Burning Man

Like many Burners (and non-Burners), I was outraged when, yesterday, an image with variations of the title “Grabbing 100+ Boobs at Burning Man 2013” went viral. In light of the public distribution of these photos, I think it’s imperative for the public in general, and Burners in particular, to have a focused conversation about a range of important social issues including the meaning of consent, rape culture, and slut shaming.

I do not know what each woman in the photos consented to and what problems may arise if they are recognized by people they know from contexts other than Burning Man, so I am reluctant to link to or share the image. However, because it is difficult to discuss the issues in question here without making specific references to the content of the photographs and because most of the harm from distributing the image has probably already been done, I have cropped and anonymized a small portion of the long gridded image here.

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My Facebook feed, which had nearly gone dormant for the past week, is once again teaming with life; this means that somewhere, in a nondescript plot of desert, 50,000+ souls are packing tents, scrubbing dust from their hair, and beginning an exhausted journey home from their annual pilgrimage to the Burning Man festival. After last year’s impulsive decision to fund the the trip on student loan debt, I find myself once again relegated to the social media sidelines by financial constraints. One benefit of watching this year’s event unfold at a distance is that it has given me time and space to reflect on my experiences with Burning Man 2012. more...

Describing “types” of capitalisms, their components, the central logics they operate by is always a risky game: nothing is ever entirely new, there are always outliers, the different types always overlap, and so on. However, I’d like to speculate very briefly on a specific trend within Silicon Valley capitalism, what strikes me as an anti-capitalism sort of capitalism. I’m speaking of this type of capitalism not as something that is fully realized in reality, but as an “ideal type”, a hypothetical possibility that we can determine if or how much validity it has in illuminating the world–or at least one small chunk of the contemporary economy. Mostly, I’m just musing on a smart, fun piece by Sam Biddle about the rhetoric of Tumblr founder David Karp before Yahoo’s acquisition of the site for one billion dollars.

The rhetoric is familiar for those who follow Silicon Valley and is indicative of a particular type of capitalism. more...

Kurt Anderson’s recent article in Vanity Fair titled “You Say You Want a Devolution.” contends that the past 20 years have seen a total stagnation in the production of new cultural aesthetics. In other words, the end of the 50s looked nothing like the end of the 70s, but 1989 looks remarkably similar to 2009. Anderson concludes:

We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle-economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation.

This is concerning, since that means the entirety of our blog is nothing more than the fungal growth sitting upon the neutral technological substrate that we impregnate with decaying cultures of past decades. Tattoos, Facebook, Burning Man, the iPhone, Twitter, sex dolls, wifi, internet memes, reality TV, geek culture, hipsters, video games, faux-vintage photographs, and dubstep are all popular topics on our blog, and (along with blogging itself) are products of the last 20 years. Anderson assumes that cultural objects are made possible through technology, but refuses to admit that technologies can also be cultural objects in and of themselves. more...

A discussion of Burning Man may, at first, seem out of place on a technology blog; however, as sociologist Fred Turner has previously observed, the ideology of Burner culture is profoundly co-implicated with the prevailing ideology of Web.  It is more than mere coincidence that this particular festival has exploded in proximity to Silicon Valley.  It is also more than coincidence that Google and other tech company virtually shut down during this event.  The week-long temporary city in a desert attracts people from around the world. The community is founded upon the (seemingly paradoxical) principals of “radical self-reliance” and “communal effort.” For a week, Burners collectively construct a festive atmosphere that separates themselves from the institutions and customs of their everyday lives. There is a vibrant gift economy with a focus on the decommodification of goods and services (though, of course, like the Internet, much money changes hands behind the scenes: for infrastructure, transport, illicit ticket sales, drugs, etc.). Everyone is encouraged to participate in all aspects of the community (to “prosume” their surroundings), and in doing so, to reach a better understanding of self. This is all embodied in the Ten Principles of Burning Man. more...