I wish someone would expand this comment into a full-length study on the evolution of regulations and infrastructure within Burning Man. It's a really interesting topic.
My friends who went in the late 90s recounted shooting at propane tanks from moving vehicles and having to camp inside of a ring of parked cars to protect your camp (from vehicular traffic)
After 2000 you had to show some decent design (not just a golf cart with dingleberries) and that was about it, they passed our moon car and shark van without much question, and the shark van was a giant sharp thing without lights.
Others will have to fill in the regs now, I understand things have gotten progressively more rigorous.
My understanding is that anything built on the playa, including the art (eg. temple of gravity) has an engineer's stamp just like would in Reno. Or just a bit more dusty.
I'd love to read a history of it, but it won't be me. I haven't been in years, and it has changed profoundly since my first visit in 2000.
https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/
Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.
This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.
It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative.
When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.
So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at.
> At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world
That's a big presumption.
1.) You cant take a single factor out of multi factoral decision and claim it is "revealed preference". It might be "cost they have to pay for something else".
2.) You cant assume they had ability to predict the future when they joined the community.
3.) You cant assume they have a place to go to now.
4.) You cant ignore women who in fact left those communities.
5.) You cant ignore majority of the women who in face did not joined the community.
And the same thing applies to men btw. You cant just claim that a suboptimal situation in which a man stayed is somehow revealed preference of males.
[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/585886.This_Is_Burnin...