Comment by gosub100

18 hours ago

> I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though,

I know. Use the $600/person or whatever cost is now to have trash service out there. Ever think of that?

13 comments

gosub100

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donkers  17 hours ago

Yes, and it kinda defeats the purpose. The event is in large part about personal responsibility and accountability. Adding trash service out there would make it even easier for people to bring more than they need, consume more, leave shit everywhere, etc. And that money is already used for existing services and the BLM permit paid to the government, it's not like it's just sitting there ready to be spent on trash services. And at that point, increasing ticket prices makes it more inaccessible to people, and then cue the complaints that it's an event for such-and-such rich people blah blah whatever.

  • komali2  11 hours ago

    This is the fundamental contradiction of Burning Man values, and I admit to obnoxiously pursuing it around the fire these past three burns now.

    Burning Man is a community and society, and often pitches itself that way, and attendees come away feeling that way - they're "Burners," any city in the world they go to they can probably find other Burners they've never met and hang out, and to truly understand the Burn you really just have to attend.

    But the values, and event, and many attendees, reject this fact with the "radical self reliance" value. People try to work around it by doing Theme camps - tribes within a tribe. Oh you're self reliant all right, you and the rest of your suburb with whom you organized to bring water and toilet paper. But no no no, that line stops at the edge of your camp, beyond that lies only community WITHOUT responsibility.

    In reality there is no community without responsibility. MOOP blows around. Your sound affects other people. And if someone is suffering from thirst or hunger at the Burn, you absolutely have a responsibility to them as a member of your community to share food and water.

    This radical self reliance thing just shifts the burden of managing people to the theme camp level, without any guarantee that any given theme camp is actually itself a good member of the community (other than processes that take a while e.g. the MOOP map).

    The Burn is big but so are towns. There's already infrastructure for sewage, there should be as well for trash, and imo food and shelter as well. That doesn't require violating any of the principles, and a form of "radical self reliance" can be maintained through "radical participation" wherein people can identify a problem they want to resolve about the Burn and resolve it, or organize a working group or syndic to do so.

    • donkers  11 hours ago

      The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?

      If you turn the event into a giant plug and play (if the org is providing food and shelter and trash and everything else), you've just created some variant of Coachella instead, and I sure as hell don't want that. The difficulty is part of the point and what makes it so worthwhile, the kind of people who self-select into doing all that work are people I want to be around. It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.

      3 replies →

pdntspa  16 hours ago

You might want to familiarize yourself with the ten principles. Trash service would undermine some of those tenets

  • gosub100  14 hours ago

    I don't need to do that. I already see the scam. Socialize the waste and privatize the profit. The mask was blown off years ago.

    • komali2  11 hours ago

      You're right minus the profits, nobody's really making any money off the Burn except maybe fancy RV rental places or whatever.