The Amazing Bureaucracy of Burning Man

citylab.com

50 points·iamjeff··6 comments

A good deal of attendees are socialists at heart. They tend to enjoy bureaucracy if it's presented as coming from and benefiting the people. They call the place "home" and the bureaucrat fills the role of a loving parent that actually cares.

This comment is brilliantly concise, in my opinion.

Please explain how Burning Man attendees are "socialist" because they go to an event with rules

Burning Man is bureaucratic because it is big. If it were smaller it could be more casual about all sorts of things. No one cares if one person poops in the wilderness. But 50,000 people doing it is rather a different matter.

That said, I'm a bit surprised that people who make a big deal about independence and thinking different put up with the bureaucracy, whether necessary or not. You'd think they would prefer smaller gatherings that don't need all that formal process.

Since BM reached 50k people, the majority of the people coming aren't the same people as those who started it, generally. It's become much more expansive, for better or for worse, and that means that far fewer of those 50k people than before have the strong ideological bents that earlier folk did.

And that's ok, sometimes you just want to party in the desert.

TLDR: East coast academic goes to burning man without doing any research and discovers the concept of MOOP and that Burning Man is not a lawless Madmax event where anything goes.

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