City demanding that the seized Bitcoins be returned to him.

In a notarized statement dated December 11, Ulbricht reportedly says he “has an interest as owner” in the seized funds and argues that as a virtual currency, Bitcoins are “not subject to seizure” under federal forfeiture laws.

It’s a neat argument. Since the Silk Road raid was the largest Bitcoin forfeiture in US history, the courts literally have never heard a case quite like it. It’s possible that a judge could rule that Bitcoins don’t count as the kind of property that can be seized in a criminal prosecution.

It’s unlikely, though. In past cases, courts have seen fit for authorities to seize everything from cash to cars, boats, houses, artwork, and even intellectual property such as internet domain names. Just the fact that Ulbricht wants the Bitcoins back would seem to establish that they have value and are therefore fair game for forfeiture.

Still, Ulbricht could certainly use the money. Although he was represented by a public defender in his first few court appearances, he has since retained the services of New York attorney Joshua Dratel, and his case looks like it could be a long one. Among other offenses, he is charged with commissioning the contract killings of as many as six people (although there is no evidence that anyone was actually killed).

In November, Ulbricht’s family, friends, and supporters chipped in $1m to secure his release from the New York jail where he now resides, but Magistrate Judge Ronald Ellis ultimately denied him bail.

It remains to be seen whether those same well-wishers will be willing to put those funds towards Ulbricht’s legal fees now that he has admitted to owning more than $30m worth of Bitcoin at the time of his arrest

His mom also swears he’s not “the” Dread Pirate. Because you always tell you’re Mom you’re a drug dealer! From Ars Technica:

Lyn Ulbricht says that she and her husband have no doubt in their minds that their son is not Dread Pirate Roberts, the accused mastermind behind the original Silk Road website.

The underground drug website, which was shut down as part of a federal raid late last year, was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ross Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, “reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars” through his role as the site’s leader and also attempted to orchestrate six murders-for-hire.

Since Ross Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013, a new site also calling itself Silk Road has taken the original site’s place and boasts a leader calling him or herself Dread Pirate Roberts—a handful of others have attempted to fill the void left by the first Silk Road. Dread Pirate Roberts is a reference to a character from the movie The Princess Bride. In the film, Roberts’ persona is passed down among various people.

Business Insider has quite a remarkable photo gallery provided by the family, attesting to Ulbricht’s innocence with kittens and skipping. Seriously – it’s worth a look! This may not go over well in jail – and it doesn’t look like the judge is buying it either, in the face of tough prosecution.

Larry Harvey was asked if Burning Man would accept Bitcoins during the mysterious “The Founders Speak” presentation at Columbia University last year. This footage was promised to be shared with the public, but has embarrassingly gone missing. The Burning Man Project seems to prefer talking, to sharing…

I’m in Dr Kittay’s class at Columbia University called Technology, Religion, and Future. Today, we had an event on Burning Man, where the Burning Man committee including Larry Harvey (Founder of Burning Man) came in to talk about the event with our class. The link is below

http://blog.burningman.com/2013/10/eventshappenings/event-the-founders-speak-burning-man-technology-religion-the-future/

I asked if they would consider accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment. They unanimously said yes! At first Larry was like, hmm never thought about that. Then one guy said, well its not really that stable yet but hell, if it makes people happy lets do it! They all nodded in agreement. Woot! Now they just have to follow up on it by adding the ‘Pay in BTC’ button to the ticket purchase section of their site.

EFF Founder John Perry Barlow was up there on stage with Larry in New York, as one of The Founders of the Burning Man Project. The EFF have been strangely silent on this particular civil liberties case, which has huge bearing on the future of cyberspace and even the nature of our society. This is literally the frontier of civilization – but before you rush out to the markteplace kiddies, remember – we’re hearing about these guys because they caught them. They were arrested for a crime, they’re probably guilty and they’re probably going to do time for what they did. So don’t do it. Drugs are bad, mmmkay! Whether related to Burning Man or not, this is also a tale of our times, and an interesting one to observe. The criminals seem to be several steps ahead of the legal system and the cops, even if it’s harder for them to outwit the FBI and NSA.

Bitcoins won’t get you tickets to Burning Man, yet. Maybe on Craigslist. This year there is a Camp Bitcoin, for all you crypto-enthusiasts. One of their crew is named “Candose”:

Filed under: Alternatives to Burning Man Tagged: 2013, 2014, bitcoin, bmorg, commerce, festival, future, press, scandal, silk road, tor

“Midburn” is a play on the Hebrew word for desert. It’s the first Burning Man regional in the Middle East. The rave takes place in the trance-central Negev from June 3-7 2014, and is being put on by a non-profit Israeli branch of the Burning Man Project.

From Haaretz:

photo: Sharon Avraham

An Israeli version of the Burning Man festival will take place in the Negev desert from June 3 to 7, marking a culmination of two years of preparing and building up a community around the event.

The original, American Burning Man, which is held in a Nevada desert each summer, is a now-wildly popular festival of art, music, and alternative culture. Burning Man’s principle of “radical self-expression,” together with its principles of giving freely from your provisions, its public art installations and the use of bartering in the temporary city of up to 50,000 imbue the festival with an element of survival, which makes it unusual in the festival world. Granted, participants bring to the desert all the food and equipment their vehicles can carry.

photo: Sharon Avraham

The Israeli version, put on by a registered non-profit that’s the Israeli branch of the American organization, began taking shape in recent years. It has previously held small-scale events in the spirit of Burning Man, fostered by a community of volunteers and artists. Israel’s five-day long Midburn (a play on midbar, the Hebrew word for “desert”) this year, will be run according to the principles of the American original. The festival is now sold out with all 2,000 tickets claimed.

Filed under: Alternatives to Burning Man Tagged: 2014, alternatives, event, festival, midburn, music, Party, regionals, tickets

Is there anyone out there who thinks Burning Man doesn’t care about lawsuits any more, because it is a charity and cares more about spreading Burner culture than it does about profit? If so, sadly, you are mistaken.

In the latest development of the continuing “BMOrg vs Burners” war, Decommodification, LLC has filed suit in the Federal Court of Canada, against burningmanarts.ca – long-time Burners who are the current holders of the “Burning Man” trademark in Canada. This Vancouver-based non-profit group trace their lineage to the Baker Beach/Cacophony Society Days. Old school original Burners, coming from the true essence of this movement, Shao Lin style. Their Burn BC Facebook page has 1100 followers. From burnbc.org:

The Burn BC Arts Co-Op is the first registered non-profit arts cooperative in BC.

The Burn BC Arts Cooperative was founded in May of 2007, and first incorporated in October of 2009 under new legislation recognizing non-profit cooperatives. Burn BC was restructured under a new incorporation (August 27, 2013) to apply for charitable status to facilitate the development of an Industrial Arts and Multimedia Arts Centre in BC.

photo by Gilles Bonugli

Burn BC supports local creative initiatives, like The Cacophony Society, Outsider Arts, Mutant Vehicles, Art Cars, Fire Art, and Performance Art that encourage “Creative Self Exploration with Mutual Respect of Personal Boundaries”. We wish to support forms of Art that generally fall outside the bounds of traditional fine arts aesthetics, and receive less support and recognition then more traditional forms of Art.

Created around an organic and casual administrative process to facilitate ease of access by the outsider arts community, Burn BC encourages participants to experiment with developing our distinctly Canadian Burning Man culture, by celebrating Open Source Cultural groups like The Cacophony Society, and the many wonderfully creative organizations and groups throughout BC.

Burn BC has evolved with one guiding principle relating to our Burning Man culture.
“Creative Self Exploration with Mutual Respect of Personal Boundaries”

The Burn BC Arts Co-Op has four general goals.

• Establish the “Cascadia Burn”
  A Leave No Trace, No Vending, Temporary Autonomous Zone somewhere in BC.
• Establish a Burning Man™ Arts Centre
  To be used for collaborative community projects involving industrial and multimedia arts.
• Fund and manage a creative property.
  To be used for Arts Retreats and to store large scale sculptures and creative projects.
• Foster Arenas of…
  “Creative Self Exploration with Mutual Respect of Personal Boundaries”
  By cooperating and collaborating with community projects, peer organizations and events that participate in the overall cultural paradigm of “The Burn”.

When hosting special events we ask people to:

• Respect the Space
• Respect the Art
• Respect Each Other
• Respect Yourself

This seems real to me, so perhaps it’s unfortunate that they chose April 1 to start this project:

The Burning Man Arts Association is a Cacophony Society project that was founded April 1st, 2014 by Bhak Jolicoeur and the Burn BC Arts Cooperative to support the Burning Man Culture that developed between 1990-2003.

Bhak Jolicoeur has been intimately involved with The Cacophony Society, Fire Arts, and the Burning Man culture and Burning Man community since the early 90′s.

We love to celebrate Burning Man through, play, dance, music, art, performance art, and the chaos of spontaneous creative fun. We have supported initiatives that are open to the organic process and the ephemeral experience, and find much joy in fostering arenas of personal exploration.

We have been intimately involved in the creation and development of many wonderful projects and events since the early 90′s.

• parade of lost souls, Vancouver

  The Vancouver Cacophony Society

• The Cascadia Burn
• The Orange Party
• The Fools Parade
• Radiant Heat
• Vancouver After Burn
• The Work Less Party
• The Car Free Commercial Drive Festival
• Parade of Lost Souls
• Illuminaries
• Burn in the Forest
• Recompression Vancouver
• Decompresson Vancouver
• and various Burning Man art projects.

We love to celebrate life.

If this is all just an elaborate joke, it’s a very clever one. Burn BC have hit back at BMOrg with a cyber-offensive, a web site that clearly makes their arguments. What they’re saying sounds very reasonable to me. BMOrg’s presumed argument that “this takes money away from us that is rightfully ours”, is weakened by their other argument that “we’ve given everything to a non profit, Burning Man is about helping the world not making money”. You can’t have both, BMOrg, either you want money so much that you’re prepared to sue your own customers in the hope of getting even more, not from your efforts but taking it away from theirs; or, you’re not about money.

2014 Vancouver Cacophony Society Flyer

I like what they stand for – freedom, openness, inclusiveness. Burners profiting together from Burner culture. They’re on the side of Open Source Culture, as are we. Open Source works, it fosters innovation, and people can still get rich from it. This technology industry approach to Intellectual Property has built the Internet, and made San Francisco the second richest city in this country.

Do we want Burning Man to become Disneyland 3.0, or stay more like it has been for most of its young life – something new and fresh that is spontaneously created by us all, and shared by us with each other?

Nomad Traveler just shared a great comment here about “stone soup” events, where everyone is encouraged to give. This was the essence of the spirit that gave birth to Burning Man, the culture that was harnessed and packaged into an LLC (and now, multiple LLC’s) as well as tax-exempt entities.

So far, for all the hoopla, the Burning Man Project “outreach” is uber-lame. It is as if they “discovered” the stone soup idea, which ironically did NOT include exploiting others for personal profit. You can squeeze a lot of “free” time and stuff out of people, but if you are not giving back more, that pretty much disappears over time. My stone soup organizations have been around for decades, so they seem to be working. We all pay expenses and time to participate, and we pay annual dues to let the organization have some operative overhead and full-time staff.

And we get grants and commercial support, that is used to help develop information for us all to use to work better. But those funds are spent based on ideas from the base-level members, not from top-down decisions. And we do get to vote on who holds those top jobs.

“Sharing” and “gifting” – are they really important to BMOrg? If they were then there’d be no need for these discussions, let alone expensive international law suits. The Burning Man Project would be immediately opening the books, opening the suggestion box to ideas, opening the source code of their systems, opening the governance of the temporary city to include its residents out of civic responsibility, radically including everyone who wanted to radically self-express, gifting the use of their name and logo and expertise to any who wanted it. Basically, all the things that Burn BC say they want to do with the ownership of their Burning Man trademark. Instead of doing this, though, BMOrg seem more into hosting panel discussions.

“Decommodification, LLC” is an ironic name for the lawsuits vehicle. The royalty stream from the events to this entity will have to be large enough to fund the legal bills – but that doesn’t guarantee BMOrg victory. If they lose, they will have to pay all the legal costs for the trademark owners as well as funding their own expenses, and possibly additional penalties. Which in turn means we  Burners will have to pay, through higher ticket prices and new taxes. The fact that Canada is not a signatory to global intellectual property treaties could be a significant issue in this case.

This case could set a strong precedent for the spread of Burner culture around the world. Are Burners “allowed” to dress up, dance around, and drive around in art cars in their hometowns? Is this a natural part of Burner culture spreading? Or may only BMOrg, sorry, Decommodification, do these things? Does the bureaucracy make the culture, or the Burners? And where do you draw the line – or, perhaps more appropriately, the target? Is it raves ecstatic trance rituals? Raves in the desert? Raves where people wear “leather and feather”? Ritual effigy burns? Anything called Burning Man, anywhere, any time? What about the movie called Burning Man then?

Perhaps Decommodification LLC thinks that American laws just automatically apply everywhere on the planet, and override national laws. This approach might not go over well with the local Vancouver media, although as we’ve seen in the past, BMOrg seems to think “any publicity is good publicity”.

Just because Burning Man’s founders think “the mainstream is becoming like Burning Man”, doesn’t mean they suddenly own everything, everywhere. A legally registered trademark in another country, is governed by the laws of that country. The days of America stomping all over the legal systems of other first-world countries are long gone – unless Burning Man has some special level of protection that can over-ride national laws. Canada in particular has a long history of resisting these kind of corporate bully tactics from United States corporations, both politically and legally. If Decommodification wanted to protect their trademark in different nations, they should have registered it in those nations. A small fraction of their annual legal budget would have covered every country in the world, and perhaps in multiple categories of use too.

This suit offers a glimpse of the thinking that’s really behind the “100 Years Plan” to spread Burner culture around the world with a “non-profit”. Spent 30 years creating the culture you co-founded, back home in your own country? Tough titties, Burning Man owns that. Have a legal trademark in your country that was registered before theirs? So what, Burning Man has lots of lawyers and will sue you anyway.

Here’s one example of what the Burning Arts crew have to say about Principles:

“Transformation” can happen almost anywhere, even the Proprietary Culture of the Juggalos can manifest experiences that emulate non-lucid “Transformation”. The way they reference “Home” and “Family” with their experience may seem uncomfortably familiar to some. It’s up to you to judge the quality of the Juggalo “Transformation” or what they are transforming into.

The “success” of Transformational Events, aren’t really measured by “How Many” are involved, or “How Much” is made. Success is more relevant to whether or not the event can facilitate an unmediated experience. The foundation of the lucid transformational experience is Immediatism.

They are not looking to deny the past – more, it appears, to learn from it.

When the Burning Man Arts Association was initially formed to foster Burning Man™, we looked at declaring concepts like “Mission Statements”, and “Vision Statements”, and defining things like “Codes of Conduct”, and found that they imposed limited personal aesthetics and definitions on participants.

We realized very quickly that while we (personally) want, and like, people to dress up, have fun, be silly, (celebrate Burning Man™); the intent of our project to support Burning Man™ and foster personal growth and transformation, could get lost in the mix. In over defining we could quickly digress into little more than well produced costume parties hosting re-branded Raves. The substance of the experience would be overwhelmed by the pressures of production, consumption, and expectation.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

So we asked ourselves…

• What do we want to encourage?
• What is Burning Man™?
• How has it evolved?
• What is our local relationship to our Burning Man culture?

We contacted, and met with, the people who created the San Francisco Cacophony Society, we talked with members of the San Francisco Suicide Club, we took time to gain insight from the people who manage the American Burning Man festival in Nevada. We reflected upon our local experiences over 20 years with Burning Man™, and asked ourselves how we wished to critically consider the decisions and evolution made by all our peers who preceded us, reflected conclusions on our perceptions of our Burning Man culture, then worked out solutions that reflected our desire to offer catalysing environments for lucid transformational experiences to potentially manifest.

Two important elements we considered….
- Play
- Immediatism

We discovered that these two elements are critical to fostering lucid transformational experiences. By focusing on the least imposing rhetoric or bureaucracy possible, we could foster these two important elements and help catalyse the potential for lucid transformational experiences to manifest at our Burning Man™ events.

Burn BC Founder and Champion of Burner Rights, Bhak Jolicouer

Founder Bhak Jolicouer provides more information about his history here. Significantly, he had been participating in Burner culture for almost 20 years before he ever attended the Burning Man event in Nevada in 2004. At this point in time Decommodification LLC (the new privately held for-profit company that owns and controls the royalties from the events) didn’t even exist. The American Burning Man trademark (in the arts festivals category) was first registered in 1995 , then allowed to lapse, then registered again in 2003. The company that owned the trademark, Paperman LLC, was also allowed to lapse, as Larry Harvey didn’t pay the corporate fees. In 2006 Larry signed a 10-year licensing agreement between Paperman LLC and Black Rock City, LLC for the trademarks. This seems to be expiring before the Founders exit, and presumably there is an expectation that the Nevada Burning Man festival will want to renew it. This would set a price  precedent for the Regionals. The Intellectual Property Assets were the subject of a very public lawsuit with Burning Man founder John Law, who tried to keep his co-founders Larry Harvey and Michael Mikel true to their vision and promises of inclusivenesses. In 2007, he sued for Burning Man to be free. “If it’s a real fucking movement, they can give up control of the name”, Law told the SF Bay Guardian. The lawsuit was settled financially out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Maybe there’s still hope that Burner culture will survive corporatization and regime change at the Nevada event, because it’s already grown much bigger than that. The Black Rock City Population is capped at 70,000 for the next few years; tickets for sale were capped even tighter, at 61,000 this year. There are many more Burners than that on this planet. Burners.Me has been visited by more than 2 million people from 212 countries. Burning Man lists 46 official Regional events on their site. However, some of those are Pre- or De- compressions, most of them are in the US, and one is in virtual reality: Burn2, in Second Life. The number of countries throwing proper Burns in the official Burning Man list of Regional events is 6, plus the United States.

Burning Man Arts have provided a pretty easy to read FAQ, reproduced below. If they win this case, Burners elsewhere in the world will be able to license the name Burning Man from them as an alternative to BMOrg. It sounds like they are offering MUCH friendlier terms than Decommodification, LLC (who is the legal entity launching the law suit against them in Canada). Of course, if someone owns the Burning Man trademark in another jurisdiction, then that would take precedence over either of these groups’ ownership claims.

The battle is just beginning, and we will bring you more information as we get it. We invite both parties to communicate with us and share their side of the story.

__________________________________________

from http://burningmanarts.ca/our-rights-faq/

FAQ

Here are some FAQ’s regarding our rights as independent Canadian Communities, and why we are defending our existing legal rights in Canada, and our obligations to these rights in Federal Court with the action commenced by the American Corporation Decommodification LLC.

Burn BC and the “Burning Man” mark

Burn BC currently ‘owns’ the “Burning Man” mark in Canada. While Burn BC has full rights to use the mark, we cannot license use of the mark until it has been properly transferred to the Canadian National Non-Profit Arts Organisation (The Burning Man Arts Association).

We are not stopping anyone from using it, have no desire to sue Burners, and when the transfer is complete, we will allow it to be used by our communities and by Artists who respect the Burning Man Culture in Canada. The mark will not be used, owned, controlled, or influenced by Corporations.

We do not speak for the community or have any desire to speak for the community. We are not asking you to conform to an identity, take sides, or adopt any edicts. We are setting this up so each of us can continue exploring self defined, and self managed personal identities and communities with respect to our Burning Man Culture and it’s roots with the Suicide Club, theCacophony Society, Zone Trip #4, and how we evolved our culture from 1990-2003 as the Burning Man Culture.

Our self defined personal creative self exploration has always been at the core of the sublime beauty we have loved and respected with our Burning Man Culture, and Burning Man Communities; An ephemeral and beautiful space beyond the reach of Corporations and Dogma.

NOTE: We have no issue with Corporations. Some of our very best friends are Corporations. Many Burners work for corporations, and own corporations. Our only desire is to experience ephemeral Immediatism with environments beyond the reach or influence of Corporations or Dogma.

 Decommodification LLC

You have to understand that in Canada we currently and completely own our rights to our independently developed communities, our expressions, and our “Burning Man” marks.

This action commenced by Decommodification LLC is an attempt to take these rights away from us and claim our communities, our expressions, and our rights to our “Burning Man” marks in Canada, and claim our rights, communities, and expressions, as property of the American Corporation called Decommodification LLC. This is not hypothetical, this is in writing in the “Statement of Claim” filed in Canadian Federal Court.

In the Statement of Claim filed in Federal Court, Decommodification LLC claims our communities, and the expressions of our communities and culture, as property of the American Corporation Decommodifcation LLC.

Decommodification LLC
- VS -
Burn BC Arts Cooperative

To understand this case, and why it matters to you as an Artist and/or a Burner, and to anyone that celebrates culture in Canada; you have to understand this is about an American Corporation claiming our Canadian Communities, our Cultural expressions, and the very format we use to gather, as property of the American Corporation and it’s 2004 American Brand.

Passing Off

To understand the confusion that is being passed off on our community. You have to understand there are TWO “Burning Man”.

1: The Original Burning Man Culture that was formed on the foundations of the Suicide Club(1977), and the Cacophony Society (1986), and Zone Trip #4 (1990) and how we evolved on these foundation between 1990-2003 creating one of the most relevant events our culture has created and experienced.

2: The proprietary American brand that was registered in 2004 in the United States created by an American Corporation, and based off the expressions of what we created at our home in the Nevada Desert between 1990-2003.

Trademark Law

Decommodification LLC
will be referred to as
Black Rock City (BRC)

• Doesn’t BRC have a worldwide trademark?

The 2004 “Burning Man” Brand Registered in the United States is also registered with the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO). Canada has never signed the Madrid Protocol and is notunder the jurisdiction of WIPO.

• Does BRC own our mark in Canada?

No; currently WE as Canadian Burners do. For an American Corporation to own a mark in Canada, it must register the mark with CIPO, and do business in Canada through a Permanent Entity.

• Is Canada part of WIPO?

No. For a company to register a mark in Canada it has to do business in Canada through a Permanent Entity, and Register a Trademark with CIPO. Canada has never signed the Madrid Protocol and is not under the jurisdiction of WIPO.

• Has BRC ever done business in Canada?

BRC has never done business in Canada through a Permanent Entity. Our independently developed communities pre-date the 2004 registered mark in the United States, and are not Permanent Entities of the American Corporation.

• Is the “Regional Network” a permanent entity for BRC?

No. Regional Contacts are not partners, or employees of BRC. The RC network was started by a person who self appointed himself as a contact point in 1997. The RC network was an informal contact point for our independently developing communities, and was not formalized under the Ten Principles until 2004

• Does first use count with CIPO?

No. CIPO goes by first to register, and only looks at existing registered trademarks in Canada when considering opposition to a mark.

• The Nevada Burn has existed for years, does that count as first use in Canada?

No. BRC registered it’s new brand in the United States in 2004. Our independently developed Burning Man communities formed symbiotically with the 1995 Registered Mark that wascancelled in 2003. That mark was not owned by anyone anywhere for two years.

• Does NAFTA apply to this?

NAFTA is a trade agreement. Trademarks are managed by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO)

What is Burning Man?

• Did the American Corporation create our culture?

No. Our culture created the Nevada Burn from the roots of the Suicide Club and the Cacophony Society between 1990-2003.

• Did BRC create our communites?

No. The BRC American Mark is in reference to the Baker Beach Burn which was shut down by authorities in 1990. The Communities had already been established through the Cacophony Society and gathered in the Black Rock Desert from 1990 onward.

• How did our Burning Man Communities Form?

Our Communities developed from the Cacophony Society and it’s loose affiliations, with roots to the Suicide Club dating back to 1977. Between 1990-2003 Burning Man and the Cacophony Society were synonymous.

• How did our culture become Burning Man?

In 1990 the Cacophony Society hosted Zone Trip #4. It was primarily a Cacophony Society event with the man sculpture added at the last minute. From 1990-1995 the Cacophony Society adopted the Burning Man name in reference to the burning of the man sculpture at their event. From 1990-2003 the Cacophony Society and Burning Man were synonymous. Many Burners hosted Cacophony Society events including Santacon. The loose affiliations of the Cacophony Society became the loose affiliations of our Burning Man Culture, and no one owned us.

• Who owns our Canadian Burning Man Communities?

WE do. Currently our Canadian Culture has developed independently over the last 20 years. We have had a loose affiliation with Burners everywhere, and our relationships to the “Regional Network” have been as a networking process, not a governing body. As Burners who celebrate the Burning Man Culture, we celebrate the achievements of Burners around the world. The Nevada Burn is the most notorious accomplishment created by our culture.

• Who created the Nevada Burning Man Event?

Our Culture created the event between 1990-2003. The Format, the style, the content were all self defined elements expressed by our culture. The infrastructure was organized by the hosts of our culture and how we expressed ourselves there. We have always assumed all liability, cost, and responsibility, for the content and expressions we created and expressed at the Nevada Burn.

• Does the BRC Regional Network Represent our Culture?

No. We are self defined. The Regional Network is now being used to re-brand our independent culture with a new Corporate Brand developed in 2004. This new brand is intentionally causing confusion by misrepresenting itself as our culture.

• Do we have to be recognized by BRC to be a Burning Man Community?

No. We own these rights in Canada. We have full rights to develop our Burning Man Communities as we please with respect to our Burning Man Communities and the Original Burning Man Culture that developed between 1990-2003. The Nevada Burn has always been something created by our culture and hosted in the Black Rock City. BRC represents the company that organises the infrastructure of the Black Rock City.

Burning Man in Canada

• Who will manage our marks in Canada?

The Burning Man Arts Association will host Burning Man Arts Events, and help communities that wish to celebrate our Open Source Burning Man Culture in Canada. Organisations, individuals, and communities can become members of the Burning Man Arts Organisation to offer input and guidance to the Burning Man Arts Association.

• Who will have access to our marks?

The Burning Man Arts Association will invite Burners to become members of the organisation. It will be managed by our community, for our community, to support our community. The “Burning Man” mark will be protected from use, ownership, control, or influence by Corporations. It will be used to support Art, and Arts Events outside the reach of Corporations and Dogma.

• Why not just apply to the American Corporation to be recognized as “official”?

The American Corporation manages a proprietary brand created in 2004. We own our rights in Canada. There is no need to give away these rights to a disinterested American Corporation and it’s 2004 proprietary brand based on our culture. We have no desire to interfere in the Business of an American Corporation and how it conducts it’s business in the United States.

• Can we still celebrate the Nevada Burn?

Of course. We are Burners, and our culture created the original event that the Nevada Burn is based on. We have no issue with the Nevada Burn, and many of our friends and family love the experience of the Nevada Burn.

• Can we be an independent Burning Man in Canada and still support the Nevada Burn?

Yes. The Nevada Burn is an event in the United States. It is not a Canadian Event. We can support it as a great achievement by our Burning Man Culture and have mutual respect for each other as Burners.

Artists and your rights

• Who owns my Artistic License? You do.
• Who owns my Art? You do.
• Does the Burning Man Arts Association control the content of my Art? No.
• Can I receive payment for my services? Yes.
• Can I sell my Art made for Burning Man events? Yes.

What you can do.

• First and foremost do not give up the rights you have earned in Canada. The only Corporation threatening the rights we have earned for our community is this American Corporation that does not own the rights to our communities in Canada. Do not be swayed by rhetoric to gain favour with an American Corporate Brand.
  YOU are Burning Man.
  Own it.

• Write to Decommodifiaction LLC and tell them to drop this case. These rights in Canada are yours, they are not the property of this Corporation. We can have a mutually respectful, independent, and self defined relationship.

• Contact us to support us with legal help, or donations to support the defence of our existing legal rights in Canada. All funds will be used for our legal defence fund, any funds left over will be donated to the Burning Man Arts Association, and used to support the Burning Man Communities in Canada.

If there are any questions that have not been addressed in this FAQ, please let us know by sending an email to FAQ@BurningManArts.ca

Israel’s Midburn needs help getting art out to the desert. I guess the Israelis couldn’t figure out how to make enough money from a sold out event, to actually get the art to it! Tickets cost 490 shekels, which is US$140. They sold 2000 of them, which is US$280,000.

In addition to this, they’ve raised $75,000 from the Israeli community. They still need another $18,000 – or $9 from each person attending. So far they have raised $211 of the $18,000 they’re looking for. What happens if they don’t get more? Will this first-time event be art-free? For some reason their Indiegogo runs for a month after the event, which happens in 9 days.

Caveat emptor, Burners…remember this is the Middle Eastern bazaar.

We hear Maid Marian is attending, let’s hope she (and her multi-million dollar non-profit  Burner culture spreading .ORG) are donating too. $18k doesn’t seem like much to spread Burner culture to a giant segment of the globe, with the first ever Middle Eastern burn.

From Mid-Burner Rachel:

What can I say – you have a sweet blog, and write about Burning Man …which is why I’m reaching out to you.  As part of Israel’s first Burning Man Festival- Midburn- My fellow Burners and I working hard to raise money to support artists contributing to the Midburn Art Project.

Here’s a link to our website: http://www.midburn.com

We already have over 30 artists and art projects underway for our festival this June, but we need to raise a bit more money to ensure that all this artwork makes it to the festival and beyond!

Here is the link to our Indiegogo campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/support-the-midburn-art-project-burning-man-in-israel-2014–2

It would mean the world to us if you could write a short blog post about our Indiegogo Campaign- or about our event in general.   Of course, we’d love you to donate too :), but we really need your help in spreading the world.

I cannot express how grateful I am to you for reading these words.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to thank you in person at the next burning man festival.

Burn On!

[Update: 5/25/14] Rachel has contacted us to ask us to change this post. I’m not sure which part she has a problem with – it seems accurate enough. Her explanation sheds further light on the funding compromises the organizers were forced to make, without support from BMOrg. She answers our question: yes, they’re not going to bring much of the art to the event unless they raise these extra funds - even though it is located close by. Apparently the reason the Israeli’s can’t pay the artists from their sold-out event is they underestimated what things cost in Israel. The fences have to be higher and the generators have to be bigger. Emphasis ours.

Please allow me to explain the campaign, it’s timing and expenses, so that you might consider changing what you wrote in your post, since we’ve seen it take a very negative toll already. 

For all of these reasons and more we are running the campaign despite the timing, and despite the money we’ve already succeeded in bringing in. 

Perhaps Midburn would’ve been better to rent the fencing and lighting and generators for their first time event, rather than taking the cash windfall from the sold out show and “investing” in this gear. That way, they could still pay the artists, make profit for themselves, and charge even more for tickets next year. It seems like a mere $10 price rise on the tickets would have made the event profitable, not bad for a first effort. Coachella didn’t make money for years.

According to Haaretz, the promoters weren’t expecting the event to be so popular – it is now the third largest Burning Man event in the world:

We did not expect such a massive response, especially as we chose not to publicize the event,” admits Nir Eden, one of the organizers, who works as a logistics manager for a fashion chain. “There are about 300 people working nonstop on the Midburn festival. You have to understand, it involves building a temporary city.”…Midburn organizers claim theirs has quickly become the third-largest Burning Man-type festival in the world, behind the original in the U.S. (70,000 participants) and one in Africa (8,000 participants). 15 trucks and two shipping containers full of equipment will be brought down to the desert, along with installations and artworks created by 40 different groups. Midburn has a foundation supporting its artwork, which has granted 150,000 shekels to the artists. Eden, a perennial guest at Burning Man, says he has gladly spent tens of thousands of his own shekels on the festival. Representatives from the World Burning Man have recently arrived in Israel to declare the country one of the seven official areas where the festival is held.

Rachel confirmed that Midburn does have to pay a licensing fee to Decommodification LLC. This conflicts with the recent opinion of nay-sayers here. It also conflicts with Midburn founder (and BMOrg official contact) Rei Dishon, who says in the comment shared by Nomad below that they are not paying BMOrg any fees.

I know none of these people and am not attending the event, I have no dog in this fight and no axe to grind. I couldn’t tell you if both were authorized founders, or neither was, all I know is we now have two different people involved with two different stories. Let’s hope the truth gets out, we welcome everyone who has knowledge of the situation to come forward and tell us what is really going on behind the scenes. In my time I have met a fairly wide variety of party promoters around the globe, some successful, some only sporadically so. I’ve done business in the Middle East before, and have run into all kinds of “bazaar” situations in that part of the world. It’s no surprise to encounter two people who claim to be insiders and founders, but have completely different views about what is going on. Somewhere in this souk, agreements get made, things get worked out so everybody can move forwards, usually with everyone grumbling about something but getting enough to make it worthwhile. I have never been to Israel, but Burning Man’s Social Alchemist Bear Kittay told me “you’d love it. It’s just like Burning Man. People stop their cars in the middle of the street and get out and dance”.  Burners will need to make up their own minds about what is actually going on in Israel with Burning Man’s first ever official (or is it?) Middle Eastern regional.

Rachel’s claims that they messed up the budget because “we didn’t know things in Israel cost twice as much as the US” and “there are all these stricter regulations in Israel”, are called into question by reports that Midburn have been throwing Burning Man Regional events since 2012 – complete with art cars, a Man and Temple to burn, MOOP, Center Camp, costumes, gifting. The only difference here appears to be licensing the Burning Man name. Official affiliation doesn’t seem to have brought Midburn much, especially since they did not even have to publicize the event to sell all the tickets in advance.

Hopefully the Burning Man Project will step up and supply what’s needed to reimburse the artists and get the art to Midburn. It’s a chance for them to do something meaningful with that money - what better cause than the first Middle Eastern Burn, in the year that we have a Middle Eastern theme? It’s also a chance for BMOrg to demonstrate to the international Burner community that their charity cares more about Art than it does about The Founders Speaking. The $18,000 would be less than 0.1% of the Burning Man gate take (it’s 47 tickets), and about 4% of BMOrg’s annual travel budget. They’re a non-profit, they want to spread Burner culture around the world, and they’re going to get royalties back from this one which is the second biggest…so what’s the problem? Why wouldn’t BMOrg want to support the Midburn artists? Or invest in the fencing, lighting, and generator infrastructure that burns in the region require, so that the promoters can pay the artists instead of having to keep all this sophisticated equipment, which would only be used once a year.

If Burners donate to the Burning Man Project, is the money going to flow through to the artists, to get their art to Midburn? Or will it go to BMOrg personnel for first class international travel to the rave?

Burners who want to help out in the Middle East may also consider spending their dollars healing the damage done by fences, instead of putting up new ones.

Jemayel Khawaja brings us, via VICE,a great review of LIB 2014. He thinks the hottest people from Burning Man were there – wow. This year it was moved halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, after problems with the cops at last year’s Temecula venue.

Photos by Juliana Bernstein, courtesy of The Confluence

 

Everyone at Lightning in a Bottle is a weirdo in some sort of way. It’s like the hottest people from Burning Man and the strangest people from Coachella all converged on the moon with the intention of starting a temporary musical space tribe. Getting weird is encouraged and there’s an implied social contract to offer positive vibes. 

 

This past weekend, May 23-25, The Do LaB hosted their event for the first time at the San Antonio Recreation Area in Bradley, CA. Prompted by friction with local law enforcement in Temecula, CA last year, promoters moved for the fourth consecutive edition, this time halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles in California’s Central Valley. It’s a sprawling chaparral tract, with deep valleys separating all of the main areas. The sight of sunburned and tired hippies trudging up steep and dusty slopes was ubiquitous by the third day, but the scope of the land added to the feeling that Lightning was a whole different world. 

 

 

… I’m pretty sure I smelled DMT in the crowd during his set. Baauer would not be my first choice as a soundtrack to a dimension crossing mind journey, but hey, you only LiB once, especially if you crossover into the other-sphere and never return. 

 

 

 

After hours, the party descends into two of the valleys, The Drift and The Ditch, where DJ setups nestled into tree trunks went until the sunrise. In the mornings, people were raving about sunrise sets by Desert Dwellers and Random Rab. I spent the daytime checking out some of the extra-curricular activities. A major aspect of The Do LaB’s mission is using music and the festival setting as a portal for information about alternative modes of thinking. There are lectures and workshops taking place all day long in grandly designed amphitheaters. They range from meditation seminars to talks on the dangers of mercury poisoning in the dental industry. 

 

I watched a man named Bashar give a lecture. He claimed to be a medium for an alien species and advised the crowd on better living techniques. Afterwards, he took a Q+A and gave advice about vegetarianism and job hunting before snapping back into his embodied self in a dazed state. It was during this speech that a friend of mine met a young dreadlocked man for the first time with whom, at the time of writing, she is currently driving up to Santa Cruz to marry. No kidding. 

 

All the cups and cutlery aren’t just recyclable, they’re compostable. This is the greenest festival in America and all the kids chomping down on veggie burgers and potato knishes while holding on to cigarette butts in their pockets and packing trash into their cars stands testament to the ethos. It’s really nice to see people able to retain rowdy levels of rage while also maintaining some semblance of responsibility. 

 

 

 

While at Coachella it can feel kind of weird to see young kids, at Lightning in a Bottle, even though the environs are significantly wonkier, the presence of children somehow feels natural...Just walking around the little worlds people create out there is a journey within itself. 

 

 

 

The Woogie is one of the most unique stage designs I’ve ever seen. It’s a colorful, pineapple-shaped treehouse built in to a massive oak tree…One rad aspect of LiB is that DJs enjoy lengthy sets; it’s a great chance to go deep into a selector’s collection. 

 

 

 

While a lot of electronic music festivals tussle to outdo each other while playing the same game, Lightning in a Bottle has quietly developed into a supremely unique festival with some deep character. It’s not about being the coolest. It’s not even really about raging the hardest. It’s just about being your weird ass self, smelling of campground and fumbling your way through a dutty wine while staring at some trippy lights. People talk about Mysteryland returning to the spiritual home of Woodstock, but the community that populated LiB seems more attuned to what those flower children laid those many decades ago. Props to you all, strange and beautiful people of LiB. You’re a special breed. That said, I’d really like a steak. 

 

LIB – so good, even aliens go to it. One of my favorite festivals, sounds like it was as great as ever this year. Any readers go? How was it? Please share your experiences in the comments.

Last weekend, Israeli Burners threw a party billed as “the first Burning Man Regional Event in the Middle East”. Prior to the event, it seemed to be sold out at 2000 tickets, but there wasn’t enough money to get all the art there. Well, it looks like the event was a big success, with 3000 tickets sold. We hope that some of the extra 1000 ticket windfall for the promoters was used to help the artists who were facing a loss on the event (their Indiegogo is still running, having raised $695 of their $18,000 goal).

It looks like it was a great party, with plenty of cool art. Seems like there is a lot of room for future growth too.

San Francisco-based Burner Shawn Saleme’s story at Visual News is the best round-up of the event. Full story and photos here.

The Art and Spirit from Midburn: the New Regional Burning Man Gathering in Israel

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp called the whole thing bizarre (full story here, via Associated Press):

A puzzling sight. A woman wears a unicorn mask at the Midburn festival. Source: AP

FOR the Bedouin Arab shepherds tending their flocks in Israel’s Negev desert last week, it was almost as if aliens had landed from outer space.

Some 3000 people set up a colourful encampment in the dusty moonscape, swinging from hoops by day and burning giant wooden sculptures by night.

It was Midburn, Israel’s first Burning Man festival, modelled after the popular carnival held annually in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Midburn is a mix of “midbar,” Hebrew for desert, and the English word “burn.”

For five days, participants — mostly Israelis — created a temporary city dedicated to creativity, communal living and what the festival calls “radical self-expression.”

Some came costumed in cape or corset. Others, from babies to grandparents, went nude. Participants brought their own food and water, and shared with others. The only thing on sale was ice because of the scorching heat.

 

Riding around in a sailboat car is completely normal. Source: AP

 

There were workshops in sculpture, drawing, and touch therapy. There was music and theatre. At the “tent of heaven and hell,” participants were chosen at random for one of two fates: getting massages or doing chores.

During the day, Bedouin shepherds meandered to the fence surrounding the festival to observe the spectacle. When day turned to night, a larger-than-life wooden sculpture was set on fire.

The festival took place a few miles southwest of the desert gravesite of Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, who dreamed of making the Negev desert bloom — though he probably didn’t envision it blossoming with hula hoops and pyrotechnics.

At the end, participants were told to remove their own trash and leave the desert without a trace.

 

Party goers sprawled across the desert. Source: AP

  

 

Not your usual night in the desert. Source: AP

 

 

This could be a scene from the moon. Source: AP

Note that, despite the promoters paying for 2 official BMOrg personnel to be there for ranger training, it’s now a week since the event and so far there is nothing from BMOrg or the Burning Man Project about this event. Instead they’re talking up a Shabbat dinner on the Playa this year. According to the Jackedrabbit coverage is “coming soon” on the official blog.

Burning Man’s traveling troubadour and Social Alchemist Bear Kittay was there:

Year 1 of the Israeli מידברן )’( Midburn summed up. I would have liked to see more Palestinians and Arabs, but other than that, it was a pretty remarkable virgin burn. Incredible to see how acculturated a 2400 person event can be from scratch. I have some cool video content I’ll be editing up and sharing with more in-depth interviews and such. Let’s keep growing these contexts for creative collaboration shall we? I must say, after almost 2 months on the road in South Africa, Singapore, Japan, Israel and Palestine, I’m feeling fired up as ever about the role that these gatherings can have on cultivating ecosystems of cultural transformation. Its great and deeply impactful in first world countries and peaceful regions, and I must say, watching this hatch in fragmented cultures like South Africa and Israel is a whole different ballgame. If we can get this model right, and keep it spreading to the places on earth desperate for this context, we can really, really, foment change

.

We finally got BMOrg’s official Afrika Burn coverage yesterday – the event took place in April. Although it’s the second largest Burner event in the world, it’s evidently  not as big of a priority to BMOrg as book club discussions about the Death of God or art in their new office. We’re still waiting to hear their take on what happened at Midburn in Israel last weekend – the promoters paid for 2 BMOrg staffers to attend for “ranger training”. Apparently this doesn’t include posting photos online, maybe they still have to work out who owns the photos (or, more precisely, their future royalty stream).

Personally, I prefer this Afrikaburn summary from Buzzfeed – 31 Reasons You Have To Check Out South Africa’s Burning Man Before You Die. Great photos. I am super-keen to get to Afrika Burn, hopefully next year.

[view original Buzzfeed post by Sarah Duff here]

Earlier this year we reported on some anti-Burner sentiment developing in Northern Nevada (The Natives Are Restless). Reno was quick to respond, with a front-page love letter to Burning Man the next day. Then Burning Man was named an “official event” of Nevada’s year-long, State-wide, sesquicentennial celebrations – one of 122.

The small town of Klamath Falls, OR - the “City of Sunshine” - is jumping on the bandwagon too. And good news: they want us. At least, one commentator does: The Klamath Rant. The town is about three hours drive from Black Rock City, and they claim a quarter of all Burners heading to the party pass through it. The Rant takes a look at the opportunity that Burners could offer for economic development, if only town officials could get past their “hippie” bias.

Hippie Town has it Better Than Klamath

Read the full post here.

People of Klamath, please understand, that to find a town that welcomed Burners with open arms, year round, would be a dream come true for our community. And yes, we have a LOT of billionaires – probably more billionaires than any other party on earth, except Bohemian Grove. Your airport looks big enough for their private jets and space craft, with lots of vacant land around it. Throw the party there, and Burners can jet directly into their camp, without any dust issues…P.Diddy might even bring his boom box.

Thatdrop brings us a report on Burner favorites Dancetronauts appearance at last weekend’s Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) in Las Vegas. And it sounds like they got an A+ :

The Dancetronauts brought the bass to EDC Las Vegas for the second year in a row with their world renowned “Bass Station” stage. The largest mobile stage in the United States, the 70 foot long structure pumped out 80,000 watts of sound while including a world premiere of the ground-breaking ProVision LED displays over the course of three days in the Las Vegas desert.

During the entire weekend Dancetronaut resident DJ’s dished out nonstop tunes, providing one of the most unique experiences present at all of Electric Daisy Carnival.

The illuminated stage drew attention from everyone who passed by and was one of the highlights of the day 3 parade.

Here’s some video of the Dancetronauts (and their Dancetrohotties) in action

There’s a lot more to a Dancetronauts show than just pressing play.

The Dancetronauts were also at the 3-day pool party of The Influential Network, a shindig at Mike Tyson’s house that was billed as “the largest social media event in the world”:

During this year’s Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, The Influential Network is taking over the iconic former Mike Tyson mansion (featured in the box-office smash hit “The Hangover”) for the biggest social media event ever as part of their Influential House Series.

The Guinness Book of World Records will be on hand to confirm that their off-site EDC party will take the crown for the largest social media gathering in history over June 20th-22nd. This event will be a first of its kind convergence of Tech + Music + Pool party like nothing that has come before it.

The Influential House launched during the first weekend of Coachella in April 2014, bringing the world’s biggest social media influencers from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Vine, and YouTube together for an action-packed, 3-day party with the concept of creating the most social media influence in one place, ever. The launch event garnered over 1.1 billion native impressions during the 3-day weekend, causing The Influential House’s hashtag #TINhouse to trend #1 worldwide on Twitter, over #Coachella — during Coachella! At EDC, The Influential House intends to shatter the previous mark of 1.1 billion impressions. 

This exclusive, invite-only event will host influencers, surprise celebrities guests and industry VIPs and will serve as a daytime oasis to connect, celebrate, and create social influence.

The Influential House pool party will feature top DJs like THE STAFFORD BROTHERS, E-ROCK, ICON,KARMA and electronic crossover artist MAKI HSIEH. Not to mention, additional production and art curation by Dancetronauts. Sponsors Monster Products, Cyberdust, SelfieMe, PreFunc, Breakr, JusCollege and ShirtWasCash will do brand activations and gift product to attending influencers. Media partner, Entertainment Tonight will be returning to cover The Influential House for the 2nd time. Additionally, FanPass.TV will live stream directly from the event and Equiinet will provide connectivity. LA Bloom is co-producing the event and brought many of the entities together. Additionally, the LA based P.R. firm The Confluence will also be co-hosting the event. 

The Washington Post, recently acquired by Billionaire Burner Jeff Bezos, brings us a story by Ben Terris about Porcupine Festival, or “Porcfest”, dubbed “The Libertarian Burning Man”. If you think all the rules and cops are getting too much at Burning Man, perhaps this festival will resonate with you. We covered it last year.

Re-blogged from the Washington Post, Lifestyle section:

LANCASTER, N.H.— Like any good bonfire, the evening ritual at the Porcupine Festival deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, includes a drum circle, plumes of marijuana smoke, shared bottles of whiskey and spirited debate.

There are also guns. Lots of guns.

Colt .45s, Smith & Wessons, and Rugers hang on hips. A bearded man clings to an AK-47; a guy with a Mohawk has a shotgun with flowers coming out of the barrel strapped to his back. For this isn’t your typical bacchanal in the woods. This is the libertarian version of Burning Man, where a kumbaya discussion around the campfire goes something like this:

“It’s great to be around people who understand. I don’t get how the left won’t just admit that income tax is theft. Who cares if it’s for a good cause? If I held you at gunpoint to pay for my mother’s cancer treatment, wouldn’t that still be theft?”

Once a year for the past 11 years, this campground in the northern part of the Granite State turns into a libertarian utopia. And this year, roughly 2,000 people — mostly white men — have paid between $45 and $100 to experience for one week what life would be like without the onerous mechanisms of laws, if the market ruled to the exclusion of all else. Want to wear a loincloth and sell moonshine, shop at an unregulated market that accepts Bitcoin and silver, or listen to a seminar called “How the Collapse of the State is Inevitable”? Then this is the place for you.

It certainly is the place for Pete Eyre, a jacked guy with an enormous beard, standing off to the side of the fire. At one point he wanted to be a cop, interning at the St. Paul, Minn., police department, enforcing many of the rules people have come here to disregard. He found the system too reactionary, he says, and now helps run an organization that films police misconduct. He shows off one of his many tattoos in the flickering light of the fire. It’s an anarchist symbol tattoo covering an old American flag tat he got in his past life. “It’s my journey,” he says.

Then someone taps him on the shoulder. There’s a kid having a bad trip in the bathroom, and in this hectic, anti-hierarchical festival, Eyre is the closest thing to an authority figure around.

“I am God,” a longhaired 20-something repeats to the people babysitting him in a bathroom hallway. “I am a perfect logical machine.”

Two girls huffing nitrous oxide from a balloon and a guy holding a needle come by. The guy with the needle says he has a chemical mixture that if injected will lessen the effects of hallucinogens. “I have the solution right in my hands,” he says. Eyre decides it’s a bad idea to inject the longhaired guy with a mystery drug — even if it could work in theory — and says he won’t allow it to happen.

“Can anyone refute that it will work?” the guy with the needle asks.

It might as well have been the slogan for the whole glorious epic of the Porcupine Freedom Festival.

Pete Eyre once wanted to be a police officer, but found the system too “reactionary” and now helps run CopBlock.org, which films police misdoings. He provided some Porcfest muscle — and found time at the festival to work out. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

 

Porcfest — as it’s known here — is put on by the Free State Project, a group dedicated to recruiting at least 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire. The idea — that a group of this size can make a difference in a state with a low population — came from an essay in 2001 by then-Yale doctoral student and current Dartmouth lecturer Jason Sorens. Thirteen years later, the FSP has had nearly 16,000 people sign a “statement of intent” to move. The plan is that when 20,000 people sign the list, it will “trigger” a large migration. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 people have moved already.

This is a way to build a community. Even isolationists don’t like to feel alone.

“In most places, if you try to go to a libertarian event, you’re probably going to get three people,” says Kamil Markowicz, an attendee from Indiana. “And one is going to be a tea party guy and the other a conspiracy theorist.” Case in point: There’s a guy here with a libertarian baseball team back home in Chicago, but he says he needed a few constitutional conservatives to fill out his roster.

The ideological motivations, which Free Staters discuss over homemade mead and beers, are relatively easy to understand. The U.S. government suffers from low approval ratings, we have been fighting wars for years without a satisfying result in sight, and privacy is slipping away. Why not just dissolve it all — or most of it— and live as individuals? In other words, live like the porcupine: Let your lifestyle not encroach on others, but if someone comes at you, don’t hesitate to protect yourself with quills. Or your AR-15.

Gun enthusiast Matt Fox leads a workshop on how to build an AR-15 rifle. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

Even the dogs at Porcfest are on message. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

“If we concentrate together, we can effect change,” says Carla Gericke, president of the Free State Project. But what exactly that change would be, who even knows? For some, it means living outside the system; for others, changing the system from within.

By most counts, more than 20 Free Staters have been elected to the state House of Representatives (about 10 of whom currently serve), with many others serving in municipal government. In 2012, state Rep. Cynthia Chase(D) called them “the single biggest threat the state is facing today.”

It’s certainly an overstatement, but the Free Staters have been active in the political arena. They have helped repeal New Hampshire’s knife laws, blocked implementation of a national ID system in the state and helped allow jurors to acquit defendants not because they think they are innocent but because they believe the law at issue is unjust.

And just as Free Staters have started to trickle into politics, some more-traditional types have found themselves drawn to Porcfest. Former senator Robert C. Smith is here trying to pick up votes for his campaign against Scott Brown in the Republican primary to be held in September, and Saul Anuzis, former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, is here, despite drawing the ire of libertarians in 2007 when he said that Ron Paul should drop out of the presidential debates. (“People here probably wouldn’t be too happy,” he says at the campfire one night after a 20-something came up and started rambling about “brain drugs.” “But fortunately no one knows who I am here.”)

“We can’t achieve anything by one method alone,” says Mike Sylvia, a state representative and the 589th person to move to New Hampshire for the cause. By his count, the FSP has its eyes on about 47 people it might try to recruit to run in the coming years. A lot of people at Porcfest are software engineers, Web developers, IT support team members and telecommunications workers. Their jobs are relatively mobile, and uprooting to rural New Hampshire isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

And the best way to convince people to move, well, that’s Porcfest.

 

Colby Keddington of Hancock, Md., carries a Remington shotgun with artificial flowers in its barrel during the festival. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

Buzz Webb of Provincetown, Mass., builds a dance stage in preparation for her annual Big Gay Dance Party, known as the biggest party of the festival. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

 

The morning after the campfire, I check in with the security tent to see whether the longhaired, drug-addled kid from the night before is doing okay.

Anyone can act as a de facto security guard here, but members of the “Church of the Sword” — a group from Manchester that doesn’t focus much on worship but does start its meetings with a “ritual of combat” involving foam swords — constitute the only organized group.

I’m told by a big, bearded man with a walking stick that the kid is fine (later I see him giving a very complicated presentation about cryptocurrency), but that I should move along because there is a possible security situation. A former member of the Free State Project who has advocated violence against the police may be trying to get into the campground, where he is no longer welcome. There aren’t many rules here, but violence and bigotry can get you banned.

I leave to check out Agora Valley, the unregulated market in the middle of the campground.

At the entrance, a group sells silver that its members minted. Across from its stand, a food vendor (sans permit, sans safety inspection) sells hamburgers and hot dogs for Bitcoin, Dogecoin, precious metals, or, if you must, dollars (or “Federal Reserve Notes”). Cellphone service is bad out in the woods, so sometimes people have to buy a sausage here, and walk down the hill, over by the Bitcoin ATM, where reception is better, so they can pay.

At the entrance to Agora Alley, the festival market, a group sells silver that its members minted. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

Food vendors accept silver, Bitcoin and other alternative currencies. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

 

Puns are everywhere. One popular T-shirt: “Kill the Precedent.” One popular ice cream flavor: Open-Carry Cherry. (Or, playing on the big in-joke here, that without government nothing can get done: “Who Will Build the Rocky Roads?”). A tractor rumbles by, spilling brown sludge out of a bucket.

“It’s okay, it’s Agora Valley, it should be covered in sewage,” says an onlooker eating breakfast across from an outdoor tattooing station. “It’s unregulated and we have no infrastructure.”

It had been raining, so the sludge mixed well into the muddy path; the smell blended with the heady fumes of armpits, pot, and brewing beer. Tents had flooded the night before, the mosquitoes were out, and a festival radio station pumped its broadcast about whether the topless woman at the campground should have been asked to put her shirt back on. (She did cover up after a group of parents complained on behalf of the several dozen small children wandering the festival grounds.)

Just past the booth where a man sells make-your-own-firearms blueprints (his wife would rather him stick to his day job of running a cabinet-making magazine), there is a series of tents hosting seminars all day. A former Army officer named Bill Buppert is talking about how “we shouldn’t think of secession as a four-letter word.”

At an adjacent tent, a guy discusses the benefits of a paleo diet. If you stay healthy enough, he says, perhaps you can live long enough to make it to the “singularity” where you can live forever by tapping into artificial intelligence. Eat like a caveman, he says, so you can live long enough to become a robot.

“The thing about a lot of libertarians,” James O’Beirne, a software engineer living in New York City, says coming out of the paleo seminar, “is that we are often analytical to an irrational extent.”

 

Porcfest attendees didn’t lack for chances to party. Here, festival-goers dance at the Big Goth Dance Party. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

Chelsea Henry of Brighton, Mich., top, and Justin Holmes of New Paltz, N.Y., practice yoga moves at the Porcupine Freedom Festival. (Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Washington Post)

 

There’s a geodesic dome nicknamed the “orgy tent,” but the biggest party at Porcfest takes place near the end of the week-long gathering. It’s Buzz’s Big Gay Dance Party, put on by Buzz Webb, 47, who goes by the “Duchess of Dykedom,” wears combat boots and has close-cropped, dyed-white hair.

Webb says that when she came to Porcfest for the first time in 2009, she couldn’t find another gay person.

“I thought we were completely underrepresented,” she says between dance-related carpentry projects. “I was like, ‘Have I made a huge mistake coming?’ ”

Instead of high-tailing it out, she decided to throw her own party, one that both celebrated and poked fun at gay culture. Yes, 90 percent of the people who show up are straight, and yes, some people show up in pink speedos and wigs purely as a joke, but Buzz feels good about it.

“What makes all this so great is that it’s a real community, and one open to you doing what you want to do,” she says. In 2009, Buzz moved from Provincetown, Mass., to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. But three years later she had to move back because of money issues.

“I miss it here,” she says. “People here really believe in live and let live.”

Most of the time, anyway.

In 2012, according to Free State Project president Gericke, a group from Connecticut set up a tent serving Polish food. To attract customers, the vendors would rev up a chain saw. The combination of the chain saw and some rowdy evenings bothered enough people in Agora Valley that a few other vendors went into town to print fliers urging Porcfest attendees to boycott their food.

That was fine with the restaurateurs, who offered a 50 percent discount to any customer who brought in one of the fliers. It was the perfect example of the free market at work.

Until the next year, when Porcupine Festival organizers let them know the chainsaw antics wouldn’t be welcomed back. There had been too many complaints.

It’s a free society here unless you break the rules. There are no cops, unless you get on the wrong side of the Church of the Sword. The griddles may be unregulated, but the eggs are USDA-approved.

A true libertarian utopia will always remain a hypothetical, even on a small scale. But perhaps for the true believers, it’s better that way. For as long as it remains the mystery solution for our country’s ills, who can ever refute that it would work?

DNAInfo New York has a story about two yoga teachers who are offering a preview of their Burning Man-inspired festival of mindfulness. The Mass Bliss mini-festivals will be set up next weekend, Saturday July 12, in Grand Ferry Park (Williamsburg), Prospect Park (Prospect Heights), and Barretto Point Park (the Bronx).

Andrew Belcher and James Puckett; photo credit: DNA Info/Serena Dai

BROOKLYN — Two former yoga teachers with aspirations to start a Burning Man-inspired festival focused on “mindfulness” are offering a preview of the event next week in local parks.

Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Andrew Belcher and his business partner James Puckett, a former computer programmer and yoga teacher, are offering a one-day-only “MassBliss” mini-festival in parks in Williamsburg, Prospect Heights and the Bronx.

The group will set up three 10-by-10-foot tents — also referred to as “Breathing Booths” — at sites in Grand Ferry Park, Prospect Park and Barretto Point Park on Saturday, July 12.

A host of free programming including yoga, hip-hop, pilates, tango, drawing and more will take place in the tent and on the surrounding lawns throughout the day.

The booths are a preview of the duo’s planned larger, four-day festival where they want people to connect with themselves on “a more authentic level,” Belcher said.

The upcoming festival, with a date and location yet to be determined, is inspired by the Burning Man festival, where thousands of people descend on the Nevada desert for a week-long creative event.

“Our mission is to inspire and nurture the joy of presence,” Belcher said. “We feel that an authentic connection to the present moment allows individuals and communities to make more intentional, deliberate actions and choices.”

MassBliss is already talking to sponsors and scouting locations in New England for the larger festival next year, which will be part Burning Man, part Austin music and tech festival South by Southwest and part Tennessee music fest Bonnaroo, Belcher said.

Activities for next year’s festival could include concerts where artists would engage with the audience, theater performances where actors transition to sudden street art spots and workshops where attendees can learn yoga or pilates.

Workshops and talks will be filmed and uploaded online later, so anybody can experience them, Belcher said.

The variety of activities stems from idea that “mindfulness,” or being in the present moment, can happen in different ways, including movement, interpersonal connection, art-making and live performances, Belcher said.

Next year’s festival will cost money and have sponsors, Belcher said, adding that MassBliss believes that being for-profit and doing good in the world can go hand-in-hand.

That said, the former school teacher said he thinks restrictions on access to yoga and meditation, through expensive classes or pricey gear like Lululemon clothing, have become barriers to entry for many people.

“This mindfulness stuff is so powerful,” he said. “Its presence is available to anyone at any time, if they’re willing to just listen.”

Breathing Booths will pop up in Grand Ferry Park, Prospect Park and Barretto Point Park from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, July 12. A schedule of programming can be seen here.

It sounds like they have picked up the principle of “Immediacy” from Burning Man. They’ve also got the principle of making public statements about “making profit and doing good in the world” from BMOrg. It’s not clear what other aspects of their events will be familiar to Burners. This is the first time that I’ve heard the theory that Lululemon is a barrier to entry for yoga – you can buy the pants for $39 on eBay, but I’m pretty sure that you can wear other types of clothes while doing yoga if that’s a problem for you.

Andrew Belcher says:

When has anything in your life happened at a time other than right now?

Despite all our wanderings into the past and worries about the future, our lives continuously unfold in the present moment. Right here, right now.

MassBliss was created to produce fun, immersive events that explore tools and skills to deepen our experience of the present moment and use that in tangible ways in our personal, professional and playful lives. Where to begin?

Most importantly, breathe. How much time do we spend thinking about our breath? Chances are, not very much—though without our little buddy breath, life isn’t going to happen. Our breath is a vehicle into our bodies, which always exists in the present.

Try it. Really. Pause.

Stop reading for a second, close your eyes and take a slow, deep breath or maybe three.

Anything shift?

Our lives are an infinite series of little moments woven together by our breath. In connecting with ourselves in the present moment we align with what is really happening right now as opposed to some thought about what we think is happening. Aligning with the present moment can inform a more deliberate decision about what move to make next. That’s when we create. Our ability to see the world in its present form, imagine something different, and then create that dream makes us human. None of us really know what we are truly capable of.

Take a deep breath and see what you find.

If any Burners attend any of these festivals, please take some photos and share.

The Man Burns is a play set at Burning Man, to be performed outside Burning Man. The playwright is David Vernon, who grew up in a showbiz family: his dad was the voice of Frosty the Snowman.

It’s quite an interesting vision. For those who may or may not be going to Burning Man this year – perhaps you’re still waiting for tickets – this is an art project you can support, and be a part of, and get to enjoy. You can bring friends and family to it, to give them a taste of Burner culture without making them breathe and bathe in Playa dust. It meets the Burning Man Project’s mission of facilitating the extension of Burner culture through the world, so you can feel all Burnier-than-thou and Ten Principally about backing it too.

It’s a Kickstarter, so if Burners don’t fund it, it won’t get made. Which would be a pity, because it sounds like a fun evening’s entertainment. They’ve hit 10% of their funding goal already, so any support you can give them would be appreciated. For any aspiring actors, young and old, for a mere $350 you can get a part in the production.

From Kickstarter:

A BRAND NEW THEATRICAL EVENT THAT BRINGS BURNING MAN TO YOU

THE MAN BURNS is a mystical, joyous theatrical observation on Burning Man and a glimpse into the lives of people who make this epic trek once a year. This interactive play breaks down the walls and gives you a night at Burning Man

This is not a play that will be performed at Burning Man-this will be performed off-playa, in your city, in a theater.

You walk up to the theater to see a performance of a new play, “The Man Burns.”  Out front is an art car playing music and getting the evening going. When you enter the theater the first thing you notice is a group of people gathered around a costume exchange picking out free colorful clothing accessories like a faux fur mantle or a set of glowing devil horns to wear inside the theater. If you brought an extra costume piece you can leave it behind for someone else.

Next, you’ll come across an old tiki bar called MAKIMAKI, the kind of bar you might accidentally happen on the esplanade at Burning Man. MAKIMAKI is decorated with well-traveled thrift shop tiki items. The house cocktail is of course, the MAKIMAKI, but there are other playa-themed cocktails as well. And a jar of pickled eggs on the counter.

When you go inside you’ll notice that the theater is decorated like the inside of a Mongolian yurt with beautiful tapestries lining the walls. The play begins. If you’ve never been to Burning Man you will be transported to this far-off, mysterious place. If you’ve been to the playa before you will find yourself back home, in the middle of a conversation about connectivity, overwhelming art, accidental sharts, (or accidental art and overwhelming sharts),  late night poutine and Burning Man urban myths.

During intermission and after the play there might be a marching band or or someone playing jazz songs on their ukelele or grilled cheese sandwiches being handed out. The party will change from city to city because YOU  are the party.

WHY WON’T MY AUNT TILLEY COME TO BURNING MAN?

It’s too hot. It’s overrun by naked hippies. It’s too far away. There are no real showers. It used to be better ten years ago.

Those are some of the reasons I’ve heard from friends and relatives about why they’ll never come to Burning Man. But they love hearing stories about the playa and looking at all the photographs. Selfishly, I thought that by making “THE MAN BURNS” an interactive night with some fun, exciting elements of Burning Man, I could give all of my friends a Burning Man night. And you can too. Everyone has at least 5 friends or relatives who say they’ll never go. Bring them to see “THE MAN BURNS” and share the experience with them.

My name is David Vernon and I grew up in a show biz family. My dad was a comedian and the voice of Frosty the Snowman. I spent my childhood backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show and wondering why my father was never the “Secret Square” on The Hollywood Squares. I also grew up with a love of story. I would read a play then perform them with my sisters Barbies. In fact, her Barbie dream house was redressed many times and became the set for “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”  Eventually, I took my love of story to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU where I studied Film and TV.

I have been a professional writer for the past twenty years.  I’ve written short fiction (which has been widely anthologized), screenplays (a film I wrote, “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and  was released by Regent films.)  I was recently commissioned to write three short scripts for an upcoming feature film anthology about the city of Berlin by the producers of “New York, I Love You.”  I’ve written essays on Salon (http://www.salon.com/2000/12/20/frosty/ …I didn’t know it at the time but all of these projects and jobs were training grounds for my most challenging and exciting project to date.

THE STORY

A whiteout is announced at Burning Man over the radio.  People are warned to take shelter. Within moments several strangers run into a Mongolian yurt to get away from the wind storm.

The strangers include: ANDY and BUNNY EARS, a gay couple that own the Mongolian Yurt and were preparing for a hot sexual encounter with someone they met on the playa. FIREFLY, a virgin burner who just dropped her first ever hit of MDMA and was on her way to a dance club, PERSEPHONE, an Australian sci-fi actress looking for a ride share to Venice Beach after having another disappointing day on the playa, MOWGLI, a bouncy, energetic young guy dressed entirely in blinky lights who communicates only through motion, MARY ANIMALS, a 60 year old woman who comes to Burning Man on her own and sets up a coffee stand (with the worst coffee on the playa), that is destroyed in the white out, and an ex-marine with an unfortunate sense of direction, known as McRIB, who is dressed in a sketchy Ronald McDonald outfit who was on his way to fight at Thunderdome but got lost.

The result is some funny chaos as these characters, and a few others, spend the evening connecting, disconnecting, arguing, and telling their Burning Man stories; some heartbreaking, some extraordinary.

INSPIRATION

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince

I’ve been going to Burning Man for the past eleven years and have also been active in the Burner community. During that time I’ve witnessed many fascinating Burning Man stories unfold in front of me. I’ve also met  so many fascinating and unique individuals. Their stories inspired me to write “THE MAN BURNS.”

The people who go to Burning Man travel a great distance and experience great joy, and sometimes hardship in search of….what exactly? A unique vacation? An opportunity to meet like-minded people? A chance to become part of something bigger than ourselves…part of an artistic experiment? After years of taking notes,  I became passionate about writing a play that explored these questions.

For many people, “THE MAN BURNS” might be the closest they come to attending Burning Man. For others it might be their first introduction to this amazing place. For Burners, I hope the play might be a catalyst for them to further discuss their own experiences and stories.

…I decided to rededicate myself to only telling stories that mattered–to me, and hopefully to others. I wanted to dream big–bigger than ever before. The concept for THE MAN BURNS came to me about a week later. And this has been my dream ever since.

I have been developing the story and working on “THE MAN BURNS” for the past three years.There is still more work to be done to get the play up and running…I will be counting on the passion of tight knit community of artists to help bring this dream alive on a limited budget.

Any money raised beyond my goal will pay for more faux fur rugs. I’m only half joking. The design of the inside of the yurt is based on I Dream of Jeannie’s bottle and needs to be as ornate as possible. And more tapestries to decorate the set. And more fake playa dust to fly through the yurt door whenever someone opens it. It will also be used to give the creative team more options to create a bigger, better evening. We would also be able to perform the play for more than one night in each city. We’d like to put more items on the clothes exchange rack. And more importantly, paying the creative team a little better for all of their hard work. All of the money will be up their on the stage. So if you can afford to donate generously, please do. The more money the more elaborate the production.

I’ve written the play. …Kickstarter is an all or nothing proposition–if I don’t reach my goal I don’t receive any of the funds donated. This is a dream that can’t happen without you.

Just came across this story. It’s from September 2011, so after Burning Man announced their non-profit vision, but just before I started this blog. Exhibitor Online has a piece on how Burning Man was the inspiration for an Intel corporate stand with product demos, a merger between the two cultures. The result was a huge hit, bringing nearly 40,000 new Twitter followers. They smashed their goal of glow stick wielding attendees at “The Big Reveal”, the high point of “the world’s biggest geekfest“.

They spent $50k to create SiMan (uhhhh…how is that pronounced, again?). First, from Intel’s SiMan Release:

No one would ever confuse the Intel Developer Forum with Burning Man, but the upcoming tech industry event in San Francisco will boast at least a hint of the annual counter-cultural festival in the Nevada desert.

 He’s called SiMan, short for Silicon Man, and on the second day of Intel’s big geekfest, he will stand an imposing 18 feet high inside Moscone Center West. While that height pales in comparison to the 50-foot-tall effigy that burned to the ground earlier this month to the delight of some 50,000 desert-dwelling self-stylists, some wearing nothing but a free spirit, SiMan promises to be a behemoth impressive in his own right.

Besides being regaled by a fully clothed crowd and remaining indoors, SiMan isn’t destined for a fiery end. Rather, he will be gloriously illuminated with 1,500 LED bulbs strung together with 180 feet of wiring. And his masters plan to let him live on to serve as a beacon for an embedded future.

The SiMan Masters are un-named. Was this entire affair in fact a symbolic beacon for the future of our culture, in its new *cough* “non-profit” *cough* structure?

Keep a lookout for SiMan on the Playa.

Re-blogged from Exhibitoronline.com. Emphasis and comments ours; interpretation of the Tin Principles, theirs.

TRAFFIC BUILDER Exhibitor: Intel Corp.’s Intelligent Systems Group Creative/Production: Live Marketing Inc., Chicago, 312-787-4800,www.livemarketing.com Production: Taylor Inc., Brampton, ON, Canada, 800-605-6519,www.taylorinc.com Show: Intel Developer Forum, 2011 Budget: $50,000 Goals:  Attract 500 attendees to the booth and lure 380 attendees back for the reveal event.  Generate thousands of impressions via social media. Results:  Drew more than 700 attendees to the ISG booth and attracted 400 guests to the reveal event on day two.  Scored 43,000 Twitter impressions, 9,000 Facebook impressions, and 1,000 YouTube video views. he merger of Burning Man and corporate America is about as likely as Lady Gaga and Warren Buffet hooking up. For while corporate America is driven by a relentless pursuit of the almighty dollar, Burning Man is based on the idea of creating a radical, spontaneous community absolutely void of commercialism. Drawing upwards of 45,000 people to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, the art-festival-slash-self-expression event culminates in the burning of a human effigy that towers 80 feet above the masses. The weeklong affair challenges visitors (aka burners) to contribute to the pop-up populous, be it by building the human form, sharing their creativity, and/or ensuring that the experience leaves nary a trace upon the desert after its completion. What’s more, Burning Man is based on 10 guiding principles, including complete inclusion (as there are no prerequisites for “community” membership), participation (attendees must be participants, not spectators), and “decommodification” (commercial sponsorships, transactions, and advertising are strictly prohibited). So as you can see, in the eyes of dollar-driven corporate America, Burning Man is pretty much the antichrist. Nevertheless, Intel Corp.’s Intelligent Systems Group (ISG) made a deal with the devil at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). Held Sept. 13 – 15, 2011, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center [note - next to BMHQ at the time - Ed.], IDF is an annual trade show and educational conference that hosts roughly 5,000 developers and programmers, i.e., the people that dream up the whiz-bang software, hardware, and applications that run on Intel architecture. Here, the ISG hoped its booth would fulfill traditional corporate goals, such as generating awareness and fostering Intel’s position as a technology and thought leader. But according to Len Klebba, who oversees event marketing for the ISG, it also wanted to nurture creativity and cultivate a sense of community between the ISG and attendees. [with glowsticks! - Ed.] And given these atypical aspirations, Burning Man and the ISG were a match made in exhibit-marketing heaven. Before the Betrothal  To further comprehend why the ISG’s mismatched marriage made sense, it’s important to understand a little bit more about the ISG and IDF. Simply put, the ISG sells microprocessor technology that’s embedded within devices or components to enable smart connectivity [blah blah] … “The ISG came to us and said, ‘Give us your craziest out-of-the-box ideas that will make us the talk of the show,'” Trompeter says. “We tossed out a few concepts, but before long, Burning Man trotted to the forefront.”

So how does a seemingly impossible union between Burning Man and corporate America avoid a Romeo and Juliet-style demise? “If you think about it, Burning Man is actually a perfect analogy for the ISG,” says Kristin Veach, Live Marketing’s senior vice president of marketing and business development. “Our idea was to allow attendees to embellish and assemble a Burning Man-style human form during the show and to pair this activity with product demos, giveaways, and a show-stopping reveal.“

The Burning Man concept, then, would expose attendees to Intel products, and foster creativity and a sense of community as people added their artistry to the project. And like the real Burning Man festival, the show-floor activity would culminate in a buzz-worthy event – but instead of burning the effigy, the ISG would reveal what had by then become an 18-foot-tall behemoth to the crowd. The theatrical reveal would hoist the humanoid form to a “standing” position to tower over the show floor like a pissed off Optimus Prime.

Needless to say, the ISG fell in love with the Burning Man idea, so Live Marketing forged ahead. Its first chore: Renaming the Burning Man concept. After all, this wasn’t a Burning Man event; it was an ISG event. After running into myriad copyright and corporate-communications issues, the Live Marketing and ISG team named their human effigy SiMan. The team admits the name is a little twisted, as it was concocted by reversing the “I” and “S” from ISG and giving a nod to the same letters in the ISG tagline for the show – Intelligent Connected Solutions. But despite its somewhat warped state, SiMan has a better ring than IsMan. [SiMan has a better ring? Oh dear - Ed.]

Next up was finding a company to craft SiMan’s components, including a core, a head, and various limbs, to which attendees would attach artistic embellishments. In addition, attendees would also help connect these elements (to play up the Intelligent Connected Solutions tagline) and essentially construct SiMan on site at IDF. For that, the team turned to Taylor Inc., an exhibit house based in Brampton, ON, Canada. “We started with the basic concept of a Burning Man-like structure, but with a high-tech twist,” says David Hunter, account director at Taylor. “Ultimately, we created multiple components comprising a metal frame sheathed in wood and skinned with a vinyl, multicolored computer-chip-like motif. Strings of LED lights ran throughout the elements, and tiny LED fixtures were used to create SiMan’s facial features.” [errr...and the high tech twist is? - Ed.]

With SiMan under construction, Live Marketing crafted various complementary activities and messaging. The resulting SiMan-based program – which comprised everything from the SiMan activity to partner promotions to a Will.i.am booth visit – not only exceeded the ISG’s goals; it also impressed our judges. “This idea wasn’t just cutting edge,” one judge said. “It was a unique traffic builder/integrated program hybrid that certainly must have sparked developers’ imaginations.”

[blah blah]
With This Glow Stick, I Thee Wed  [!!! - I would've titled this section "it's glowtime for SiMan" - Ed]
Day two culminated in a theatrical production the likes of which IDF had never seen: Glow Time. Modeled after Burning Man’s flaming finale when the human effigy goes down in a fiery blaze of glory, Glow Time was SiMan’s moment in the sun – although to keep the fire marshals happy, the flames were replaced by glow sticks, and SiMan wasn’t reduced to a pile of ashes.

Throughout the first two days of the show, staffers and partner exhibits promoted Glow Time. In addition to handing out glow sticks, they encouraged everyone to come back to the ISG booth at the end of day two for the big reveal and grand-prize drawings. By roughly 6 p.m., more than 400 glow-stick-wielding attendees – 100 more than the ISG’s goal – swarmed the now-darkened space (achieved by turning off several overhead light fixtures in the venue). Dramatic music played in the background while the Assembly Zone’s presenter acted as the Glow Time emcee, reinforcing ISG’s “connected,” “embedded,” “community” verbiage. 

With a theatrical flourish, featuring special-effects fog and spotlights, the 700-pound SiMan was raised to his full height of 18 feet and lit via his internal LEDs. Awestruck by the towering creature they’d helped create, attendees pulled out their cell phones to capture the moment and share their pictures and videos with family and friends. After a few words from the emcee and a round of applause for SiMan, the fog dispersed and the lights came up. But before attendees left, the presenter plucked two cards from the Plexiglas bin for the grand-prize netbook drawings.

When attendees returned on day three, they discovered that SiMan was still fully suspended in the Assembly Zone, sans spotlights and fog. During the day, staffers and partners encouraged attendees to decorate SiArt Pieces, but instead of attaching them to a component in the zone, attendees could attach them directly to any part of SiMan (or rather those areas they could reach without a ladder). All told, the ISG estimates that more than 700 people participated in the Assembly Zone activity, adding more than 1,000 SiArt Pieces to SiMan – a number that surpassed the ISG’s goal by more than 45 percent.

…the program’s social-media efforts garnered more than 43,000 impressions on Twitter and approximately 9,000 impressions on Facebook. Additionally, its YouTube videos scored more than 1,000 views.

“From Will.i.am to Glow Time to the Assembly Zone activity, the ISG’s Burning-Man-based program was a tremendous success,” Klebba says. “SiMan truly got attendees involved in his creation, fostered developers’ creativity, and generated amazing awareness.” So it just goes to show, despite the naysayers and the cultural (or corporate) taboos, even an unlikely marriage of polar opposites can sometimes turn into a long-term love affair.

Joe Gelman at the Bold Italic has written “How To Survive Living With Your Burner Room-mate”, a wonderful story about what it’s like to be living with a Burner – when you’re not one. Love the picture! Shout out to Distrikt who have their first flag down at 9 & G for finding this.

From the Bold Italic:

If you live in San Francisco, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll end up in a conversation about Burning Man. With housing getting increasingly competitive, you might even find yourself in the same boat as me: living with a Burning Man enthusiast, or “burner.” As many of us know, the fervor with which burners talk about the festival rivals any religious fanaticism out there.  Not unlike shoving the one true path to salvation down your throat, your burner will hammer BM dogma into your head and promise that you’ll never understand what it’s like in Black Rock City, 6,000 MPH winds ripping the flesh clear off your body. After being close friends and roommates with a burner for a couple of years now, I’ve come to know his habits intimately, and I’ve compiled a list of things you’ll need to accept now that you’ve got your own burner roommate to deal with. 

You’ll Be Talking about Burning Man. Constantly.   

What did I think of that art walk? Felt a bit watered down compared to some of the installations at Black Rock. You know what that scene in The Avengers reminded me off? Some guy with Hulk hands on the Playa. There must be something about watching a 50-foot-tall wooden man burn that replaces the bar to which all of your future comparisons will be made. On top of making the fest the new benchmark for everything, burners will jump at any chance to recount some insane episode from BM. So get ready – you’ll quickly have heard so much about Burning Man that you’ll feel like an expert on the subject.  

All Your Preconceptions about Burning Man Are Wrong

Even though you feel like an expert, do NOT express opinions about Burning Man unless you’re ready for a 10- to 60-minute correction. Even things you’d think are straightforward conversational cues could get you in trouble.

My Burner: The sun is beating down on you all the time, so you need to have those moments when you hide out in the shade sometimes.

Me: Yeah, sounds really hot.

My Burner: Well, actually, the heat isn’t even the worst part. It’s really the heat in combination with the wind, the dust, and trying to build art out there in all the elements. That’s what most people don’t understand; the heat is just one part …

And so on. When you’re trying to walk out the door in the next half hour, learn to nod and smile when your burner starts to talk Burning Man shop. 

The Party Never Stops

You know what you need after jam-packing your body full of drugs and roasting in the desert for a week? Another party where you take more drugs to “decompress.” Kind of like eating a painful amount of food at a buffet and returning a few hours later because you’re worried you’ll go into buffet withdrawals. And Decompression is only one of the BM events that occurs during the year. In fact, all year long my burner is inviting me to parties celebrating the fact that BM just happened, is about to happen, or is not even close to happening. Prepare yourself for even more opportunities in the city to do drugs in the middle of the week, and try to hide your look of disgust when your burner offers you a dust-covered fur coat that one of his campmates maybe had unprotected sex on.

Hoarding

Your burner will undoubtedly have obtained a lot of items that are useful on the Playa but useless anywhere else: drawers full of blinking lights, garbage bags full of boas, 50 jars as part of this year’s gift preparation – you name it. Give up any dreams of having a sleek, minimalistic, metropolitan apartment, and try to ignore the bike in the corner of your burner’s room with dildos for spokes.

Planning Will Consume Your Burner’s (and Your) Life

As that magic time of the year approaches, you’ll see your burner only in passing as they hurry off to a weekly Skype meeting, to the Haight to shop for skirts and goggles, or to plan and/or construct a gift that you’ll find hypothetically interesting. On top of losing your roommate to the construction of a mobile, collapsible bar that serves only people showing off their junk, you’ll also need to accept the fact that your common areas will look like a homeless man’s shopping cart exploded all over them. These things will litter your hallways, your living room, and – as a quick personal favor – your bedroom for just one night.

Your New Roommates, and There Will be Many

One of most prominent characteristics of BM is a poignant sense of community. An outcome of this is that throughout the year, you’ll have various burners sleeping on your couch because your burner bonded with them in previous years, and they’re now passing through SF for a visit. This can keep your home interesting and filled with new guests, but be prepared for your burner to assure you that the 53-year-old man in your living room is not creepy because they shared a gift while doing mushrooms together. Right before BM, you might even have a handful of burners using up the last of your hot water before they head out for their spiritual drug fest.  

Constant Suggestions that You Should Attend Burning Man

This is perhaps the most complicated part of living with your burner. On the one hand, every time they open their mouth about BM, they’ll conclude with an invitation for you to join their camp next year. At the exact moment you start to show any interest, they’ll do a complete 180 and start in with warnings, cautionary tales, and questions about whether you really want to go. Make it past that point, and now you’ve got no less than 50 articles in your inbox: first-time guides, the core tenets to study, how to navigate Black Rock City, musings on whether you should or shouldn’t do acid your first time attending – take your pick. If you’re like me, you’ll read the title and the last paragraph and swear on your life that you read every damn word.

On top of being the most complicated, the ongoing BM invitations are also the most terrifying part of living with a burner. After years of hearing about BM, I’ve finally been convinced to attend the week-long sobriety massacre this year. I plan to go only this one time, but this raises all sorts of questions. Most notably, will I enter September as a born-again burner? Will I come back and complain that my EBX burrito tastes like garbage compared to a sand-dusted grilled cheese in the middle of a cold desert night? Will I contribute my own BM stories when my burner starts in on one of his, thus creating a conversational loop from which we can never escape? Only time will tell, but let it be known here and now that I give my permission to everybody to tell me to shut the fuck up about Burning Man already.  

I’d like to dedicate this article to my burner – you know who you are. Please, throw out the fucking pickles you made a year and a half ago as BM gifts.

Filed under: Alternatives to Burning Man, Burner Stories Tagged: 2014, funny, Party, playa love, stories

Debra Klein has written a great feature at the Daily Beast about David Best’s new Temple at the Paradise Ridge Winery in Sonoma- a permanent structure made of steel, now installed between “TRUTH” and “LOVE” in their outdoor sculpture gallery which features a lot of Burner Art.

Entrance to Paradise Ridge

Previously, they had burned a David Best Temple there. People (Burners?) knew to write notes on the Temple, without ever being told.

From The Daily Beast:

What do we have, in the end, when a love has gone? When a person has left for good? All that was everything between two people—a romance, a friendship, or simply day-to-day life—disappears. Only our memories never leave. But what if we want them to?

These are the thoughts that might flood visitors to David Best’s Temple of Remembrance in a meadow on the grounds of Paradise Ridge Winery. Like a vaguely Asian-themed birdcage, the deceptively ingenious rusted lattice memorial to love and loss is part shrine, part interactive do-it-yourself art project, as light visually as it is heavy emotionally.

It’s a place to remember the people you’re carrying in your mind or your heart. You can scrawl something on a flat pebble and bury it in a bird-bath bowl, or send a message to them on a piece of cloth set aflutter in the wine country wind. And, in doing so, you release your own feelings, too.

Best and his crew helped put the “burning” in the Burning Man festival fourteen years ago when they built the massive Temple of the Mind memorial in Nevada’s desert, and then dedicated it to a friend who’d died before the event began. Droves of attendees streamed inside to vent their emotions over the course of several days. The structure ignited their passions, and then the creators ignited it.

The temple idea caught fire, and while that ephemeral tradition continues as an end-of-the-festival ritual each year, the new Temple of Remembrance, on a hillside in Sonoma County, is Best’s first constructed in steel and is permanent. It sits somewhere between Truth and Love (that’s not a metaphor, those are the names of two other large Burning Man sculptures relocated to the same grassy, oak-fringed field) in a place where—despite expansive tree and vineyard vistas—visitors will find themselves looking within.

While Best’s flammable work is fleeting, the changes people experienced inside seem to stick. Best recalls a grieving father confiding that a visit let him unlock the emotional door trapping his family in grief. “Our son is free now,’” Best remembers he said. It’s a reminder that the flip side of anger is love, isn’t that why we feel both so intensely?

Although Best doesn’t consider himself particularly spiritual, he has a sixth sense about what people need to heal emotionally, be it from a trauma or a lost love, or both.

“You have to provide a place where someone can feel private, yet safe. They can be there or run away, they are not locked in,” he says. Immediately after, as if to prove his non-guru bona fides, he mentions he’s putting the finishing touches on a hot rod to race at Bonneville.

[read more at the Daily Beast...]