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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

> no event like burning man on the planet

Check out regional burns. They're smaller, but many are not ruined yet.

Ha. I've gone to AfrikaBurn a few times (largest burn after Burning Man). It started circa 2007 and the old-timers are already complaining that its ruined. Also juicy politics like this: https://medium.com/@kurtsiegfried/fear-and-loathing-at-afrik...

That is perhaps the most densely phrase-ridden rant I've ever encountered. it's worth reading just to marvel at how much can be implied while saying so little definitively. The author effortlessly weaves idioms and references to create a narrative of abuse, which makes it easy to relate to the circumstances alluded to.

It's masterful work, because even though I know nothing about any specific details, and this leaves ,me wanting to know those details before I take it as gospel, the truth is that a few months from now if AfrikaBurn came up in conversation, what I would likely remember is that I had read that it has real organizational and sociological problems. So, I guess that's goal achieved for this author, no matter how much at this point I want verification before accepting this.

You're right. I proved it to myself by reading the whole thing replacing AfrikaBurn with IBM. It really works; e.g.:

> By sleight-of-hand and the wholesale and completely unnecessary import of an unwieldy American pop culture franchise, a group of creatively blocked shadow artists, bureaucrats and box tickers are making an elaborate and specious lunge at celebrity through curation-by-funding. Employing savvy redistribution of money, they stand on the shoulders of established, older artists and their fashionable, younger counterparts, thus hoping to crown themselves the fairy godmothers of local pop culture. In short, involvement in IBM appears to be nothing more than a cynical exercise in associative branding for themselves and, in some cases, the products they promote in the real world.

With apologies to IBM. You can use Monsanto or Tata Motors if you prefer.

A masterclass in the art of vagueblogging

Masterful, indeed, and with some absolutely inspired turns of phrase in there. However, seeing the list of literary acknowledgments at the end, I have to wonder if there is more plagiarism that poetry happening here. Well, no matter; I particularly loved this sentence, and intend to appropriate it myself, at some point, after `s/burner/$TARGET/` has been applied:

> The burner mindset is parked on bricks in the stultifying cul-de-sac of hipster insouciance.

I stopped reading when I got to the "white privilege" part.

This looks autogenerated. I can tell from the Markov-model artifacts, and from having written plenty of wharrrrrgarbl in my own good time.

I've been to a few of those and while they're fun, they're only like the modern Burning Man because of association ans they don't have the same scale or funding. Burning Flipside, in Texas, was really really fun though.

For those on the west coast, Fourth of Juplaya is the big gathering of Burners early in the summer but there isn't really a sense of community and everyone is really spread out.

SHHHHHHH, don't tell anyone. You'll ruin it.

You just ruined them. ;)

http://regionals.burningman.org/

The map in that would probably overlay nicely with a global wealth map:

https://cdn.credit-suisse.com/articles/news-and-expertise/20...

> many are not ruined yet.

From my "recently having read the article but never have been to burning man" mind, that makes it sound like it's just not succeeding.

So what you're telling me is next year, regional burns ruined burning man.

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