Burning Man is happening right now and it’s hard to not feel a wee bit of FOMO about not being there, especially when people are posting photos of incredible art in the dust.

It’s a pretty magical place really. It’s one of the only places on earth where you could have a story about (e.g. following a musical dragon and then meeting three taking mice underneath a five story flower covered in clowns while watching a building burn down in the distance), tell it, and have nobody think that you’re crazy.

But for all of the things that are absolutely mind-blowing about the Burn, it’s easy to forget some of the things that can be very un-fun about being on playa. So in order to help me feel a little less nostalgic, here are the top 5 things I definitely don’t miss about being in the dust right now.

1. The Environmental Impact

Burning Man is a “leave no trace,” event, which means that you pack out everything you bring in and try to be as conscientious as possible. But let’s be honest, Burning Man is not an eco-friendly event. Getting to the event means a whole lot of either driving or flying, and people come in from all around the globe.

On top of that you’re heading out to one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet and that means you have to bring EVERYTHING with you. And I mean everything. Food, water, shelter, equipment, amenities, art, etc. Then you have to run a whole lot of generator power to get the whole thing to go. Enough for 80,000 people. No matter how conscientious you are, there is nothing environmental about it.

Then there’s the fire art and all of the art that we burn. While most of the incredible fire art teams I know do their best to offset their carbon footprint (and god damn is their art worth it), lets face it, fire art, fire pits, and burning dozens of structures, while incredible, just ain’t great for the Earth.

2. Before you Get There

The amount of work it takes to actually make it to playa is pretty unbelievable. Just planning for survival in the desert is no small chore, but throw on top of it big art and theme camps, and prep work can take months. Organizing camp mates and infrastructure is a huge job. Then it all gets packed into a truck or shipping container and has to make it there.

For me, I’m generally driving my stuff from either Montreal or New York, a drive of about 3-5 days, no small task. By the time you get to Nevada you’re already a little depleted and you still have to do all the final runs for everything you need once you get there.

And then, THE LINEUP. I’ve always done early arrival, so I’ve never seen the horror stories that some people describe. But regardless there’s still at least a several hours wait in the hot sun in a lineup. Baking in a tin can with no shelter and nowhere to go. You can make it as fun as possible and meet your neighbours, but two of my pet peeves are lineups and waiting, and it’s something I will not miss this year.

3. Emotional Melt Downs

The Burn is a very intense type of peak experience. It has some of the most amazing things you will ever see in your life, but it can also be incredibly overwhelming. There are flashing lights and constant sound and harsh weather and so many people and and all of it never, ever stops.

Because of this it is guaranteed that at some point in the week you will have to field your own or someone else’s complete and total break down. If you’re lucky and you and your camp mates are good at handling emotions, then this means that it could just be feeling super sensitive and needing to take some alone time and have a little cry at some point. But I’ve seen everything from screaming and yelling, to people breaking other people’s stuff, to full camp feuds.

4. Playa Dust Corroding Your Skin

Playa dust is this very strange basic substance that is extremely fine and gets in EVERYWHERE and is corrosive to skin. In all my travels around the globe I’ve never encountered anything as particular as playa dust.

While you do your best to manage it (I wear gloves and boots everywhere I go, and rinse by skin with lemon water when I get back to my camp), it still affects all the soft skin on your body. By the end of a couple weeks my cuticles are always torn ribbons, the inside of by nose is more raw than if I’d have a cold for the last month, and my hair feels like I’ve bleached it 5 times.

5. Tear Down Days

It doesn’t matter how much of a badass you are, by the end of a week or two on playa you’re pretty exhausted. But the work isn’t over yet. You still have to do the job of tearing down your camp and repacking your trucks. Inevitably someone in your camp has heat stroke, and at least two people haven’t shown up to help because they’re still out partying and forgot. Everyone is grumpy because they had to wake up early and it’s hot and the work is hard. The likelihood of a couple of people getting into a conflict is extremely high and all the while you have to try to think clearly and efficiently and get this whole dusty mess back into the truck and be able to close the door.

By the time you’re finished you still have to drive the several hours back to Reno. And if you’re one of the percentage of vehicles on the way out who has an accident or equipment failure (like we were two years ago), you’re looking at another bunch of hours to in a harsh environment without your shelter.

So Why Do We Go?

When trying to describe Burning Man to people who haven’t been, it’s pretty hard to capture the sheer awesomeness that is this experience. While all of these things I just described are so very hard, it’s almost like all of these trials break you down to a point where you’re truly permeable and available to be effected by this magical environment. And in that way you can fully experience the things that I truly love about the Burn.

1. The Community

The type of people who are drawn to these types of environments are some of the most interesting in the world. It takes a special type of person to be able to go build in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

Right now I have friends on playa who have giant domes and art on fire, others who are driving around massive steel art cars, friends who’ve built unbelievable projects and shelters, friends who are in mind blowing costumes, and friends who are creating incredible experiences. And those are just some of the people I know. Because at any moment on playa you can also meet people who will blow you out of the water. Architects, artists, musicians, performers, costumers, engineers, builders, the list goes on and on. Some of the world’s most beautiful and creative minds flock to this flat piece of earth for a week or two. Every conversation you have with a stranger could have the capacity to change your life, even if it’s just to move or entertain you. It creates this feeling of potential unlike anywhere I’ve ever been.

2. The Land

While it may seem strange to want to go to a place where you could actually die and where what the ground is made of literally degrades your body, the power of this land is unchallenged. There’s a reason the aboriginals of this area hold this land as sacred.

There is something to be said for being reminded that the Earth is just so much more powerful than your tiny little human body. All it takes is one little dust storm to have you standing in awe and reminding you of your place in the chain of things. No to mention that it’s just plain BEAUTIFUL. The way that the light bounces of the ground and through the dust, the way the sun lowers itself behind the mountains, the view across a land so flat it seems fake. All of these things have made my cry with their beauty.

3. The Art

I once tried to describe Burning Man to a few of the professors in my Masters Program, but they just couldn’t wrap their heads around how a few art pieces shown outside could be significant to the artist community in any way. What I wasn't able to convey to them was the sheer scale and caliber of the type of artwork people bring to playa.

Hands down, the most moving and influential art I’ve ever encountered in my life have been at Burning Man. It is a place where people come to build large and fully experiment. It’s a place where artists don’t have to censor what they want to say in order to appease galleries or clients. And because of that the art can be powerful, shocking and profound.

On top of that there is just so much work brought to show. Artists from around the globe come to display here. There are hundreds of registered works and hundreds more unregistered ones. No matter who you are or what you’re into, you’ll be able to find something that blows you away.

 It is so worth the trip just to see what's going on in the cutting edge of art right now. 

This year I’m really glad that I put my energy into things other than Burning Man. It’s been a really intense year, with a couple new trajectories in my life and art practice that have needed my attention. So, while I’m glad that I’m not in the dust right now, you can be sure that I’ll be back!

Cultural appropriation has been a major buzzword of the last couple years, and with good reason. Images of drunk white people in sacred native headgear, horribly butchered tribal tattoos and racist Halloween costumes. These images often make people who desire to be conscious feel ashamed and nervous about engaging with any sort of imagery or practice that isn’t from their exact bloodline. People desire to be respectful and because the term “cultural appropriation,” is ambiguous and confusing it tends to mean people shut down to participating in any cultural space other than their own.

But the PC behaviour of not touching other cultural space is in of itself problematic. The more we segregate from each other the greater the divide becomes between us. Less understanding and shared problem solving leads to higher instances of ethnocentrism, racism, segregation and misunderstanding.

Right now we are at a new height in knowledge exchange and capacity. With this new era of interconnectivity, shutting down to an exploration of what other cultures can teach us means losing a massive amount of learning and expansion. Our world is also in a state of environmental crisis. Having various Indigenous knowledges permeate the greater cultural sphere could help provide some necessary perspective and solutions.

Cutting out sharing culture also just lessens the beautiful diversity of the world around us. How bland would it be to only be able to eat the food that your specific ancestors cooked? How horrible would American music be today without the incredible influences Black culture brought to the scene? Without integration of cultural influences, how boring would our clothes be, how sad our spiritual practices, how lost would indigenous knowledge get, how lame would our holidays be, how limiting would be our world view?

But in order to be able to share culture respectfully, we need to understand this very confusing term of “cultural appropriation.” What it is really? What are the behaviours that are damaging, what are the behaviours that are healthy, and how can we do our best to navigate it respectfully?

Why Real Cultural Appropriation Sucks

"First they came to take our land and water, then our fish and game. ...Now they want our religions as well. All of a sudden, we have a lot of unscrupulous idiots running around saying they're medicine people. And they'll sell you a sweat lodge ceremony for fifty bucks. It's not only wrong, its obscene. Indians don't sell their spirituality to anybody, for any price. This is just another in a very long series of thefts from Indian people and, in some ways, this is the worst one yet." -Janet McCloud, Tulalip elder and fishing rights activist.

Unhealthy appropriation/ exploitation occurs when people outside of a specific cultural space can make money or gain social capital from artifacts or cultural ideas, when people who are in that community cannot. This is a complex idea, but the basis of it comes down to a power dynamic.

A good anecdote to describe this was the New Age movement in the 80s, where Native American spirituality was suddenly seen by the white population as something to be desired. There was a large disconnect between the perceived “Native American spirituality” and what was actually happening in the lives of people in that cultural group. It perpetuated the stereotype of the “noble Native,” sharing spiritual wisdom with the white man, all the while these New Agers had no real understanding of Native people and no touchstone with their actual struggle for survival. What occurred was a huge movement of people and companies selling and profiting off of distorted “Native American “spiritual artifacts.

At the same time that Westerners were profiting off of these objects, there were still laws all across North America that BANNED Native Americans from even owning their own artifacts, let alone selling them. We were deep in the governmental process of trying to forcefully assimilate Indigenous people to a Western way of life, and denying them any right to language, land, communities and spiritual artifacts was part of that horrific process. This transcends to today where the largest producer of “aboriginal” artifacts is China, while a large number of Native populations are still impoverished and can’t make money off of their art or artifacts. This is what super messed up harmful appropriation looks like. It is not okay.

What is Cultural Appropriation Really?

Cultural appropriation is defined as the “taking,” from a culture that’s not one’s own, of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge. But the terms “culture,” and “taking,” are completely indeterminate, so even this definition alone can’t really define the boundaries of where cultural appropriation begins and ends. This definition bristles with uncertainty, which is why it’s so confusing.

If we’re talking about taking from a culture that’s not one’s own, that means that the line of culture needs to be well defined. But culture is one of those things that’s extremely fluid. Defining the parameters of where a cultural group begins or ends is complicated, as is connecting a particular practice to that one group. Also, since cultural practices are formed from a bunch of influences and shared histories, it becomes difficult to assign them to one group or another. This means that the lines of where “culture,” begins and ends are convoluted at best.

But let’s simplify it and make it personal. Let’s say that each human being can roughly define the type of ideas and practices you grew up with, and that everything outside of that is another cultural space. How do we engage with those spaces in a healthy way that’s not damaging so that we can grow and expand our ideas of the world?

Culture theorist Richard A. Rogers places appropriation into 4 categories: dominance, exploitation, exchange and transculturation. Two of these practices are damaging, and two of these practices are healthy.

Dominance is the practice of desiring power over another, while exploitation is treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work. Both of these actions can be seen in the example of Native spirituality being commodified.

On the flip side, exchange is the act of giving and receiving where both parties benefit equally. Transculturation is defined as, “seeing oneself in the other.” It doesn’t mean acquiring another culture (acculturation) or of losing or uprooting a previous culture (deculturation). Instead, it takes multiple spaces of cultural phenomena and merges them into something new that benefits both cultural spaces.

So How Do We Apply This?

Let’s simplify an example around what this means. Let’s pretend that someone physically smaller and weaker than you has something you want. You have four options.

-You could physically make that person afraid of you by yelling or force until they give you that object. 

-You could just take that object. 

-You could trade them for that object with something of equal value. 

-Or you could connect with that person, start a relationship where you benefit their lives and they benefit yours, and in that process the object becomes shared property because it benefits everyone.

For me, the last option feels far and the way the best, and it feels the best for the reason that it’s focused on the RELATIONSHIP. We we stop focusing on the world around us for what we can get from it, and instead we desire to make real connections and contribute, the conversation around cultural appropriation becomes a whole lot simpler.

Is there something from a space that you didn’t grow up with that you’d like to have as a part of your life? Instead of just ignoring it or feeling ashamed that you want to engage with it in the first place, or just taking it and using it however you want, why not find other humans who did grow up with it and get them to teach you about it? See what you can give them back that actually benefits them, whether its something from your life experience, another object, money, time or friendship. Be humble. Be willing to learn.

When we do this we actually begin to expand the understanding and skill set available to us as humans. We also get to learn new skills and practices that start to benefit everyone and help heal the world around us. The more we respectfully share ideas, with humility and a desire to make the world a better place, the better everything becomes.

Try Your Best and Don’t Be a Dick

Yes, the ideas of culture and appropriation may be very complex and convoluted. But whether we’re dealing with culture or just our daily lives, it can all be whittled down to something very simple- Don’t be a dick. 

If you don’t know about something, ask someone who does. Be kind, present, and willing to learn. And instead of asking what you can get out of a situation, why not approach it with how you can contribute to the world around you?

Want to read more? Check out the resources this article came from-

From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation

Borrowed power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation

Wanting to be Indian: When Spiritual searching turns into cultural theft.

New Age Commodification and Appropriation of Spirituality

Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality

I’m part of a community of people who call themselves Burners, a group of individuals that attend and participate in Burning Man and related events. This is an article written specifically to that community and may not relate to others, as it’s about one of the 10 Principles that Burners follow as an ethos. 

The 10 Principles are a set of guidelines that are in place to help the community stay sustainable and ethical in its practice. The intentions of them are noble and I fully stand behind them, but today I want to discuss the specific principle of decommodification and how it’s practiced.

Our current world is flooded with commercialism. Ad Campaigns, influencers, big business and a constant message to buy more stuff. The principle of decommodification had the explicit purpose to keep that message off the playa and create a more sacred space where we could shape our own identity.

On the playa (or other regionals), you’ll find no sponsorships, corporate branding, or exchanging of money. Everything that is brought is a gift once it’s on site. This helps change our social practice from transactional to pure unattached interaction, an experience we’re not able to have almost anywhere else in our lives.

As stated by Larry Harvey in 2004, “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”

This is an INCREDIBLE goal, one that I fully and completely stand behind as a principle. Unfortunately as a practice I’m watching it be more damaging to parts of our community than it’s intended to be, and that’s what I want to address.

Photo by Owen Wiltshire

To understand where I’m coming from you have to understand a little bit about me. My full-time job is as a professional artist and I’ve been working with the Burner community and others like it for well over 15 years. I am extremely passionate about this community. One of my life passions is to help create solutions specific to this community, as well as bringing the spirit of this culture into the world on a daily basis. Because of this, I’ve headed several organizations and initiatives, some of which have turned into sustainable businesses in the default world. 

One of the businesses I’ve been a managing partner in for the last five years is a company called Archimedes Design. Archimedes was started by my two business partners who had been on the playa for many years running a theme camp. They wanted to see if they could build better structures that would go up faster and offer more shelter specific to the playa environment.

By the time I joined them we resolved a dome design that solved for a bunch of problems. A 26’ dome that could go up in under 30 minutes, pack down smaller than the trunk of your car, parts that could be switched out and fixed so you never had to throw your gear away, fabric that could be easily switched out for art and designs, all that offered you ideal shelter in the desert.

It was something made by Burners, for Burners, and we were in love with the solution we’d come up with. We wanted to make it sustainable to create so we made it into a business where we listed the product as cheap as possible, made all the parts ourselves by hand, made the plans open-source, and we were willing to teach and work with anyone who was interested. But of course, we still had to have a price tag on it. Materials aren’t free (although quite frankly, we completely donated our time for about the first two years). We were passionate about sharing this and just wanted to get it out there.

But then we faced our first dilemma- how do we talk about this solution with a bunch of other people who don’t want to talk about it? This created my first real experience with the problems of decommodification.

Because we didn’t want to step on the toes of this specific principle, we were very careful about how we handled talking about this product. For the first couple of years we were only doing word of mouth, handing out cards to specific people who asked, etc. And yet the backlash to us handling it in this way was still HUGE. On average I would say about 2 out of 10 people would inform us that we shouldn’t “profit,” off of Burning Man (and let’s be clear, we weren’t even breaking even for the first while).

I have had random people chew me out when they watched me handing a business card to a stranger and they weren’t even part of that interaction. I have had my skin torn off on forums for even mentioning that I sell a product that could solve the problem in question. I have gotten emails from strangers who’ve seen photos of the domes in the desert and have chewed me out for using the playa as a background to sell my stuff. 

It got so bad that by year three of the company we stopped selling to Burners entirely. We stopped giving Burner discounts, we stopped making it open source and we stopped trying to have any conversation whatsoever about selling these domes in that community. We completely switched markets because of the aggression our own community showed us over trying to make a sustainable solution that was literally built for the playa.

This, unfortunately, is an experience I and others like me have had again and again. I meant to write this article last year when I saw a forum explosion about how the Burner artists in the Smithsonian were becoming too commercial. I meant to write it this spring when the Manish Arora show was verbally hacked to pieces by the local community because it showed at Paris fashion week.

But I’m writing this today because yesterday my link to my new clothing line got posted in response to a specific question about it on a Burner Facebook group, and I immediately got an email and two Facebook messages informing me that I was breaching the decommodification principle.

So let’s break down this principle and how we use it because I think that the way we are currently applying it does more damage than good to our actual community.

Photo by Michael Holden

Let’s look again at Larry Harvey’s quote. In it, he talks about protecting our culture from exploitation and focusing on participation rather than consumption. Those are two excellent points I’d like to break down. 

Protecting our culture from exploitation 

I actually wrote my Master’s thesis on transculturation vs. cultural appropriation/ exploitation and one of the things I learned was this- Unhealthy appropriation/ exploitation occurs when people outside of a specific cultural space can make money or gain social capital from artifacts or cultural ideas when people who are in that community cannot. This is a complex idea, but the basis of it comes down to a power dynamic.

A good anecdote to describe this was the New Age movement in the 80s, where Native American spirituality was suddenly seen by the white population as something to be desired. What occurred was a huge movement of people and companies selling and profiting off of Native American spiritual artifacts.

At the same time, this was happening there were still laws all across North America that banned Native Americans from even owning their own artifacts, let alone selling them. This transcends to today where the largest producer of “aboriginal” artifacts is China, while a large number of Native populations are still impoverished and can’t make money off of their art or artifacts. This is what harmful appropriation looks like.

So if you translate that to our space we can use the example of companies or influencers who are not a part of and don’t contribute to the community. Exploitation happens when they come in and use images of that space in order to sell product, while (and here’s the key component) the actual artists and designers who exist as a part of that environment cannot.

So, if we’re harassing our own community members who are trying to make a sustainable space from their practice, we are actually contributing to an unhealthy power dynamic that keeps our own community impoverished.

The balance of power is shifted however when actual community members begin to make their contributions to the world sustainable. Interactions where community members can intake money as a resource, which then can get put back into the community, closes the loop, and retains power in the culture. Then, instead of members having to work for corporations and companies that are of a different ethos in order to fund their “gifted art habit,” the member can instead start to contribute to their community and the attached culture full time.

Participation rather than consumption

Participation is part of a complex eco-system that takes a lot to sustain it. There has to be a framework built that meets our basic needs as well as creating all of the art and happenings that we can engage and interact with. The art, theme camps, events, gifts, etc, are what make the Burn such a magical place, but we need to be clear about one thing- creating all of that takes a lot of STUFF. (Extra reading about Burning Man and Capitalism)

While we’re on playa we like to forget about all of the objects we had to buy to get there, and I fully approve of creating a Temporary Autonomous Zone where we can imagine living in a transaction-free environment. I agree wholeheartedly that there should be no sponsorships or logos and that space be made a pure as we can make it. But let’s talk honestly about the before and after.

When I go to the Burn, my standard cheapest possible budget is about $1500. This is just my personal budget and doesn’t include any of the art or structures I build. So let’s say that part of that is travel, tickets, and food and that about one-third of that is buying things I need/ want to survive on the playa. So let’s say I spend $500 on goods. Tents, water containers, gear, clothing, etc. This is an extremely conservative number compared to a large majority of people I know who attend.

So at this basic smallest number of $500, let’s multiply that by the 80,000 people on-playa yearly (not even counting regionals) and we suddenly have 40 million dollars spent on products just for Burn week. That is an unbelievably large amount of buying power.

Now, let me ask you this- how many of you shopped at places like Walmart or at any other large scale company with horrific values and sweat-shop labor and predatory business practices? How many of your costumes came from online shopping and cheap labor in Asia? How many of you bought one-time use goods for your Burn that you threw away immediately after?

So if we honestly want to talk about consuming less so that we can bring Burner values into the real world, let’s talk about how much we are voting with our dollar. When we spend money at these places we buy cheaper goods, which means we have to buy them more often. When we spend money at these places we are devaluing people from around the world who work in horrific working conditions to give us an abundance of cheap crap. When we shop at these places we are giving power to companies who are profiting off of our culture, rather than making our own cultural economy sustainable.

The markup prices for most big business is anywhere from 70-90%, whereas the markup price for most art is generally 10-20% That means that when you buy a product from a corporation, a tiny percentage is actually going to the people that made it, the rest is pure profit to the corp. When you buy from an artist or designer, the majority of the cost goes directly to the labor that’s creating it, and if there’s any profit, more often than not it gets put back into the art process. The economics of art-making are actually incredible, and one of the only models that keep the majority of the money circulating within the community. This is how community models can be made sustainable.

On top of that, when people spend more money on objects that they find really special, they tend to buy fewer things. They tend to use those special pieces year after year instead of throwing them away or replacing them. For me, this is the best-case scenario, and the only one that truly embodies how I feel about the values of decommodification and anti-consumption.

So, before you rag on someone who posts a link to their latest project on Facebook, maybe ask yourself these three simple questions- 

1. Is that person from and contributing to our community?

If this is a person who has been shaped by and has helped shape our culture, then they have a right their personal ideas that have come from their engagement with that cultural shape. If these are people whose ethics are in check and truly just desire to make their ideas and art sustainable, maybe try supporting them instead of making their life harder.

2. Are they disseminating their ideas in a respectful and content appropriate way?

No one likes spam and I think it's essential that we address when people are pushing something without actually contributing to a conversation. But if someone on a Burner page asks, “Hey, I want to buy from some local designers, any suggestions?” then I shouldn’t get flack when I respond with mine and my other designer friends websites.

3. Is it ethical?

If the way this person is producing art or products is harmful to people, the community or the environment, then we also shouldn’t be helping support the dissemination of their products.

I want to be very clear that being a full-time artist is in no way a lucrative career. It is an extremely hard path and not for the faint of heart. It is what I do because I am so committed to bringing the values of art and community into the world at large. I want the culture I love about Burning Man to exist year round and everywhere. I would absolutely give away everything I made for free (and often do) if I could do that and still eat. In fact I price my stuff way cheaper than I actually should because I’m committed to trying to make it available to as many people as possible. 

What I want is to feel supported and cared for by my community in my goal of making art more available to the world. In order to make that sustainable, I have to sell some of it. When people make me feel bad about selling my stuff then I have less energy to make art and contribute to my community. When this community attacks me for trying to make my art practice sustainable, it makes me feel like I should take my art and go play with people who are actually exited about what I do. In my mind this is exactly the opposite of what a community should do for each other. We should be encouraging each other in our endeavours and our expressions so that we can continue to grow and thrive together.