Well, having painted for you a rather dismal picture of what became wrong with our world, let me now return to the gift economy of Burning Man and Black Rock City. Gifts are very good conductors of social capital. Let me illustrate. If I give you a gift, this represents a personal gesture. It is a bonding experience, unlike buying something from someone, where the great convenience is that we aren’t connected. In a market transaction people who are party to it feel no further sense of human obligation. But interactions based on gifting operate quite differently. In the words of Lewis Hyde, who wrote a wonderful book called The Gift, “When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.” What he’s saying is that in a gift economy everybody begins to feel like they belong to one another. Value passes from person to person, from heart to heart. To put this another way, gifts are bearers of being. Think about a gift that you loved giving. Didn’t it feel as though it already belonged to the person you gave it to? Didn’t it feel as if it was just flowing through you?
Black Rock City is devoted to the giving of all sorts of things, the sharing of survival resources, interactive artwork, and our public service roles. The whole tissue of our city is one vast gift. If you look at our budget it amounted to five million dollars in 2001. But if you want to understand what makes our city come alive as a civic entity, then look at the gifts that all our people give to us. It would run into the millions. I cannot begin to estimate it. We’ve actually created much of our civic infrastructure out of gifts. Volunteers greet every person who comes into our city, they police the environment, and they light the lamps that illuminate Black Rock City.
But I particularly want to call attention to a special kind of gift we call a theme camp, because it best illustrates the gift-giving process. This begins with what we call radical self-expression. We ask participants to commune with themselves and to regard their own reality, that essential inner portion of experience that makes them feel real, as if it were a vision or a gift, and then project this vision out onto the world. Now artists have been doing that for a long time. And it is an almost irresistible impulse out there in the Black Rock Desert because the environment is a blank slate. You can project your inner vision out onto the world as if you were projecting a movie. That is what makes radical self-expression so radical.
Along with radical self-expression comes radical self-reliance. Most of our citizens pool survival resources—they have to. They must prepare to survive in really drastic wilderness conditions: one-hundred-degree temperatures, hundred-mile-an-hour winds. And what tends to happen is that people respond communally. They form organized groups and someone says you bring the shelter, you bring the food, you bring the boa feathers, and we’ll survive together. And we didn’t tell them to do this. They realized that they had to form bonding social capital in order to survive. That’s how cultures developed originally, you know. They developed an ethos and a sense of belonging because people had to share resources and struggle to survive together in the world not like the economy of convenience that we live in today.
Now we don’t dictate the content of radical self-expression in the theme camps, but we create the societal vessel that helps to contain this creative, interactive, utterly uncontrollable process. We’ve created a few simple rules. We’ve said a theme camp must function as a public environment that is accessible to other people whom one doesn’t know, and that it must result in some kind of social interaction. I don’t know if you notice what I’m saying here, but that’s bonding social capital turning into bridging social capital.
Before I go further, let me describe a theme camp because it’s hard to imagine in the abstract. I think my all-time-favorite theme camp, after all these years, is Camp Fink. I encountered Camp Fink by chance. I walked into a tent that looked like a seedy sportsman’s bar. There were crossed tennis racquets on the wall, and it had all these portraits of famous finks: Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy, and Richard Nixon—because he finked himself out. But here’s the interactive part. They had an ancient Corona typewriter out in front with an endless spool of paper, and they invited you to rat out on your friends. And you’d be surprised, it got really interactive, because everyone wanted to read what everybody else was saying!
In recent years, many of these theme camps have become increasingly ambitious—and that’s only a natural tendency because in a space with no physical limits your imagination grows larger and larger. A vision is not defined by the context of the world around it, but radiates reality outward: it starts to define the surrounding world. And people get these visions and end up incorporating two or three hundred people. Now all people are collaborating to produce a public service or an expressive theme of some kind. And they form large communal networks in which everyone is cooperating toward a common goal; this is what Putnam called bonding social capital.
But observe what we’ve done. We’ve told people: OK, you’ve got your tight little world of your mates and your friends, don’t close the circle. Leave it open so you can bridge out to a larger world, and, indeed, so you can feel the great world has the same sense of inner reality that you feel in yourself. And the shape of the entire city is like that. It’s planned as a huge semicircle with the Man at the geographic center and the streets radiating out. One time someone said, “Larry, why don’t you just close that circle?” and I said, “Good God, we’d go psychotic. Don’t close the circle!”
So, theme camps are essentially collective gifts, and this, in turn, begins to generate gift-giving networks. We’ve found that when people join together for the purpose of producing a gift whose scope extends beyond the limits of their little bonded world, it produces a kind of social convection current. The hotter the flame, the more oxygen it will suck in. And these networks suck in a whole lot of resources. They begin in simple ways—and no one plans this—let me make that clear. They just happen. For instance, someone in a camp knows someone else—a friend outside the group who possesses some needed resource—and soon this person is drawn into the circle. If he’s willing to give to the gift you don’t exclude him, you say come on in. That’s the principle of radical inclusivity we discovered many years ago.
As the greater gift imagined by the group begins to grow, this process starts to spread out through networks of acquaintance, connections multiply and a new kind of superabundant wealth appears. A metal grate abandoned in a basement becomes a dragon’s jaw, some ancient string of Christmas lights forgotten in the attic forms the perfect accent for its tail. Manifold resources stream in. It’s precisely the opposite of what happens in a capitalistic society where a struggle for scarce resources produces relentless competition. And this process can actually rival the capabilities of mass production. Social networks tend to grow on an organic principle. They expand exponentially.
Here’s an example of how we are growing. A group of New Yorkers, affiliated with the nonprofit organization SEAL, came to our event in 2001. Burning Man occurs over Labor Day, so that, of course means that when this group returned from Black Rock City in they encountered the events of September 11th. For days afterward a pall of dust and smoke drifted over the island of Manhattan as police manned emergency checkpoints all over the city. Now this group had lived communally at Burning Man. They had seen their bonding world become a bridging world and they responded to this public trauma in a unique way. They began to craft burn barrels. These are oil barrels into which we cut designs. These objects are beautiful—they look like jack-o’-lanterns—and serve as fireplaces that protect the desert surface. So this group put the word out to create a network of people to manufacture burn barrels. They donated several of these beautiful pieces to the New York City Police Department; now, emergency workers had a place to warm their hands during the long winter nights. As I say, the rate of return on social capital is a lot better than the rate of return on normal capital investment in the market world.
This is the good news. All ov
er this country, people are starting to organize. They’re starting to form networks and we’re helping them. We don’t dictate the content of radical self-expression. But we help people create the social circumstances that will sustain an ethos of gift giving. And I can tell you what’s going to happen next because I have watched Burning Man grow from two thousand to four thousand to eight thousand participants in the span of three years. In fact, it only stopped growing at this rate because we slowed it down. We didn’t want it to grow too fast. We took measures so that we could culturally assimilate people, so they wouldn’t just come looking for a party, so they’d realize that our ethos was about giving and not about consuming. We knew that they’d destroy us if we didn’t slow it down. But what this growth represents is a rate of natural increase; it’s how things grow in nature. And the next big story is that networks all over the country are about to rapidly expand in scope. There have now been burns in several states; we have regional contacts in every place except Mississippi. There’s even been a burn on a boat in the Baltic Sea and one in Antarctica.
This returns me to Richard Jefferies and his essay on the prodigality of nature and the niggardliness of man: “There is no ‘enough’ in nature. It is all one vast prodigality.” I believe that human culture—as distinct from the social institutions that surround it—is a pure phenomenon of nature. Social institutions have the power to protect it and sustain it, much as any vessel—a petri dish or ceramic pot—might help or hinder the growth of any living thing. But the innate vitality of culture belongs to the world of nature; it occurs spontaneously, it is without a plan, and when it is allowed to grow it has a power to affect our world in ways that dwarf our normal estimate of our resources.
I think that the essential lesson that we’ve learned is, in a way, very simple. People don’t have to go out into the world and create a great city. We’ve made our city as large and as civic as it is in order to create a sufficiently persuasive model of the world to show people how things could be. I still want it to grow larger, frankly. I mean it won’t be New York, but I want it to feel like a complete model of civilization so that people can go back home with the confidence that they can change the world and they can share that vision with other people and they can attach to it some transcendent principle. That is why the Man stands at the center of our city.
This process begins with radical self-expression: the feeling that your inmost vital self is real. But most people just don’t have the confidence anymore because they’re too isolated; they’re too passive. So it starts with this, I’ll call it “I Am.” And it proceeds, as in a theme camp, to a feeling that you are united with others, that you are linked in a bonded circle and together you can share the same experience through an act of giving. And I’ll call this, “We Are.” Finally there is the feeling that somewhere outside this circle there exists some greater gift that everyone is joined together by as they give to it, and I’ll call this “It Is.” And I have come to believe that whenever these feeling states can be strung together like pearls on a string, as if they were parts of one spontaneous gesture, you will then generate an ethos, a culture, that leads, in Jefferies’s words, to a “boundless shower of good things forever descending.”
Now I’ve told you things are getting a bit bleak in our world. We’re just so accustomed to this state of things that we don’t notice. But I don’t think I’ve told you just how bad they can get. So I’m going to tell you a story. It’s like A Christmas Carol. This is where the ghost says to Scrooge, “This is Christmas future.” I’m going to tell you about Christmas future. This is where we’re going.
Some time ago, I went to a dinner that was given for an artist friend who was leaving for a journey up a river into the jungle of New Guinea to confer with some tribal sculptors. And it was a lively party. It was a bunch of my more louche bohemian friends, and it was held in an Italian restaurant that I’d never been to. I was just given an address, and when I got there I was astonished, because it was located on the edge of San Francisco’ financial district. I mean all these high-rises and condos, and it was very apparent to me that this was a small family enterprise and that it had been there for years, and I wondered how the hell it had survived. There were family pictures on the walls, mementos, and we went downstairs through a narrow corridor to a special room that was obviously precious to them. It was decorated in primary colors and we were taken into the place of honor, and there was a big round table and on that round table was a giant lazy Susan. It felt really communal. It was so cool that everyone could share. And at the center of this thing, at the center of this communal circle, was this transcendent object. It was a bust of the Pope. In fact, they’d surrounded it with a big square Plexiglas cube, so it looked like a miniature Popemobile.
Now this is what I call a sympathetic bistro! The food was robust, the cuisine of southern Italy, and the waiters were to a one all very jolly. I love this kind of restaurant; I love family places. They brought in bottle after bottle of Chianti. And, of course, we were using this lazy Susan, so the bottles went round and round, and pretty soon the room was spinning round and round as we got drunker and drunker. As I say, these were bohemians and never noted for any inhibition, and they became increasingly rambunctious, and at a certain point one of the guests by the name of Kaos Kitty climbed up on the table and proceeded to do things to the head of the Pope that I really don’t want to describe to you—let’s call it radical self-expression.
This is, of course, the kind of scandalous story that’s often better in the telling, something you read about in a memoir of the lives of the artists. There was a lot of laughter, shocked looks from people in the adjoining room, and my friends, on the whole, were thrilled by their audacity. But I will confess to you tonight that I was inwardly chagrined. Think about it for a moment. Here we were in the bosom of this family place around the altar of their simply Catholic piety … desecrating it? And I left the restaurant that night feeling a pang of guilt and a flush of shame on my face, I really did. I thought about apologizing as I went out, but I was too ashamed, and for weeks afterward I was burdened by this feeling of guilt because I’d sat by … I’d laughed too.
Well, some months later my girlfriend and I were walking through the slushy streets of Minneapolis in the middle of a midwinter thaw. There was fog filling the air and we were looking for some place to eat at a late hour. We went around a corner and across the street I saw this nimbus of neon light in the air. We crossed over and, sure enough, it was a neon sign and, sure enough, it was a sympathetic bistro—on fact it was the sympathetic bistro. It was the same place I’d encountered in San Francisco! And I thought, well gee, did a cousin, a nephew branch out to Minneapolis?
We went inside and the atmosphere brimmed with familiar sentiment. Family pictures lined the walls, and they’d painted the exposed plumbing … and then it really dawned on me. This was not a sympathetic bistro. What I’m saying is this was not a communal thing, this was not a bonded group. This was not a family restaurant. The pictures and the keepsakes on the walls had been purchased by the lot at auction. And when I looked at the other diners, all of them white, pretty Anglo-Saxon looking and undoubtedly Lutheran, the full implications of this began to sink in. Most of the tables were for large groups. This was the demographic. A waiter came in with a lighted cake, there was a birthday party, and suddenly I understood what this was. It was a RED, an acronym for retail entertainment destination. This is the fastest-growing trend in retail, and it’s remaking our world. REDs are the finest flower of our marketing system and they are a commodification of our lives. You see most of our desire and addictions are really projections of our need to be. And they’ve become really good at finding out what our desires are, and they’ve learned to create stuff—both goods and entertainment—which we then consume as substitutes for being.
In the case of the jolly bistro, some entrepreneur had determined—using demographic studies and psychographic profiles—what WASPs really need in their lives. And
I can tell you from personal experience what WASPs really do need in their lives. Family members often live in different states, and family dinners and gatherings can be awkward. You don’t have anything in common with anyone because bonding social capital has broken down a little. So you go to these gatherings, and you find yourself wistfully and secretly wishing that things were, oh, a little warmer, a little more sympathetic, a little more … well, Mediterranean. If only we could be Italians! And this environment, this bistro, was designed to fill this gap. Art blended with science. If people want to feel that they belong to one another, then it’s wholly feasible and very profitable to manufacture the illusion of this feeling. I had really enjoyed the food at the original restaurant back home, but sitting there with my girlfriend I picked indifferently at my meatball. I kind of herded it around the plate and, as I did so, I forgave Kaos Kitty for her performance. In fact, on the whole, it seemed very appropriate.
Let me give you a little profile of retail entertainment destinations. They’re usually located in metropolitan areas, and they’re devoted to the proposition long understood by marketers that it’s more lucrative to sell a state of being than a product. There’s nothing new in this. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. That’s what they used to say, but REDs in this late stage of capitalism are based on much shrewder and more sophisticated insights. They’re not just selling attractive and desirable sensations; they’re selling a lot more than that.
REDs come in different shapes and sizes. I’ve described the little restaurant, but it works up into larger complexes. These typically combine dining, shopping, and entertainment attractions. In the trade journals this is called the “trinity of synergy.” Because they know if you’re eating and you’re shopping and you’re being entertained, you’ll spend a lot more money. It grows up into very large-scale complexes, and these are being built at a tremendous rate. You know what I’m talking about: Disneyland, the Strip in Las Vegas, New York’s Times Square.
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