ANDIE GRACE: 

Yeah, no, this is beautiful. Some of the connections that I’m hearing that I did not know before. I love what you’re digging out that I’ve wanted the world to know, which is just how long technology and some really groundbreaking stuff has been happening within this community, and even on the playa. 

STUART: 

Hello?

ANDIE: 

Mangrum, comma Stuart. Welcome to the show.

STUART: 

Hello.

Ho ho ho, invisible friends. It’s another holiday season! My, how the years fly by like pages being ripped off an old paper calendar in the snowy wind. Here we are up in the nosebleed seats of the Burning Man Live desert ski chalet for another winter season. I’m Stuart Mangrum. I’m here with my pal Actiongrl, who has baked us up another tasty, delicious Burning Man history pie.

ANDIE: 

I love that.

STUART: 

What flavor we serving up this time?

ANDIE: 

So festive. Oh, Stuart, we’re going all in on technology. I have been doing these oral histories now for about two years.

STUART: 

That’s right. Collecting the tales of the ancient ones like me.

ANDIE:

Yes. Collecting the stories from our ancestors in Burning Man history. And I learn something new every single interview that we do. But what’s really interesting about these stories is that they aren’t just about nostalgic desert dust ups. They’re kind of the source code of why Burning Man evolved the way it did, where it did, in this particular setting, and the era that happened to come out. There’s a lot of input that happens to have come from our glorious San Francisco Bay Area, the heart of Silicon Valley. 

The things I’m finding out in these interviews really illustrate how this bunch of adventurous weirdos kept coming back year after year, building stuff, breaking it, remixing, playing with new tools, and that would manifest in art and theme camps, the city layout itself, the infrastructure.

And a twist that a lot of people miss is that technology really was woven into it kinda right from the start.

STUART: 

Wait a minute. Fact check here. Technology at Burning Man? I thought it was the Silicon Valley tech bros that ruined Burning Man! Anyway, that’s what I heard.

ANDIE:

You were there, so, of course, you know that’s patently hilarious. Burning Man in that era really was a crowd that had a whole lot of overlap in the emerging world of high tech technology. Back before there were Instagram influencers, and TikTok, and ‘social’ and ‘media’ fell into the same sentence, and your aunt knew about Burning Man on Facebook; like way back mid 90s when Burning Man was like word-of-mouth between friends.

It really started to blow up because of the use of technology — tech, anarchism, even. People were showing up with toys and tools and like repeaters, printers, networks, out there in the middle of nowhere. And this was a time when Silicon Valley ran into the art punk cauldron that was out there on the playa.

STUART: 

Well, yeah, there was definitely a strong punk aesthetic way before there was anything you could point out and say, “That’s high tech.” I always get a little bit peeved when people talk about Burning Man as being a hippie thing, because at least about the time I came in, it was much more of a punk tech. And some of the earliest tech users I remember were basically punk tech artists repurposing industrial technology, making machine art that would destroy other machine art in really cool ways.

And to be fair, a lot of us had jobs that touched on tech. Maybe not when I first started going, but within about a hot second after the commercial internet got going in the mid 1990s.

You know, some people talk about how Burning Man took the life out of the Cacophony Society. I think also was a lot of us just got jobs for the first time, full time jobs, and didn’t have as much fun to mess around.

ANDIE:

These two things were really growing up right alongside each other, right? And so, yeah, some of those core desert instigators and early artists did have jobs that touched tech in some way and began to deepen as technology through the dot.com era began to come on a little bit later. And what organization really did begin to form with, Burning Man itself was in service of nurturing the culture in the event and kind of communicating with people to expand, like, how do people connect before the event, to do bigger projects, to learn to be safe and informed.

And this was just a great place that made a wonderful beta test for starting to implement communications technology around Burning Man and the human connection. All the news and information that was coming out was kind of an experiment. So you started to get print zines like the one that you I know you worked on, your interviews in here, by the way, you got pirate radio, we saw web technology and websites started to emerge.

All this was there.

STUART: 

You’re right. There was a lot of experimentation. All this stuff was new. We didn’t know how it worked. There was no manual for it. So that was a lot of the fun. And I think it’s also a lot of the reason why the Burning Man community got connected so fast, and why the event grew so geometrically.

So, we’re going to explore how all this helped shape Black Rock City today, right?

ANDIE: 

Absolutely. This is the third installment of our “People’s History of Burning Man” series. We’re going to dig into how technology turned an experiment in the desert into something bigger and more organized. Radio waves, the zines, the first steps on the web, some of the other communications tools that arose as Burning Man in Black Rock City was finding its voice as we build ourselves out in the dust, and the rest of the world started to notice.

STUART: 

All right, everybody, so crank up the dial, plug in the modem first. Or just hit play on the podcast, because this is the episode for anyone who wants to know more about how the digital and the analog worlds first collided in Black Rock City.

ANDIE: 

First up is David Beach.

STUART: 

Oh, Beach, a great old friend and colleague of mine. I worked with him at a little outfit called iStorm, who helped build one of Burning Man’s first websites and orchestrated the first live webcast from the middle of nowhere.

 

DAVID BEACH: 

So yeah, Kale Peoples and a few other folks, we built a site called iStorm. iStorm was really just a way for us to do some just really innovative things with the medium, tell stories in a new way, integrate video and audio with text and images in a very interactive way, ways that weren’t… The web at the time was mostly just an image and text and blue links and things. We wanted to push the limits a bit to express our creativity and ideas. 

I needed writers. That’s how I got connected to Stuart really, because Stuart was a writer. He had his own zine, The Twisted Times. He had written for this Happy Mutant Handbook. He was quite the bon vivant. And I met with him and we really hit it off. And I said, this is what I want to do. I’m gonna… He kind of was a bit of a gonzo journalist type at the time, right? He wanted to go to Mexico and write about the fireworks festival in Mexico. And so he did that. He wrote this great story about pranks and we integrated all the Cacophony Society videos into the story. And, you know, that’s how I kind of got into that world a bit. And it was just, for me, I was like, this was really great. 

I didn’t realize that there was this kind of subculture happening. I’d always been adverse to the San Francisco culture, even though I was born there. I just thought of it as hippies and burnouts and people that didn’t appeal to me at the time. I wanted to think more about the future. And then I realized, no, these guys are about hacking culture and doing amazing things with media like Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) and those kinds of things. That to me was awesome; especially the BLF, because I was in advertising and I worked with some of these clients and they’re like doing this amazing stuff to send a message about these companies and this advertising itself and commercialism and you know, all the things. And to me, I love that. 

So yeah, Stuart and I hit it off and he really opened my eyes and opened to a lot of great things, along with Geek Boy and Jeff Holmes too. 

So we were building the site and Stuart tells me that the webmaster for Burning Man, Gray, was moving on. It was hosted by The Well. And I thought, well, I have a bunch of server space. Let’s build the Burning Man website. 

I had not been to Burning Man. My impression of it was: these are a bunch of people doing insane things out in the desert, being free and building these incredible structures and burning ‘em down because they could. And that definitely was intriguing. I thought, let’s build the Burning Man site, and we’ll make it a part of iStorm. That’s the audience I wanted to attract. It was good for me, in my mind, to be associated with that mindset. 

So we started building the site in ‘96. 

And then I had a friend, Jon Luini from MediaCast, and he was also the co-founder of IUMA. And he produced like literally the first netcast concert. He was an innovator in live streaming video. It kind of crossed our minds: Why don’t we livestream the Burn, the Man burning, somehow? And it’s good to be naive sometimes, because you just go, “Yeah, let’s go do this.” You know, and then we have to lead in, like, “How do you do it?” 

Stuart was going, “There’s no electricity out there. I mean, we have generators, but there’s no internet out there, you know? What are you gonna do, like run a phone line from Bruno’s to your RV and then…? That’s not gonna work. I don’t think I can get a cable that long.” 

So we started to work together with Stuart. And that’s when I met Larry and a few other folks as well. I remember going up to San Francisco and having meetings with those guys and everyone kind of thought it was crazy. There’d been some attempts with like sat. phones or something, maybe, I’m not sure. But I know that the idea of actually having a live video feed of the Burn was absurd. So we figured it out. 

We worked with a company called Internex and then MediaCast, which was Jon’s company, and having meetings about what it would take to do it. And one of the things that we had to do was negotiate with Nevada Bell to run a high speed line all the way out to Gerlach from Reno. There was no high speed internet at all in Gerlach. Everyone was just using modems. So we convinced them to run an ISDN line like out to a motel room in Bruno’s. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

How? 

DAVID BEACH: 

If I remember correctly, they had to. If someone wanted it or needed it, they were obligated to do it. Because some regulation or something around that time that sort of mandated that high speed internet was a priority. And we didn’t know that going in, but it definitely worked to our advantage. 

So we had like a dual line ISDN running into one of the rooms at Bruno’s. Next to that room was an old little tower that I think a rancher may have used for cell service or something, somehow. It was like a big antenna tower.

We figured that we could do like a frame relay line of sight connection between that motel and that tower to a tower at the camp, which was… I don’t know how many miles away that was, 10 miles? I don’t know what it was. Long! You know? And a line of sight connection between the two dishes would give us, in theory, high speed internet from our camp to the world, really. 

So we worked really hard trying to figure this out. Jeff Holmes went up to Gerlach for several weeks at least, getting everything set up, making sure it was set in the right place and it was working, and installing a server there, making sure that we had the beginnings of that connection working. I have no idea where the dishes came from.

We went out there, like we’d built a site. First of all, we built a site. I mean, we shouldn’t discount that. We built this pretty unique looking site. At the time skeuomorphic design was new and interesting, at least for the web, so we used a book metaphor. The idea is that there’s this Burning Man book that was in the desert. And you open the book up and it tells you all about Burning Man. It tells you how to get tickets and has the Survival Guide in it and has all the information you need to attend Burning Man. That was the basis of the site. That was going to be the place where the livestream was going to happen. We had a countdown to it and everything. 

How we did it was put a webcam on top of the RV. There was a dude, I remember he just saved our ass. We were having a really hard time getting a connection. You know, the wind and it just, we weren’t lining up to the dish in Gerlach. Yeah, it just wasn’t working. And finally, like this guy, God, I wish I could remember him. I know he was at the time a pretty well-known like network internet expert. And he had a rig and he helped us get it all working. And finally it got going. 

And not only did we, we basically turned the Burning Man website into the live experience, right? And this was days before the Burn. And the site became, we sort of flipped it. It was all about the Burn and the event itself. And we started publishing the Black Rock Gazette. So every day we’d have a new online version of the Black Rock Gazette. And there was another group called Piss Clear. It was like a zine. We published the daily dispatches from Piss Clear. We had updates on the weather. We live streamed the radio station. 

Once we were connected, we could do anything. Yeah, it was a little slow. We also had like an online chat. It was this kind of fun chat software where you can move around and you had a little avatar, it was very ahead of its time. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

All of this was very ahead of its time. This was not things that events were doing yet. Not really. 

DAVID BEACH: 

Yeah, I guess so. And then we had a digital camera and then we had a digital video camera, and Scott Beale would run around and take video for us. And he interviewed artists and showed different aspects of life at Burning Man as close to real time as possible. He’d come in from an interview with the tape. I’d give him a new tape. He’d go out again. I would encode that video and upload it to our server and it was live for the world to see, you know. He got like a flyover. We had a great shot of the site as well and you know, really good interviews with people. Scott was great with that. 

And then there was a guy named Brant Smith who worked at IUMA and he was just so enthusiastic about it. I brought him up too, and he ran around and wrote stories and took photos. Basically anybody who wanted to, could post stuff. 

Unfortunately, had to be encoded or transposed, and then put into HTML. It was a pretty manual process. I pretty much spent the entire time in that RV with Kale. I barely got out. It was really, I think at night I got out a bit. We had fun, you know, eating and drinking and doing the things you would do, I suppose. But I didn’t get a full Burning Man experience because I was trying to create one online. 

Bruce Sterling came by to interview us for his article for Wired Magazine. He just came in and things were moving. He just sat down and kind of observed what we were doing. And it was cool to see him and have him write a little bit about what we were doing for that Wired article.

And so it was, yeah, it was a pretty wild time. 

 

STUART: 

You know, Burning Man is a not digital native event. Burning man has analog roots, and you might not be able to tell by listening to us, but neither Andy nor I are digital natives. Andy. Actiongrl. What was your first computer experience?

ANDIE: 

My first computer. I was in fourth grade and that would have been a Commodore Vic 20 with a cassette tape deck.

STUART: 

Oh, so you had to upload Castle Wolfenstein from a cassette tape?

ANDIE: 

That’s right. It took a long time.

STUART: 

Yeah, I know that because I had an Apple 2.

Actually my first computer experience was when I was a teenager. I got to sneak into the engineering lab at the University of Southern California and play a alt text Star Trek based game.

ANDIE: 

Did you lose your mind?

STUART: 

I actually did not understand why everyone was so excited about this.

ANDIE: 

Wow. Looking back now, do you understand?

STUART: 

I do, and I kind of miss the days of black screens with green OCR font text on them. I kind of do a little nostalgic for it.

ANDIE: 

I think these days is easy to take for granted what a big deal some of these kinds of things were because of the hours spent with black text on those screens programming and causing things to happen, and cleaning literal dust out of places, and finding out that what works in the city doesn’t work on the playa. It was a lot of manual and technical labor involved.

STUART: 

Yeah, it wasn’t all prepackaged. Being a user and being a coder were very closely adjacent, or even being a hardware person. I built my first couple of computers, because I had to.

ANDIE: 

Right.

Next, I want to hear from Scott Beale. I think you and Scott Beale also worked together with Beach at iStorm.

STUART: 

Yeah. Scott Beale was our QA manager. I met him completely randomly in that he had an apartment next door to one of my best old high school friends, and a bunch of Burners showed up and were partying in the hallway. And that’s how Scott got kind of dragged into our scene. But he went on to do a lot of, I think I would classify Scott as a super connector in the way that he created

ANDIE: 

Absolutely.

STUART: 

…nodes and hubs for all the community to come together.

 

SCOTT BEALE:

I remember the person who I had met at Burning Man in ’96, Marian, Marian Goodell showed up as a volunteer for this event. And I thought that was cool. I didn’t know her very well. It’s just the beginning of her involvement. Michael Mikel is at that thing. And I remember him like slipping me a hundred dollar bill under the table from Burning Man, but literally under the table without even just to kind of help out. And I was like, that’s really cool. Well, I was paying for the drinks, but just, you know, there’s some expense to this thing. It was all volunteer. 

But anyway, we had that event in the write up for I said, “Come decompress.” And seriously, it was the first decompression. I mean, it’s just funny to think because I didn’t really connect that 12 years later. I went to decompression like, yeah. I said, “Hold on, I did the first after… Burning Man hadn’t, wasn’t doing… They did pre-events, probably as fundraisers, but didn’t do the official one. I don’t know, maybe it was ’97 they did, or ’98.

ANDIE GRACE: 

Decompression. Well, then now it is a trademark. 

SCOTT BEALE: 

Yeah, of course, of course. 

ANDIE GRACE:

Nice work, Scott.

SCOTT BEALE: 

You know, I’d like to think we had something to do with that. I don’t know. 

So it was a great event and we had like an art gallery in front of CellSpace, Burning Man artists, and then we projected an image of the playa on the ground. So like you’re like on the playa. That was fun. It was fun to do, but it’s just a fun. 

I remember that’s how I really got to know Marian. Of course she would come to all the stuff. 

So going into ’96, the website was built by iStorm and Stuart worked there. So Stuart was my boss for a while. This is like before ’96 event, our company had this thing called iStorm, which was like a digital magazine. And we did the netcast that year in ’96. Part of what I did was running around shooting video, come back to an RV. We would digitize the video into Quicktime video and then slowly upload it to the website, which was blowing my mind, right? Something I just shot in theory can be watched by the world which now everybody does in a second on their phone. But that concept was so crazy back then. 

There was a guy in Gerlach who, there was no cell service, so he actually put up a tower so he could have cell service. And so I remember we were using that tower out of Bruno’s motel and and somehow brought in a dual ISDN lines into that hotel room and use that with microwave and antennas to send that signal to Center Camp so we could have connectivity. It was crazy, totally crazy. This is before Oregon Country Faire came out and John Gilmore and all these guys providing connectivity, satellite connectivity. This was like how we did it back then. So I documented all that.

ANDIE GRACE:
So..? 

SCOTT BEALE: 

See this too much because I haven’t got to the ’97 web team yet. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Well, that’s where we’re walking this road together. I love it. What inspired you specifically to give so much of your time and energy to this thing aside from hundred dollar bills under the table? 

SCOTT BEALE: 

Yeah, it was funny because I was still had the age out, right? I was still working at that film video place until ultimately then I went to work for Stuart, but yeah, I still working normal jobs. But there was so much going on. It was so exciting. We knew what we were doing was important. Like when you’re in, in something like that, you know, people look back at it be like, this is a historical moment of whatever this is. People don’t think about that in the moment, but when the Beats were doing their thing or whatever was happening, that was all. You look back, but it’ll probably seem like just, just going to a poetry reading. Who cares? Like it probably wasn’t that big a deal, but all that stuff was important. 

That was my social life, right? So, you know, I had friends that were coworkers and stuff, but basically it’s very interesting too, because usually, right, you get a job, you have your social group to probably around your age. This was everybody, right? There are people much, much older, 20 years older, but younger, very diverse or Burning Man diverse, but you know, like from a lot of different backgrounds. And so it was a different kind of experience than I think a lot of people have with their social groups. Just like getting into a job on hanging out with him. And you just kept going and going and going, right? Cause then Billboard Liberation Front, right? Like there’s so many side projects. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Did you participate at all in BLF?

SCOTT BEALE: 

Yeah, I built the website. I sent out the press releases. I documented stuff. Initially it was like this mysterious thing. You can’t find out about it. Yeah, we still host the website. It needs to be updated. But yeah, I got involved with that. There’s so many things. And it’s weird because all my other friends from the before times, nobody had crossed over into this.

Oh, yeah. I completely forgot. So Laughing Squid, my company, I started in ‘95 because of the documentary I was making. So that was the initial thing. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Just like an LLC to cover your…?

SCOTT BEALE:

A production company, right? And so later on, the Squid List would be part of Laughing Squid. And then down the road, like web hosting and the blog and all that stuff that came later. 

There’s so many great stories. So when I was working at this place called Allied Film and Video, the other thing that was happening is the web was starting to emerge, right? 93, 94, ’95, like the beginning of the web and browsers and all that.

And so we were doing CD-ROM replication, right? So was like our new special thing. You could come in and make CD-ROMs. So multimedia was this new thing, really big in San Francisco, of course. There’s a lot of stuff. And I remember hearing people talking about the web and like, I remember writing down URLs, with long, crazy, tilde URLs. 

And so we were working there. It turns out our neighbor was Wired Magazine. And they published their first issue and they came by and dropped off a stack of their new magazine. “Here’s this new thing we just did.” It’s total craziness if you think of it, right? And it totally reflected Silicon Valley and the culture and, which also was very much part of Buring Man, a lot of those guys; infinite crossover with that scene. 

So then it turns out Burning Man’s gonna happen after all, right? The whole thing. And negotiating to use this private land, which, right, as we know, ends up just being that one year before we go back. 

Oh, yeah, I’ve been leaving out something from ‘95 that was a pretty big deal for me too is that: I shot all those photos and then there’s this guy, Jeffrey Gray was doing the Burning Man website back then and it was on the Well, of course, the famous Well, that came out of Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, all that stuff. And I remember going to his house and he had a scanner, which unheard of, like really expensive. And he scanned my photos in and then I watched him upload them to the Burning Man website. This is before I was blown away by the QuickTime on the playa. This is like the year before where it was just like, wow, something I shot out there is going to be online and people can see it. And so that was in ’95.

But then ’96, it came, was the thing that Stuart’s of all the iStorm. and then ’97, so obviously it made sense that it’s time to bring the website in house, right? So this rockstar web team that I got to be a part of. Brian Bellendorf, he was the main, the lead developer of Apache, which is a software, the web server software that ran most websites at the time. He ended up co-founding HotWired, Wired magazine’s online side, all this stuff; legendary guy, right? And he’d host meetings at his house. He was way ahead of stuff. And I remember, such a great concept. That’s the first time I’d ever seen WiFi. He had WiFi at his house. I was like, WHAT??? And you know, none of us could even do that. 

But Eddie Cadell was part of that team. A bunch of us were part of that original team that then built the first website in-house, Burning Man’s own website. That was ’97. So I became sort of the day-to-day webmaster from ’97 to ‘99 doing updates to it. Yeah, I’d make all the like hand-coded HTML changes to the Burning Man website for three years. 

And I remember Larry would send me like a Word document wanting to make a change. Instead of sending me the change, he sent me the whole Word document. It’s like, “No, I just need to know what are you changing,” because he didn’t, he didn’t… You can’t explain it to Larry. He obviously wasn’t that technical. 

And by the way, Brian Behlendorf had servers and he hosted SFRaves, this huge rave community. So it crosses the back over to that. He also ended up hosting Laughing Squid on his server and Burning Man. So we’re all on the same server. 

So we set up the email list. So we started setting up a regional list for each major city that had a Burning Man community, like New York for sure and all this. I remember I set up Austin, first time I ever went to Austin, and I met with the guy who was, you know, head of the Austin community there. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

George Papp. 

SCOTT BEALE: 

Yes. My God. Yes, exactly. It was cool. 

That was to me a really interesting concept. Okay, I can go to a city and maybe there’s Burning Man people and I can find them through these regional communities, people you know you have this in common with. And so you can meet up with people in cities all over the world. So I was doing that for a while on Brian’s server. 

And so I was one of the first people being paid by Burning Man part-time, it stopped being a hundred percent all volunteered and having some paid employees right around that end of the nineties. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Amazing. 

SCOTT BEALE: 

It all overlaps, right? It was just all intertwined.

ANDIE GRACE: 

Yeah, no, this is beautiful. Some of the connections that I’m hearing that I did not know before. 

SCOTT BEALE: 

Most people don’t. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Well, I love what you’re digging out that I’ve wanted the world to know, which is just how long technology and some really groundbreaking stuff has been happening within this community, and even on the playa, bringing that internet connectivity to the surface of the moon like that. 

SCOTT BEALE: 

Burning Man’s initial growth onto the playa is tied right with sort of the birth of the web. I mean, it’s perfect timing. And being based out of the Bay Area, like, all that stuff. I always thought like Burning Man or the New York or somewhere, maybe it would not all come together the same way.

 

ANDIE: 

Okay. So up next is Brian Behlendorf. I was so excited to talk to Brian because he really connected Burning Man and the rave communities through technology. And you’ll find out how in here. He was the chief engineer of Hotwired, which was the online website for Wired magazine.

STUART: 

All right. Let’s hear from Brian Behlendorf.

 

BRIAN BEHLENDORF: 

To me, this idea of connecting music and kind of underground culture, but also technology, kind of the seeds were planted pretty early. I was into computers growing up, but didn’t see myself as like a programmer or a hardcore software developer type. It was really more about like, what would the social impact of technology be? Because it was the early days of the internet, because Berkeley was one of the homes for where a lot of internet technology came from. 

People were starting to become aware in pop culture about the web. Even while I was supposed to be doing my physics homework, I found myself jumping online and meeting people from not only all over the world, but meeting people with shared music interests in the Bay Area. I found a lot of resonance with people into electronic music around San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, partly because I started a email mailing list, which at the time was novel and weird and you had to explain to people what that meant, called SFRaves. It was about the rave scene in San Francisco. 

I had a hunch there were good parties, but all the ones that I could find were happening in clubs or other 21-and-over places. And so I felt like, well, if there’s somebody out there who knows where the actually the good parties are, you know, the underground ones, the stuff that happens in warehouses or beaches or things like that, it’s probably going to be online. So we had conversations about where the parties were, but we started to put on our own as well.

This idea of not just being passive consumers, but being collaborative about it, being engaged with, this idea that you don’t have to be a spectator, you know, the world is your oyster. If you wanted to put in the effort, if you were passionate about a topic, a type of art, just go out and manifest it. Don’t even wait for somebody to give you permission. 

Through that journey, and while pretending to go to college, a friend of mine I’d met through the list said, there’s the new magazine that he was working at that could also use a way to put some of its back issues online, and that was Wired Magazine. So I started working at Wired in 1993. I started taking this content that was beautiful in pink text on a purple background and I loved Plunkett and Kerr’s design for Wired Magazine, but there we were putting it in black text on a gray background which is what the web was before background colors and colored fonts and things like that, so that more and more people could read them because I thought that the content was really critical for people to understand. And it was this emphasis of society and technology and art and other things that was kind of thrilling to me. 

And so I left school to do this more or less full-time. But along the way bringing my kind of rave interests and community interests together with interests in Wired magazine and technology. I kind of brought all those together onto a server called Hyperreal.

Back in the days before the cloud, before it was easy to stand up a list, a mailing list somewhere, or even get an email address, the real center of power lay with people who could stand up Unix boxes and then give out accounts to their friends and set up email services, set up websites. There’d be content there, but there’d be community there, that kind of thing, the nineties that became Unix boxes with creative fun names. And I chose the name Hyperreal after a song by a UK band called The Shamen just because it sounded like another place; it sounded like a fantastic mystical kind of place. That was a platform that I could use to host not only the rave mailing list, which grew beyond San Francisco. And it was more than just a list. It was a website. It was a virtual community in many ways, along with just other interests, right, musical and cultural and that sort of thing. 

I also collaborated with a number of other people to build a updated piece of web server software which we had named Apache. The Apache web server became pretty popular. It pretty soon was running about two thirds of the web out there. And it was open source software, which is a term that wasn’t even invented until 1998. It was free because we were just building better websites and it was easy for us to collaborate, easy to work in very much a do-ocracy kind of mode, very much like the parties we would throw as part of the SFRaves list, very much like other kind of creative endeavors I was a big fan of. And so Hyperreal served as a home for the launch of that project as well. That has become its own kind of nonprofit, the Apache Software Foundation, et cetera. 

Now we’re at about 1994. I had heard about this event happening out in the desert. And some of the other people at the HotWired offices went to it. They came back with some fantastic stories, and I vowed to be a part of it going forward. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

What did you hear that excited you? Why? 

BRIAN BEHLENDORF: 

So what I found exciting about this was it took place in this big flat desert playa, right? It felt to me, it sounded like a gigantic canvas, like an art canvas that was blank, that people could go and do art projects out there you couldn’t do anywhere else; and those might involve fire; those might involve simply building something big. But it was also a place just to be kind of nerdy and creative and the stakes were low. And because the stakes were low, because you weren’t trying to entertain a massive audience, you could be very creative. You could take risks. And if it didn’t work out, so what? 

And to some degree, the challenge of getting out there, the fact that it was hard to do, the fact that there were no facilities out there, you couldn’t just buy a coffee on your way to, that you had to bring everything with you, made that even more appealing. Like, that’s really exotic. It’s not hard these days to travel to far flung locations around the world, you know, where’s the challenge now, right? And the challenge might just be in our own backyard, literally.

So these friends of mine and other HotWired coworkers, they were part of a camp called Bianca’s Smut Shack, if that’s familiar. They came back, told great stories. And I was like, “OK, next year I have to go.” But I also realized, OK, this event doesn’t seem to have a website. It had a domain name, burningman.com, but that seemed to resolve to some private addresses rather than to anything public. And so I remember reaching out.

I asked them, do you know who’s involved with this? And they weren’t quite certain, but I somehow got in touch with Scott Beal, who had been connected to Internet Alfredo, which is like an early cyber cafe in San Francisco that I think the group that had registered at least the DNS for Larry and for Marian. So I was like, so are you, what’s your plan for that? Are you setting this up?

Somewhere along the way, I met Marian and said, “Here’s what I could easily offer for you. I’d be happy to set it up at this independent place. You’re not beholden to a big company. You’re not paying outrageous amounts for somebody to build an expensive website for you,” where we can try to take this kind DIY culture that I sensed was a big part of Burning Man already, even though I’d never been, even just from what my friends had told me, right? like that DIY, “Let’s be creative, let’s take risks” kind of ethos. 

I said, “We could do that in a virtual setting as well, right? If you have volunteers, I can give them accounts. You can set up a web space where they can edit HTML. You need a systematic way to engage with your community. So let’s do both a big announcements style mailing list.” 

And so that’s when she launched the Jackrabbit Speaks, as well as mailing lists for the different sub communities, both the staff and the core volunteers. But even the folks you want to fly planes in, or you know, which was the aviators list, right? Or other people coordinating Gate or Greeters and that sort of thing. Let’s use these tools to be able to really turn up the dial on the volunteerism so we can reach people who have day jobs and have, you know, families or whatever, but are able to use email to give a slice of their time to track what’s going on with the event and then spend that week able to give their all because they’re better connected to what was going on. 

She said, “Great.” We stood up a very simple burningman.com web page in time for the event in ’95. We weren’t even selling tickets online. We weren’t like doing any registration. It was, you know, here’s how to get there, here’s how to find the ticket booth, you know — which if there was a dust storm, you might even just drive right past it — and here’s all the information you need about the stuff to bring and what to expect.

ANDIE:

Yeah, but this is all before you even went. 

BRIAN BEHLENDORF: 

All before I even went. It was like, this seems like an important thing to do. And you know, if it goes to naught, fine. Clearly there’s a bunch of people passionate about making it work. And if I can help enable that, facilitate that, share what I’ve set up for other communities in this way, I’d be happy to.

 

ANDIE: 

And finally, Stuart. This next one’s you. I definitely wanted to include you in this episode because let’s be real. You brought the Burning Man community online, didn’t you?

STUART:

I’m having, like, a weird echo chamber effect here. It’s like when you’re looking into a mirror and there’s a mirror behind you. I’m having a little infinity moment, so… 

I don’t know what I did. Honestly, Andie, it’s been so long. How about we just listen to the clip and I’ll learn along with you.

ANDIE: 

Roll the tape.

 

STUART MANGRUM: 

I moved pretty quickly into freelance work as a writer, as a journalist, working on content for the nascent worldwide web. I kind of did a shift into a marketing career that I pursued for many years after that. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Okay. You had a zine called The Twisted Times. Was that during that phase or did that come later? 

STUART MANGRUM: 

Yes, it was during that phase. Twisted Times was a little self-published magazine that I did with a couple of my friends, with my partner Paisley Hayes. When I had my first successes in journalism and sold my first articles, I was tragically disappointed by how little money it made after all the work that I put into it. 

So I decided to pursue business writing, and do my fun writing on the side. This is the time right before the internet when there was a huge, I guess, mail art culture, zine culture, all kinds of people making their own what were really kind of the forerunners of blogs, right? on every subject under the sun. And mine was just on weird shit in my life and weird things that I found, humor. It was great because it introduced me to a whole lot of other interesting weirdos. 

There was one kind of meta zine called Factsheet Five. was like a clearing house. It was a directory for other independent publications. And because of the mechanics of bulk mail, this had to go out through the US mails, right? So that’s how old I am. Running bulk mail stamps and a bulk mail permit had to have, think a minimum of 200 addresses on it for you to get the cheap rate. I don’t think I ever had 200 paid subscribers to the thing. I sold in a couple of bookstores and whatever.

But to fill out my 200, I started going through Factsheet Five. anything that sounded interesting, I would just send them a trade copy. And it’s got a rubber stamp made that said, trade. Not long after that, my PO box started filling up with all kinds of amazing, interesting, crazy zines from all over the place, one of which was called Rough Draft: The Official Organ of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, which is my first entree into the strange world that I live in now.

ANDIE GRACE: 

What was the first in-person event that you went to that you found that way? 

STUART MANGRUM: 

Well, I was, I like to say I was an armchair Cacophonist for a number of years. I would read this thing every month and giggle and chuckle with all the antics, you know. “Clowns on a Bus” just knocked me out. It’s like, you’re a bus, a clown gets on, no big deal. Next stop, another clown gets up. Next stop, another clown gets on. By the end of the line, half the people on the bus are clowns — and here’s the catch — pretending they don’t know each other! Things like that really tickled my fancy. 

At one point in, I guess it was summer of 1993, I decided to try to meet some of what I call my invisible friends. These people who published other zines in other parts of the country. And I was throwing a barbecue and I just invited a bunch of people from my zine exchange list. And Michael Mikel, Danger Ranger, showed up with Louise Jarmilovitch driving up in the 5.04 PM, their art car that was artfully rearranged by the San Francisco earthquake of ‘89, wearing fabulous costumes, sporting a fez. I’m like: these are my people. 

Anyway, I had a drink or two and I told Michael, I admitted, I confessed, I haven’t actually been to any these events yet. I feel like I’m a member. Every issue says I may already be a member. I think I am, but I haven’t been to one. “I’ll tell you what,” (This was the whiskey talking.) I just said, “I promise right now, as God as my witness, will go to the next event on the Cacophony calendar, no matter what it is.” And Michael said, “That’s great. You’ll love it. It’s called Burning Man.”

So yeah, Burning Man was my first Cacophony event. And yeah, I got Tom Sawyered into publishing the on-site newspaper, the Black Rock Gazette, which Michael had published one issue of in 1992 using some kind of a laptop computer and a portable Xerox machine, but which I then turned into a daily. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

And so this was news of what was happening at the event? 

STUART MANGRUM: 

Yeah, it was mostly just nonsense, like my zine. It was very much inspired by Twisted Times. There was just a lot of goofy stuff in it. But we did start to cover the culture. We went into it knowing that we could never completely write a multi-page newspaper every day out there, so we pre-wrote things like artist profiles. That’s how I met Pepe Ozan. I called him up and interviewed him, I think, over to his place over at Project Artaud to talk about the art that he was bringing to Burning Man. 

So we’d pre-do stuff. We always had a crossword puzzle. I like the idea of having a Sunday supplement on Sunday that it had a snarky fake horoscope and a crossword puzzle, all that stuff you find in the Sunday section. We pre-printed everything except page one of each issue, which we refer to as the news hole. I think they still use that term, filling the news hole. There generally wasn’t that much news. So any rumor that popped up… “Hey, there was a huge explosion.”

“Somebody ripped out his penis piercing by getting it caught in the speed lacers.” And we’d print the Darwin Award each year for the dumbest that guy won in that particular year. And there’d be some reviews and just a lot of nonsense really. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Take me back. Did you start doing that right away in 1993 or was this?

STUART MANGRUM: 

Yes. I jumped into the deep end of the Cacophony pool. 

And it was just a terrible idea. I can’t believe that I bought it. The technology at the time, combined with the elements out there, it was a series of disasters, of tech failures. The first year we managed to actually do it pretty well, but only by working only at night in a trailer with no air conditioning and no windows. 

The second year we were like, okay, we need more room, so we rented an RV. But also the second year was when my friend Mark Church, Dusty Balls, and his friends from KFJC, decided to come and bring a radio station out. So I was like, “Okay, we’ll share the RV.” It’s not like we had much money to spend. So it was like, “Okay, we’ll be roomies.” The newspaper office and print room will be in the RV and radio station will be in the RV. 

Well, that turned out to be a terrible idea because we wanted to keep the dust out and they wanted to have constantly people coming in and going out and coming in and going out. So dust became a pretty critical issue there. We discovered the pinch rollers, the little rubber rollers on printers and Xerox machines, guess what? They don’t pinch if they get playa dust on them, so every 40, 50 copies or whatever we had to take the machine apart and rub those down with alcohol to get the playa dust off of them. That was just, yeah, that was too much. So next year I was like, all right, next year we’re going to have a split operation!

We’ll do our writing on playa. So we’ll have the newsroom on the playa, but we’ll put all the printing gear in a room at Bruno’s Motel and Country Club in Gerlach. And that worked reasonably well, except the commute was ridiculous because back then the event site was much, much further out into the playa than it is today. It was a good half hour to 40 minutes, depending on how fast you drove to get to town, right? This is not because of pulsing or anything like that. It’s just because it was far. 

We went into doing production off site. You know, in the later years of the Black Rock Gazette, we would print it all up, make a digital file, send it to a print shop in Reno that loved to print it for us and deliver it for us for free in exchange for the delivery driver got to spend a day at Burning Man. I think through most of the remaining years of the Gazette, that was how it worked. It’d written on playa, zapped over to the big city, printed overnight, and then driven out in a van the next morning. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Okay. Wow. And you did say that you kind of got volun-told into that role, right? 

STUART MANGRUM: 

I’d like to think it was Tom Sawyer-ed. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Tom Sawyer-ed. Okay. 

STUART MANGRUM: 

Yes. It’s a subtle difference. I was tempted with an opportunity that was made to sound, well, it was intriguing. It just seemed like an impossible challenge. No, he said it was great. He said, “You’ll love it, Stuart. We publish a newspaper out there. You’d be great on that because of zines, right? Because you’re a desktop publisher. You’ve got it all down. You know how to work Pagemaker and all that other stuff, and you’re a good writer.” Flattery.

I said, “You gotta be crazy, Michael. I’ve seen pictures of that place. There’s nothing. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing. It’s not even like a desert. It’s like the moon. There’s like no rocks, no trees, you know. What do you do?” 

And he’s like, “No, no, no, no, we can do it. It’ll be great. I did it last year.” 

And so I thought about it, realized that I had made a promise that I pinky swore. I called him up the next day and said, “Okay, who do I talk to about working for this newspaper?” 

And he said, “The one you’re publishing?”

That was the volun-telling part. I realized that I was not being part of a staff that I was the staff. So…

ANDIE GRACE: 

Got it. 

STUART MANGRUM: 

That was the Gazette.

But yeah, it was a start for on-playa media. Like I said, the radio station, the first radio station happened the next year. Then we did our first live webcast from the playa and all those other things kind of grew out of that first little onsite media presence. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Did you have a moment where you realized, this is going to become a big part of my life? Was it that first year right away? Was it another year? 

STUART MANGRUM: 

It was, yes, infatuation at first sight. I never… I never experienced anything quite like that before. And I made so many friends. It was really like I had connected with my lost tribe, right? You know, we used to talk about Cacophony. Cacophony was like, if you can imagine being in high school, but instead of the weirdos being shunted to like off to another table, the weirdo table is the cool kids table. And only weirdos get to sit at the cool kids table. 

And so there just some real nutcases, but just some super creative people, you know, super fun. And I just dove headfirst into being a Cacophonist. And Burning Man was the big event of the year, but there were plenty of others too. So I proposed and publicized and ran Cacophony events and, and then the next year started rolling around. Sooner than I would expect it was Larry Harvey invited me to work with him on the year-round communications, which I didn’t know existed because I wasn’t part of the existing community. But he was like, yeah, we do a newsletter, you paper newsletter. You like newsletters, don’t you, Stuart? So that’s how I got into writing for and helping to lay out the off-season participant newsletter, the Building Burning Man newsletter and this and that. One thing led to another. And suddenly I looked down and realized they’d given me a business card that said I was the Minister of Propaganda. It was great.

All of those firsts were really fun just because they were new. I love doing things that haven’t been done. I get bored easily. So it was like the internet was this new shiny toy, right? Just a couple of years into my tenure there, it’s like, “Wow! There’s what? We can have online discussion groups? Holy crap. Wait a minute. You’re on the Well? I’m going to get a Well account. We’re going to like chat and yeah, a website?” Good God. How cool is that?

So that really fueled the growth of the community, but also kind of kept my interest alive in it and led to a lot of long-term infatuations. 

ANDIE GRACE: 

Right! Well, you mentioned the webcast. Tell us about the year that that happened. How did it come together? Because that was way, you know, that was pretty big time for that time. 

STUART MANGRUM: 

It was in fact, it was so unlikely that the current webcast manager Motorbike, Matt, recently wrote a history of webcasting on playa, and I saw the draft. He believed that webcasting had started in I think 2002 or 3 or something like that. But no, there was an attempt to do it as early as 1995. It was literally for the lack of a cable. We just didn’t have enough cable to put the tower together for the line of sight. 

In ’95 also I believe the guys from Monk Magazine did what they called, they claimed it as a first, but really what they did is they uploaded some photos from the event on a sat phone to their website, which kind of sort of qualifies. 

But we actually did video in ’96. And I’ll never forget looking at the control room computer and my friend David Beach, who helped project manage that and drove it; Beach and Jon Luini and Kale Peoples, iStorm, all those guys who’d come out that year specifically just to do that. And they’re clustered in front of the machines, they’re like “Fucking Japan. There’s a guy in Japan watching this. Holy crap!” That was a big deal. That really seemed an impossible come true.

 

ANDIE: 

You want to take us out?

STUART: 

All right. That’s all we got for this one, my friends. But there’s more in the vaults. So if you like it, let us know. And we will keep producing more episodes, more installments in “A People’s History of Burning Man.” Thank you, Actiongrl, for all the good work.

ANDIE: 

Thank you, Stuart.

That’s it for this episode of Burning Man Live, which is and shall continue to be a production of the nonprofit Burning Man Project, made possible in large part by donations by friendly folks like you who sidle on over to donate dot Burning Man dot org, and drop us a little bit of the cool green. Well, I would love to say thank you to all of the subjects who contributed to this episode of People’s History of Burning Man, and everyone who made this episode possible.

Big appreciations to the Burning Man Live production team: Vav-Michael-Vav, kbot, Allie, DJ Toil, and you, Stuart.

STUART: 

All right.

ANDIE: 

And as always. Thanks, Larry.

STUART: 

Thanks, Larry.

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