What Comes After Money

by Daniel Pinchbeck

  Another feature of these places is an air of amenity and authenticity: monumental architecture, open-air loggias, colonnades, fountains, vaulted ceilings, and decorative plasterwork. It’s all part of what’s come to be called the “experience economy.” These places are designed to appeal to our need for community and identity. At times they almost seem to waft a sense, albeit rather cheapened, of classical civilization. At least it seems so superficially, but when you descend to ground level, to the place where humans interact, the place where culture’s roots should grow, it is a very different story.

  After my experience with the jolly bistro, I became fascinated with these places. So two years ago at Christmas time I decided to go to Las Vegas. I wanted to see the great mother of them all and learn something from it. Now I’ll admit to you that I dislike the yuletide season. This great orgy of spending and consumption and forced giving seems to me like the ultimate perversion of what giving should be. So I engage in whatever activity feels like the opposite of Christmas. So it was that in late December of 2000 my girlfriend and I embarked on a holiday and we decided to call it our Viva Las Xmas tour.

  At the same time, the Guggenheim announced its plan to open a gallery as a magnet attraction at the Venetian. That’s an example of what the trade journals call edutainment. And later, on TV, a young woman representing the museum described this venture as a noble form of democratic outreach to the hoi polloi, to the unwashed masses—and, I might add, a very lucrative proposition for its gift shop. And an art critic was featured looking like he’d just downed a snifter of quinine water. He was actually wearing a turtleneck, and he talked about the postmodern implications of this daring move and how it was ironic … and so forth.

  You see, in the last twenty years Vegas has reinvented itself as a thoroughgoing RED. It used to be this sleazy place where guys went for action, but ah, not anymore! It’s now a center of edutainment, infotainment, eatotainment—every kind of ’tainment you can think of. They’ve torn down all the old facades and, in their place, they’ve erected palaces that offer up the holy trinity of market synergy. We wandered through these great complexes. We loitered in the shadow of animatronic sculptures. We witnessed the musical fountains and beheld the pharaonic mysteries of ancient Egypt at the Luxor. At Caesar’s Palace I actually bought an ashtray, I admit it. It was irresistible. But my favorite place was the Rio, because there we discovered a riverboat that they’d mounted on the ceiling on a curvilinear track, and it was filled with performers who, like performers on Broadway, were dancing and singing their hearts out. It actually was interactive, and I got kind of excited about that. They kept coming around and they were waving at us and we were waving at them.

  In fact, this kind of interactivity is typical of REDs. Here is my favorite quote from a trade. It explains that interactivity is a key component of immersion environments: “Free street performances, another form of ambient entertainment, strive to replicate the spontaneity of the archetypal, if not mythical, marketplace. Yet because they work independently, their performance can be unpredictable making them potentially disruptive to both visitors and tenants. Thus authentic performances are not commonly allowed on the private property of destination complexes.” Instead they hire performers and typically these performances are of short duration. They’ve studied this and found that maximum spending is reckoned to take place during a period of three to four hours. This is the reason for the ersatz interactions, why they hire these performers, and why the performances are so brief.

  We did witness the great speaking statue of Neptune at Caesar’s Palace. It was set in a courtyard, and, in a weird kind of cartoon way it might have been Florence. It could have been a northern Italian hill town with its a public square, a very civic setting. This robotic Neptune spoke to us for about seven minutes, it attracted a large crowd, and then it stopped and everyone dispersed—and where did they go? Right into all these shops that strategically surrounded it. And every one was a brand name high-end retail outlet selling goods at a 200 percent markup! And I’ll make an even more embarrassing confession: I went into one and bought a pair of Gucci’s. Even knowing what it was, I was caught up in the trance.

  You see, these settings are engineered with the precision of a hermetically sealed engine. Though they may look like urban spaces, you’ll find no posters pasted to the lampposts, and you will experience none of the spontaneous encounters that are the lifeblood of culture.

  What you will discover is what we discovered: the people chute. In the process of reinventing itself, Vegas has built an elaborate system of pedestrian transportation. They’ve located large parking complexes on the periphery of the Strip, and they funnel people through casino environments by an integrated system of escalators, bridges, elevators, tramways, and a variety of other mechanical devices. We were never more than ten feet away from an opportunity to buy something. It was virtually impossible to escape this. The space of one casino bled seamlessly into the next.

  At the very end of our stay we took the elevator upstairs at the Rio, walked into a restaurant and went out on the terrace, and there, spread out before us, was the Strip: this great evil drive train glittering in the desert night. And I thought to myself, this is just like Burning Man! We, too, create a scene, a fantasy environment. Each year we create an annual art theme because we believe that stories and myths are one way that people belong to each other and one way that you can get artists to collaborate. What is more, we fill it with interaction and ambient entertainment. The theme camps and art are magnet attractions. We even have our own Electric Parade every year! Spread out on the desert floor, our glittering city is a capsule world that obliges people to linger and loiter and totally immerse themselves in an environment. The only difference is that you cannot buy or sell anything. The only difference is that you are seldom more than ten feet away from opportunities to interact with art and other human beings. The only difference is that you must give of yourself. The only difference, finally, is that it is real.

  You see, the great irony of this is that the creators of these REDs have almost inadvertently reinvented a model of classical civilization. Pursuing a path of market research, they’ve learned that human beings crave something greater than themselves to which they can belong. They’ve learned that we need myths and stories that can tell us who we are. They’ve learned that we need a coherent theater in which to act out life’s drama.

  And yet, marketers also know that in our modern world the public craves variety and choice. The Palladian facades of the Venetian palaces that they concoct allude to an older order in which traditions shaped and governed everything. But underneath it all, beneath the plaster facades and the faux marbling, they know that in today’s consuming world the individual and individual’s desires are king. It is, in fact, our desires as individuals disassociated from history, place, and any sense of a surrounding community that drive our economic system. Judged by any civilized standard, the mass culture of an RED is an oxymoron. Yet I think there is much we can learn from it.

  And this goes back to where I began. I said the great value of our modern system is that it uniquely caters to the individual. We are in the forefront of this consumer revolution, but all around the globe traditional societies that once housed cultural processes and formed social vessels of belonging are beginning to shatter. We used to call these societies the third world, but now they’re called emerging economies—but we are now, today in America, the most individualized and the most self-conscious people that have ever existed on the face of the earth. And I don’t think we are ready to return to a simpler life or the type of society that once sustained culture.

  Demands for self-restraint will not be heard because we demand choice, we demand freedom, and we value our individuality more that anything else. Nor do I think we can reconstruct the kinds of societies that once helped culture to thrive. They depended on the fact that people had to struggle together, that circumstances held people together over long periods of time. We w
ant to change our jobs, we want to move freely through the world, we want to redefine ourselves continually: we have exploded that ancient world of tradition.

  I’ve discussed a continuum of being: an I am, a We are, and an It is. But if you look at all previous ages of human culture, the order of this continuum started with It is, with gods and myths of supernatural origin, sustained by traditions among people who struggled to survive in a challenging world. And it ended somewhat tenuously with the experience of the individual. Today this sequence works and must work in reverse. It must necessarily begin with I am, at the level of each individual’s experience.

  So let me return to my comparison of Burning Man with retail entertainment destinations. The essential appeal of Burning Man is to the individual. We’ve achieved an ethos, and we have a few basic rules. But no one is required to subordinate himself or herself. Instead, all are invited to expand themselves. Burning Man is available on their terms: anyone can engage in radical self-expression. Everyone is free to do and be. The great difference between us and the consumer marketplace, however, is that we have inverted the essential nature of the capitalist system. We are like Disneyland turned inside out. Because at the heart and center of this thing you will find a gift and, in so doing, you yourself, your unique spirit will itself become a gift and be consumed like fire in its passage to the sky.

  Seventeen years ago, I started Burning Man on a beach in San Francisco. This is frequently the first thing that people ask me about. They want a myth, and I was once incautious enough to tell a reporter that it corresponded to the anniversary of a lost love affair. That story has now circled the globe, and it’s been interpreted and reinterpreted as myths often are. I’ve been told that I was burning myself, that I was burning my ex-girlfriend, that I was burning my ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, but none of these stories are true. They’re factoids. They’re myths in the modern sense of the word: distortions of the truth. And yet people keep asking me this question, and I think it’s because they’re looking for a myth in the older and more profound sense of the term. But myths are not about chains of causation or rational reasoning. They tell us that the essence of things is contained in first causes, and that everything, as in any vision, emanates radically out of this. That’s what people are asking me to tell them. That’s the nature of the story that they need to hear. So I will tell you that story.

  One day in 1986 I called a friend and said, let’s build a man and burn him on the beach. I did this on impulse. There was really nothing on my mind. I’ve thought about it over the years, and the best I can say is that some passionate prompting, some immediate vision just had to be embodied in the world. Call it radical self-expression … I Am. We built our man from scraps of wood, then called some friends and took it to the beach. We saturated it with gasoline and put a match to it, and within minutes our numbers doubled. That’s actually when Burning Man began as an institution, you know. We were so moved by that we knew we had to do it again. If we’d done it as a private and personal thing, I’m sure we wouldn’t have repeated it. And I remember holding my son in my arms, and I looked at each face illuminated in the firelight. They had formed a semicircle about it, and I was so moved—We Are. They’d all come to see this gift. A woman ran over and held its hand. I didn’t know who she was. The wind was shunting the flames to one side, and someone took a picture of it—it’s the only recorded instant. She just had to touch it. She wanted to belong to it. And then, of course, there was the Man himself. Standing there against the limitless horizon of the broad Pacific, it seemed to belong to the ocean, to belong to the sky—to exist in some realm immeasurably beyond us. It formed a fireball, a second sun brought down to earth, a sudden, uncontrollable and completely spontaneous emission of energy. It Is. And when I look at Black Rock City today, I notice that its curving streets are like that semicircle of people so many years ago on Baker Beach. Our city seems to reach out to the Man as if it could capture him, but can never quite possess this gift at its center. I Am … We Are … It Is. What more is there to say, except that I believe there is a way that all of us can be together.

  17

  A FAREWELL TO ADVERTISING

  KEN JORDAN

  I get great pleasure from imagining a world with no advertising. Sure, there’s the occasional commercial that gets me to smile, but most ads make me feel like I’m being talked down to; instead of addressing me in an honest, straightforward way, they try to draw my attention to whatever they’re hawking through gimmicky manipulations—for instance, paying a celebrity to announce how dearly he adores a certain car insurance, gas-guzzling SUV, or cat litter. Other ads try to freak me out because my breath smells, my armpits reek, and my hair isn’t glossy enough to earn me a kiss. No need to list the other approaches ad agencies employ; we’ve all internalized the myriad strategies used to subliminally coerce us into buying stuff we don’t need or want.

  The sense I get from advertising is that I’m continually being lied to, everywhere I turn. But more disturbing still is that the picture of the world offered by advertising is of a throw-away consumer culture based on instant gratification, presented as a kind of heavenly paradise. We are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction, our country is perpetually at war, Wall Street’s investment culture has revealed itself to be irredeemably morally bankrupt, and through it all, we are bathed by a perpetual stream of consumerist messaging that proclaims we live in a material paradise. All you have to do is buy the right beer, and babelicious models climb out of your fridge. Shopping sets you free.

  But despite the relentless propaganda, at this point most Americans accept that our version of consumer culture is unsustainable. Not everyone sees this, certainly, but for decades the number has been growing, and some demographers think this long-time minority perspective became the majority in 2008, the year of the Obama election, which is a convenient marker for the shift. And yet, we are assaulted by more ads than ever. They appear on eggs and apples at the store, arrive as cell phone spam, sneak up as product placement in the movies—some sources say that the average American is exposed to as many as three thousand ad messages a day. They blare at us from every conceivable angle: the sides of buildings, the floors of subway platforms, the back doors of public bathroom stalls. They shake, flash, and squeal in mock delight, aching to convince us that our deepest needs can be satisfied on the supermarket shelf. We’re only one kitchen cleanser away from having the time of our lives.

  The cumulative effect of this non-stop assault, which begins at birth and continues through our final moments, is to make us numb. We know we can’t trust ads, but we get suckered in by them; ultimately, they achieve what they are designed to do, which is to sell product. Our understandable response is to develop a thick wall of defense against their come-ons. We become sophisticated critics, armed with irony and a knee-jerk cynicism, knowing better than to accept an ad at face value. At the same time, we can’t imagine an alternative to the consumerism they promote, and so fall prey to their manipulations again and again. As good cynics, we realize that any effort to remake society is bound to fail, so we might as well stock up on the latest disposable pleasure and make sure to get our money’s worth. But seeds have been planted for an alternative worth considering.

  Today, thanks to the internet, once I know what I want, I can usually find it pretty quickly. For instance, it took me about ninety seconds to discover that Americans are exposed to three thousand ads a day, and I was then able to compare that number to estimates from other sources. Search engines have become extremely effective at connecting people to what they’re looking for. Recommendation engines, like the kind on Amazon.com that suggests books you might be interested in, based on your previous purchases, have steadily improved, linking you to music and books you probably will like, people you could date, schools to attend, cars to buy. These matchmaking technologies might not be able to look into your soul and surprise you with an offer out of left field, but once you express, for example, an interest in
permaculture, automated systems are now quite good at letting you know about new permaculture books and DVDs, and (in theory) permaculture courses, groups, gardening supplies—whatever a budding per-maculturist could want.

  Matchmaking systems of this kind are popping up everywhere online. Unfortunately, they are guided by the same manipulative practices and questionable ethics endemic to the advertising industry. Companies engaged in digital advertising, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, do their best to surreptitiously track the online behavior of whoever they can, creating detailed profiles of each of us that will help them capture our interests and predict our future purchases. Beacon and cookie technology installed by third parties stalks us as we go from website to website, following where we go and watching what we click on. So if I spend a lot of time on car websites, I might notice that while visiting CNN.com, MSNBC.com, or YouTube, suddenly a legion of car ads appear. Marketers will spend extra for these targeted ads, because it helps them narrow in on likely customers, making the ad-buying process less like firing buckshot. And if you do want to buy a new car, all the car ads suddenly flooding your screen might be useful.

  But these matchmaking systems, as they currently exist, have serious drawbacks. For a start, you have no idea what these profiles say about you, or what is being done with them. The data collected about you, usually without your knowledge, is owned by the company that collects it, which can do whatever it pleases with that information, including sell it to whoever pays. The lawyers at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and other privacy advocates are rightly outraged by how little control we have over the data about us that streams across the internet. They are also frustrated by how little the public seems to care about it. People tend to prioritize convenience over privacy, and they don’t expect that the owners of these profiles will abuse them, or at least not so badly that a real crisis results.