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Emily and I survived our brief trip into the chaos of Burning Man, mind and bodies mostly intact. I’ve attended 7 of the last 10 years but still find compelling reasons to endure it all over again, old friends being at the top of the list.

I took more drugs than photos (just kidding) but you can see a few pics I’ve uploaded here. A far more entertaining and comprehensive look at this year’s gargantuan event for the curious can be found in this report I stumbled across by Marc Merlin who had the enviable luxury of arriving by plane.

Several people have asked me recently (before, during, and after my trip) if Burning Man has become “too big”. The answer is yes (population 45,000+). On a very practical level the density of the crowd makes it challenging to keep any cohesion to your adventuring posse. Turn your head for one second, become momentarily hypnotized by something shiny or blinky and suddenly you find yourself separated from your group, wandering among a crowd of people all similarly struggling to navigate the chaos. Your odds then of re-joining with your pals are slim and not worth much effort. Lacking any technological fix like cell phones, SMS, twitter - heck, even FRS radios no longer work well - one has to make the stark decision between aggressive insularity (vigilant cat-herding or handcuffing yourself to your friends), or flying solo into the storm. This can take on a certain additional gravity when mind altering substances enter the mix.

Now mind you this is not the worst thing in the world, and for some this state of affairs is probably appealing. After all, one goes to Burning Man with at least a certain amount of slack in the tether to the ordinary world if not cutting the tether altogether. Commiserating with strangers, falling through trapdoors, questing for some deeply personal and ineffable utopian trace or maybe just a clean port-a-potty are all worthwhile Black Rock City activities. But the diminishing middle ground between being lost and locking arms with comrades presents a daily/nightly conundrum that was less of an issue when the odds of bumping into the people you hoped to see still ran high.

Which is to say that I wish I’d had more time to catch up with many of my campmates - some of them old and dear friends who I rarely get to see. Many friends and acquaintances who weren’t camped nearby I never crossed paths with even once. The most meaningful moments that I did manage to share with friends felt like they were stolen from the swarm that always threatened to sweep us all away. Perhaps other people have better degrees of luck negotiating this (or slower-moving friends), but its clearly a different ballgame today than it was when the population was much smaller.

On a more abstract level, the growing scale of the event has a bounding effect on the zeitgeist. In years past, each new leap in scale promised to deliver some novel emergent character to the event, the truer “theme” revealing itself from a collective meta-improvisation. Now the combination of familiarity and, I think subtly but more insidiously, the homogenizing effect of everyone’s similar adaptive strategies to the increased scale make the emergent character more predictable. You can set your watch by it. Stunts like this griefer who lit the man early register as barely a nuisance against the unstoppable flow of the event toward its signature chaotic equilibrium.

That said, we are already talking about possibly going next year, coming up with strategies for better navigation of the maelstrom and concocting harebrained art projects. Next year’s silly, controversial (though ultimately probably irrelevant) official “theme” has been announced: American Dream. Laughing Squid has the details and much entertaining commentary from his readers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 1:16 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.