Unhelpful

For many years, I’ve had the idea in the back of my head that I need to experience Burning Man. As it turns out, I never made the time when I had the money, and never had the money when I could make the time.

The whole energy of the experience was, from my third-hand information, was very non-commercial, authentic, extreme.

This year, Burning Man came and went before I realized it, even though last year I swore to myself I’d investigate the option of going in 2004. While talking to a friend about my irritation at having let another one slip by under the radar, he said a word that had never been part of the Burning Man experience I’d read about many years ago, or since, though admittedly, I hadn’t researched the matter thoroughly: “tickets”.

Tickets? This was an event which commercialism was left by the wayside, and during which it wasn’t socially acceptable to use money, which is to say it was an informal gift economy.

Tickets. Sure. Maybe we have some regulatory scheme in play that Burning Man is subject to as a matter of public safety. Yeah, maybe that’s it. You have to deal with land use issues, have a certain amount of emergency personnel infrastructure, and the county probably wants a cut. Right.

Tickets! Not just tickets, but $150 a year in advance to a mind-numbing $350 at the door if you show up without one. And yes, that’s per person. The official site itself plays the cost up, unashamedly, this way:

How much are tickets at the gate?
Are you sitting down? Please do so. TICKETS AT THE GATE WILL START OUT AT $350.00 (Yes, that is three hundred and fifty dollars).

So it’s a radically commercialism-free zone gift economy where the first gift constitutes a car payment to the organizer.

Clearly, this was not the Burning Man festival I read about so interestedly in the pages of Mondo 2000 magazine back in the days where it was even money on M2000 and Wired as to which would out-last the other (one could make the argument that M2000 won the bet, as Wired went from being a literate, socially aware counter-culture magazine to the “style” section of the Wall Street Journal in a heart-achingly brief period of time).

Reading the site further, this “radical” experiment in non-consumer collaboration also has gotten into the business of, well, selling things. Admittedly, it’s not official merchandise, t-shirts, and chintzy tourist programme - it started with ice. Now it’s ice and beverages. Ice, beverages, and of course, tickets that follow the airline pricing model of “screw the people who decide at the last minute” which may be a successful ticketing model, if not a terribly ethical one.

An argument can be made that doing this event costs money, which is certainly true. If commerce is so anathema to the feel, however, shouldn’t services be scaled back? Is it worse to have an official merchandise vendor than to utterly gouge people at the gate? Is it worse to tastefully restrict vending to specific locales and to tax accordingly than to turn an honest experience into yet another commodity?

I wanted to do this when it was being billed as an experiment in community and had a survivalist, libertine bent to it. Now it just seems like a tour package and an experiment in byzantine rationalization. If I’m going to pay $350 plus travel expenses for anything, I’ll be damned if it’s going to be for something falsely billing itself as a non-commercial event. In Nevada, no less.

At least I can stop feeling like I’ve missed something.