CHARLIE: 

You don’t need to go big…

It’s not a giant hurdle to come to Black Rock City. You don’t need to be part of a huge theme camp. You don’t need to have the most shiny art car, or be the most aesthetically pleasing human in the universe. You can be you in all of your beautiful glory, and you will be welcomed inside Black Rock City…

There’s inevitably going to be surprises, and that’s one of the glorious things about it.

STUART: 

In the beginning, or so legend has it, Burning Man existed in a state of perfect anarchy, a sort of Garden of Eden, but without any plants and with flame effects. There were no plans because we had no idea where we were going; no rules and regulations because we didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of limits; and no bureaucracy because in the beginning, it was a pure do-ocracy; make your own permission and beg no forgiveness. The only forms we had were joke forms, like an application for an artistic license (I still have mine) or a soul surrender contract. 

Now, this is perfectly fine when we were a small camp. But growth has consequences, and cities are built on rules, literally. I had a government professor once who explained this for dummies. Imagine a small group of people camping next to a river. Now, if they’re only a few of us and the river is big enough, does it really matter where anyone goes to pee or make coffee? But of course, the more of us there are, the more we need to create social agreements.

The ancient Greeks knew this, which is why so many of our modern words for this — words like policy, politics, and police — are all derived from their word for city: polis. Of course, the Romans knew it too, and their word for city, civitas, is literally the very basis of civilization. 

Now, once upon a time Black Rock City was a joke city, a city in name only, but of course, that’s no longer the case. And as the city has grown, it has inevitably acquired rules and regulations — some might say too many rules and regulations. 

Now, of course, we want to be safe. We want to meet our permit obligations, and we want the 10 Principles to flourish. But there’s a point when systems get too complicated and start scaring people away from doing all the things that make Burning Man so Burning Man, like starting a theme camp or bringing an art project or a mutant vehicle to the desert. These things are complicated enough without making them more complicated through process. 

So, there has been something of an agonizing reappraisal in the organization of a move to streamline processes and root out unnecessary bureaucratization, which is to say, any rules that are designed to make the organizers’ lives easier by making the participants’ harder. They’re not always easy to spot, but sometimes they are… And we’re doing something about them!

So I’m excited to, in this episode, to talk with some of the people who are leading this effort at Burning Man Project, starting with Louder Charlie, Charlie Dorman, the Operations Director.

 

STUART: 

It’s not going to be harder this year, right?

CHARLIE: 

It’s not going to be harder this year. It’s going to be the opposite.

STUART: 

If anything, we’re going to try to make it easier, possibly, as radical as that sounds. 

CHARLIE: 

Right, and maybe dispel some myths!

STUART: 

Maybe it’s because the shiny pictures of the really radically expensive camps, you know, the beautiful giant Henry Chang custom rod art cars; people look at that, and they’re like, “That’s beautiful. I could never do that myself.” You don’t have to start at that level. You don’t ever have to go there, right? Some of the best mutant vehicles out there are based on a scooter or an electric wheelchair.

CHARLIE: 

And some of the most fun you’ll have is in those tiny little interactions that you have with the guys at the back who just brought something simple, and they’re running a very weird little moment; and it’s very low-tech, low production, and oh my God, it’s fun.

STUART: 

I was in an opera sing-off, a spontaneous opera sing-off at dinner one night. Some guys came into Lazy Girl and were sort of bragging about being professional singers, and I brought Caveat over for dinner, and I said, “I’ll bet you’re not as good as he is.” And it turned into this like dueling Rigolettos.

CHARLIE: 

I ended up sharing a steak with an art dealer from somewhere in the Middle East and just, you know, a human in my normal life, I would never, ever, ever have run into anywhere at all. And I just ended up having a really fabulous meal, like just sitting at the side on the street, on the back shooting the shit with this random guy. It was great, really great. 

STUART: 

Things happen; there are magical things that happen. But there is a serious note, Charlie Dolman. I remember a few years ago, back when we were doing the Cultural Direction Setting project, there was a sentiment held by a lot of people out there that Burning Man is supposed to be hard. 

CHARLIE: 

That’s funny. 

STUART: 

“We can’t make it too easy for people or it won’t be Burning Man!”

How do you feel about that?

CHARLIE: 

I love it when you ask good questions, Stuart. 

The answer to that lies in “What does ‘hard’ mean?” There’s a difference between something that requires effort and something that is difficult or complicated. I think Burning Man is meant to take some effort. It shouldn’t be the same as walking into a park. Some intention into your process is a good thing, but that doesn’t need to be hard, and it doesn’t need to be gargantuan.

And I also want to just recognize that intention is where we’re at right now. People have told us that we have made it too hard to come to Burning Man. And, you know, in some ways, that’s 100% true: hard and complicated. And so if we make it easy so that everybody… I mean, we’re at the end of 100-mile road, so, you know, people are just not going to walk in off the street. So there’s tension there. Yeah. 

STUART: 

Let’s talk about that, about that move to make it perhaps a little bit easier for people to bring their gifts to Black Rock City. Call it de… is de-bureaucratization a word? I think I just coined it; cutting the red tape, or, as I’ve heard you put it simply, maybe putting a little more kindness into the equation. What’s behind that thinking?

CHARLIE: 

The first year coming out of the pandemic, 2022, was a very hard year for a lot of people. It was coming out of Covid. It was changing our mindset. And I think people, you know, had forgotten how to do Burning Man, and in some cases, just also forgotten what it’s like to be in deeply social environments, and that was tough. And that includes all of the people that work for the organization. 

Then we went into the mud year, which really triggered some pretty significant operational challenges that required some kind of deep focus.

And we started getting feedback that we were not being nice, that some staff were just being overzealous. You know, this whole kind of “Burnier Than Thou” thing.

I did have a conversation with a staff member who was like, “That person can’t come in and do that thing,” and this human had just made up this rule. 

STUART: 

Yeah. 

CHARLIE: 

And I can see that it had been done for great reasons. They were trying to stop trash coming onto the ground. That’s fine. But you can’t do that. That’s thought crime. You can’t accuse someone of doing something before they’ve done it. That’s not right. 

STUART:

Yeah.

CHARLIE: 

And so we spent last year really trying to focus on human interaction and being kind to each other generally and all of the things that we do. So that means staff to staff, staff to participants, and to just the whole city. Let’s just be kind to each other. We had some success with that. I personally have had feedback from folks who said, “I had a great interaction doing this thing in that place with these people.” So we made a really great start to it.

That smaller number of humans put the organization, you know, the people charged with bringing this thing to life and being in service of the community, it put us in a different position. People felt, for one reason or another, more empowered to give us feedback, for which I’m very grateful. And they started to tell us, you know, “It’s got too hard. These forms are too long. You guys are too bureaucratic. There’s not an appeals thing here.” 

And a small sliver of that is because people just didn’t like that their way of camping wasn’t really culturally appropriate, and we were giving them feedback, maybe not super well, but they didn’t like the feedback. And, you know, I understand that.

But a lot of it wasn’t related to that. A lot of it was just humans who really were trying to do the best that they could, and did not feel that the processes were really supporting them in doing that. 

I had a conversation with someone a little while ago. He is trying to spin up a project. And he said to me, “You know, every time I get an email from you guys before I open it, it sends me into deep anxiety because I just freak out that I’m not going to be able to do…” whatever, whatever it is. And that broke my heart, honestly broke my heart, because that should never, ever, ever be the case. With reference to the previous conversation about it being hard, that’s one thing, but anxiety-inducing and excessively labor-intensive and that much of an emotional and intellectual lift for humans that they are freaked out by it? No, that should not be the case. And I apologized profusely to him. And, you know, we’re working on that particular instance. 

All of those things came together, and it’s kind of given us this impetus to be like, okay, well, where can we eliminate some of the load? Where can we make things clearer? Because sometimes it’s not necessarily that the thing is complicated, it’s just that it’s not clear. That puts a load on the other person to try and figure out what it is that they think we want, because they believe that we will penalize them if they get it wrong.

STUART: 

Or the rules were built up over the years, like different coats of paint of different colors, and they didn’t necessarily refer back to the originals, right?

CHARLIE: 

That is 100% accurate. 

I want to be sure that folks understand that this has not come about through any bad intent. The analogy here is you think of a theme camp, like, your first year, you come into your theme camp, and at the end of that first year, you’re like so excited because it went really well, but you also learned this lesson. You’re going to improve this, and you’re going to improve that. You have all these ideas. The staff and the organization has done the same thing. But that improvement, that constant desire to make things better, and closing all those little loopholes, you know, like, “Wow, there was a problem there, right?” 

So it’s all of this; it’s a cumulative effect of a lot of good intention has actually resulted in a thing that doesn’t feel good. And so I just want folks to really appreciate that the staff did not set out to make folks feel uncertain or overly complicated, but we need to own that that’s the outcome of some of our actions.

STUART: 

So I’m glad you brought that up, because it’s hard to imagine how you get to a state of bureaucratization. The little rules add up, and a lot of times, they’re for absolutely not just necessary but mandatory reasons, like safety rules, right? We have to impose certain safety regulations in order to qualify for a permit and be a responsible civic authority, right?

But it’s possible for individuals who are in enforcement positions for that to take their enforcement authority a little bit too broadly, right? …and to get out ahead of it and forget the cardinal rule of Burning Man, which I think you and I have talked about before: 

My cardinal rule of Burning Man is don’t make too many fucking rules!

I’m serious. We should always be very thoughtful about any rule that we impose. Our origins are in a state of pure, pure, beautiful chaos. And every rule is a little bit tightening of the straitjacket on fun and creativity. So we have to be very thoughtful of that. And I really think that we need to be minimalists when it comes to imposing rules and regulations.

You know, the whole process. I know you’re essentially the mayor of Black Rock City. You get complaints about all the potholes all over all the roads, all over town. But let’s take it from the top. 

Ticketing. Are we taking some measures this year to streamline that purchasing process, now that we’re in a state where perhaps supply and demand are a little bit more evenly matched?

CHARLIE: 

100%

The information communicated on the ticketing page has created some questions. We’re going to be in the process of answering those questions to kind of help people guide their way through it. I think that we’ve changed the sale process so that you don’t have to do a registration with a Burner Profile. So that’s a step that’s taken out. 

And we are looking at other pieces. So for example, the ticket allocation process, like what can we do to try to make that simpler? If a Steward’s ticket, which is the way that we allocate tickets to ensure that participant groups…

STUART: 

Camps and vehicles and art projects.

CHARLIE: 

Right. So they get the amount of tickets they need to do the thing, right? Because they can be sure of that. What is the mechanics for allocating that? And is there limits on numbers of tickets that people can buy in individual places like you? There has been in the past, and it’s meant that it’s been really kind of complicated for people to distribute all this stuff out. Can we make it simpler? 

So, some of that work is still in process right now, but my hope is that folks come out of the end of it feeling a little bit better. The language going out hopefully is making that clearer for people.

STUART: 

Okay. Something else that everyone loves to complain about. What are we doing to cut down on wait times to get into the city and out of the city? That whole Gate kerfuffle is a pain for a lot of people in both directions.

CHARLIE: 

Well, the first thing that’s really obvious and really easy is, just making sure that we have enough staff at the right time. That’s not always easy. Think about Gate runs 24 seven for six weeks, and it’s something like 7000 shifts that they have across their entire thing. So, filling that up is harder than you imagine. First of all is supporting Gate in making sure that they have the right number of humans. So you’re going to see a big recruitment drive to get folks coming to Gate. It’s really actually super fun out there being out in the dust. They are a fantastic bunch of humans. So that’s the first bit.

The next piece for people who come in early: we used to have a wristband that people have to wear. So, if you came in early, we could identify that you had this wristband. It takes 30 seconds to put on a wristband, and we put on 30,000 of them. So you do the math. It’s like eight days worth of some time or whatever it is. So that’s gone because we don’t need that. And if you need to leave, we’ll just give you a wristband on the way out. We can just give you that band rather than banding everybody, just in case. So that’s a lot simpler. 

The third thing is an interesting one. We have better information. So we are now, you know, using this dashboard that folks probably saw last year, dashboard.burningman.org. And that communicates the latest information. And that’s the first part of people being able to help themselves, like, “Is now a good time to go? Look at the dashboard. Oh no, the travel time on Gate Road is this… I’m maybe going to wait it out a little bit.”

So yeah, there you go.

STUART: 

Actually, that wristband thing coincided with the Gate staffing thing because in the lead-up to the event, when people are showing up to build their camp and their art projects, that’s probably when Gate has a more difficult time staffing the Gate operations, right?

CHARLIE: 

That you are joining the dots to it, you’re joining the dots. Yeah, exactly.

STUART: 

Fewer people, less time, less time or wait, more agony.

CHARLIE: 

And then on the way out, one thing that everybody has experienced is you come down K Street at the back, and you go down those little tubes, we call them the Fallopian Tubes that reach down to the Greeter Station, and then you come out, and it’s just this dust bowl chaos mass of all cars coming in all directions, and just it’s, it’s a mess. It causes all the traffic to back up into the city. So this year, we’re going to be putting lane guides into that place so that all of the traffic that comes out is guided onto Gate Road, and that will improve people’s time to get out of the city and onto Gate Road. 

STUART: 

And what about, up at the pavement, the last leg of getting onto the road?

CHARLIE: 

One of the things that we had up there is, again, limitations with staff trying to get actually licensed staff. You need permitted humans to do that ‘flagging’ (it’s called) on the road, that guy in the orange jacket that’s waving at you. 

The other thing is that humans have a habit of trying to be in one lane on the gravel, and what we find is when we run two lanes on the gravel. Then we can push out about 500 cars an hour. And if we have one lane on the gravel, that goes down to about 250 cars an hour. We are going to be focusing this year on making sure that it is always two cars on the gravel. 

The other thing for folks to know is that we can only put between 500 and 600 cars an hour on the road. According to our permit, with the federal government and various traffic studies and all the other, you know, legal bits and pieces, that’s our limit. So pulsing — that process of kind of stopping on Gate Road — is set up to allow that amount of cars onto the road because if we let more than that, then the whole road grinds to a halt. And then starting it up takes a long time, a very long time, actually. And it just, it doesn’t work. So pulsing is set up for that.

So what we did last year and we’re going to improve on this year is really making sure that the amount of traffic on Gate Road is again communicated through that dashboard, because there’s a limited amount of time that I can do to get people onto the blacktop. I can run it as fast as we can, but there’s a limit to that.

But I can tell you, hey, now is not a good time to come to Gate Road because there’s already a three-hour line there. They’re moving it, you know, at 500 cars an hour, but it’s going to be three hours. Some of that is like, yes, let’s do the things that we can as quickly as we can. And some of it is, let’s give people information so they can make their decisions.

STUART: 

If you’re just going to sit in your car, why don’t you just stay and maybe do another line sweep, right?

CHARLIE: 

Right! Or the MOOP test, you know, that little MOOP test that we do with the BLM? If you do that on your camp.

STUART: 

Exactly. Help your friends or your neighbor camp or the road out in front of your camp, which everybody seems to think is not their camp, but which, of course, we know is.

So what about DMV? What are we doing, Charlie, to make it easier for people to bring their amazing, awesome mutant vehicles to Black Rock City?

CHARLIE: 

So there’s a licensing, or there used to be a licensing fast-track for authorized vehicles. That’s being changed, and all returning vehicles that are in good standing now have this opportunity to go through a fast-track process. 

Also changing: So if you have a night license or a day license, you only need to do one inspection. In the past you had to go do two inspections. So between both of those things, as well as cutting a bunch of questions from the form, I think 25% of the questions are just getting cut, it’s going to be a significantly smoother, more joyful experience to get rolling in Black Rock City.

STUART: 

And hopefully more people will embark down that path and bring more ridiculous rides. 

We spoke with Chef Juke about that.

 

STUART: 

All right. So we’re talking about, the Black Rock City simplification of process, busting red tape. Chef Juke, what steps has the DMV Council taken to simplify the whole mutant vehicle licensing and registration process this year? Go!

JUKE: 

Oh, well, the DMV has actually been working on this for a few years, and this year we put a lot of effort into streamlining the process. 

You know, one of the things that we noted is that most of the vehicles that apply to come to Burning Man each year are returning vehicles. We know who they are, we know what the vehicles are, so the very first thing folks will notice when they’re applying to bring a mutant vehicle is the application is about 25% shorter, fewer questions. 

And for all returning vehicles this year, we used to have them come for both a day and a night inspection, and we’re now expanding a program we started with a select few vehicles a few years ago, but basically, any returning vehicle only has to come to the DMV on-playa once. They get to choose whether they come during the day or during the night time, but if you’ve come out before we’ve licensed you before, no longer do you have to come for two separate inspections.

STUART: 

Well, that’s handy. Yeah, but how do you check nighttime, visibility at high noon on the high desert there? I imagine a lot of people shading their eyes to look down into lights.

JUKE: 

Well, but this is a thing. If they’re a returning vehicle, we’ve already seen their vehicle at night. We’ve taken photographs of their vehicle at night. So if we don’t have any record of an issue or that we said, “Hey, next year, you know, do some more with your lights.” You’re going to be able to come with just one inspection. This is a program we started a few years ago called Zipline. We’ve just basically expanded it to pretty much all returning vehicles.

STUART:

So I gotta say, your department name screams dehumanizing bureaucracy. What are you doing to put more of a human face on things this year? I understand there’s some open hours, AMAs. Tell me about that process.

JUKE: 

Well, I will say that internally and externally, when we talked to mutant vehicle owners, we’ve always said we really work hard to never become as bureaucratic as the default world DMV, our namesake. To that end, we’re trying to make sure that if people have questions, rather than just answering them via email, we’re now having basically an AMA. It’s a Zoom call, one hour, once a month, the first Friday of every month at noon Pacific. And anybody who is a mutant vehicle owner or interested in getting their questions answered about the process of applying for and bringing a mutant vehicle to Burning Man is welcome to join. 

And we also, you know, we always take emails. We answer 2,000 emails every year when folks email us at DMV@burningman.org. We usually try to answer every incoming question within a day or so. 

We’ve got a great website, part of the Burning Man website, where we’ve got a lot of information that people can look at before they email us, but we’re always here to answer questions year-round.

STUART: 

Yeah, I’d love it if more people read the manual, but, there’s a lot of weird ideas out there, Juke. You and I both know it. There’s people who will tell you that they’re not accepting any new mutant vehicles or our old favorites; the wheels can’t be visible; you have to spend a million dollars. 

Let’s say that I’m a first-time dreamer of a mutant vehicle. I’ve got a golf cart and a dream. What’s the best way for me to get on the right track as far as getting that safely built and registered?

JUKE: 

Come to the mutant vehicle pages on the Burning Man website. If you go to anywhere at burningman.org, click on the menu in the upper right-hand corner, and in the search bar, type in Mutant Vehicle, you will get a plethora of information. The first page is our Mutant Vehicle criteria and licensing page, and that lays it out pretty well. It also has links to show you mutant vehicle applications that didn’t make the cut. 

You know, our goal is to be a permission engine. We want to encourage and invite mutant vehicles of all shapes and sizes. At this point, we have so many creative folks who find so many ways to mutate and change an underlying vehicle or build them from scratch that to get an invite, it really needs to look unlike a stock or street vehicle. It doesn’t have to be a $1 million vehicle. That’s a very common misperception, but the key is: mutate it, change it up, make it look something interesting that doesn’t look like what you started with.

STUART: 

I think we have Mr. Henry Chang to blame for the million-dollar threshold there. His stuff is beautiful, but that’s the stuff that people see on social media, these amazing custom rods. They don’t see, you know, the electric wheelchair base with a kayak on top of it, which is one of my personal favorites, by the way; shout out to John Sarriugarte.

JUKE: 

Yes. And most people don’t realize that over half the vehicles that we license are the smaller vehicles: 10, eight people or less. Most of them are golf cart bass. They notice the big ones, and there’s really only about 20 of the really huge ones, the ones that get in the news articles every year. But most of them were the smaller ones.

And one of my all-time favorites is a golf cart covered in fabric, painted fabric, and it’s a little rocket ship, and it is a rocket ship as if it was drawn by a six-year-old. And that’s exactly what it looks like. It is janky, it is small, but it’s a beautiful work of art, and it makes me smile every time I see it.

STUART: 

And it’s got room for at least one passenger in addition to the driver?

JUKE: 

It seats four — four very happy-looking people.

STUART: 

If my mutant vehicle only seats one, is that still okay?

JUKE: 

It’s totally fine. We don’t have a seat requirement. The main focus is mutation.

STUART: 

Okay, but if I do have an empty seat, I have to let anybody onto the vehicle, right?

JUKE: 

Uh, it’s not exactly that. We encourage vehicle owners to give rides when they can, when it’s safe to do so. I mean, we’re not in a position to tell folks that, hey, if there is a Burner who might have imbibed a little too much, who is demanding to get on your vehicle, they must let them on. But the goal, ideally, is if you have room for passengers, be a community resource. Share what you’ve got. And a lot of the vehicles do that. 

STUART: 

Well, nobody should expect Uber, right? If you do get a ride somewhere, you have no idea where you’re going and you better just say, “Yes, I like it!”

JUKE: 

A mutant vehicle is not an Uber. The mean vehicles are encouraged to pick up riders whenever they can, and it’s safe to do so. But again, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be able to stop for every person who flags them down.

STUART: 

I just want these kids to know: if you see an old gray-haired man, who looks like me, struggling to keep up, and you have an empty seat, please let me on. Thank you.

JUKE: 

You know, we’ve had a few programs over the years to help vehicle owners get connected with participants, and the mutant vehicle owners are more than willing to do that. And a lot of the mutant vehicle owners, that’s part of what makes it fun for them, is to pick up folks and give them rides around a playa and show off their art. Because it is, these vehicles are art in motion.

STUART: 

So, I got to ask a little history question here. You’ve been around this program a long time. There’s a lot of rules and regulations. How did we get here? Were people gaming the system to basically be able to drive around to comply with the art car loophole?

JUKE: 

At first, when I first started going 31 years ago, there were no driving rules, so people drove everywhere. And that soon became untenable. It became unsafe as the event grew. And so safety was the first factor of why we started limiting and restricting driving at the event.

Then a small group of people started bringing their art cars, their artistic vehicles, not because Burning Man had invited them for that, per se. It’s just that Burning Man attracted people who seem to like to create interesting movable art. And as that grew and more of those folks who had already done their art cars for personal reasons outside of Burning Man started showing up at Burning Man, it became a feature. And as it became a feature that inspired more people to create these vehicles. And now we have, you know, a majority, probably of people who build these vehicles specifically to bring to Burning Man. 

In the beginning, just a decorated vehicle would get you a little license. But there came a point where we had a limit to the number of vehicles we could invite, and we had to figure out how to do that. And we worked to create reasonable criteria for what kinds of vehicles did we want to invite to be able to drive around. That criteria is a little different than you’ll see from almost anywhere else, which is what makes it fairly unique to Burning Man or Burning Man-type events. It’s mutated, so it’s beyond, you know, not something you’re going to see normally on the street. We wanted to maintain this sort of uniqueness, and so we created this criteria for mutant vehicles. And for the most part, it works out great. Folks get it and they love it and appreciate it. Mutant vehicles are one of the iconic pieces of what makes Black Rock City what it is.

STUART:

I have witnessed firsthand the difficulty of getting something out there and keeping it running out there. Once again, to our new crowd of starry-eyed, new mutant vehicle mechanics, got any tips for safety and durability? How do they keep them running and keep them safe out there?

JUKE: 

Well, you know that all depends on the vehicle itself. The more complicated your vehicle, the more delicate your vehicle, the more challenged you may be in having it out there and keeping it running. I think one of the biggest things that people should be prepared for is: just like your tent, you don’t want your first time you really either assembling your mutant vehicle or really putting it through its paces, being once you get to your first time bringing it to Burning Man. 

Most of it is common sense, but you’ve got to add in the factor of being out in the desert. So you want to bring more supplies, more tools, more whatever you’re going to need to keep that thing running.

STUART: 

I call it Noah’s Law: Bring two of everything. Right?

JUKE: 

Exactly. 

A challenge some people have is: if they have a vehicle that needs to be assembled, you know, we can help them come a little early to have some time to do that, but sometimes folks overcomplicate the assembly, and it takes longer than they think. And we’ve had people spend four days of Burning Man just in camp trying to get their mutant vehicle working. And there’s a point where we’ll say, “Hey, at this point, you might really just want to give up on it for this year and go actually have Burning Man without the vehicle.” Planning is everything. Make sure you know how your vehicle comes together, know what it takes to keep it running, and make sure you bring it.

STUART: 

So, I know that electrification is a growing trend out there. 

JUKE: 

There’s a lot of conversation in some of the forums where meeting vehicle owners discuss. There’s a Facebook page for a meeting vehicle and art car owners. There’s a lot of discussion to that. There’s some who’ve been very, very successful using alternative fuels. There’s a fella who’s got a solar array at his camp and recharges his vehicle every day. And he mostly uses it in the afternoon and evenings, but it seems to work really well. And we’ve had folks using any number of different alternative fuels, including some folks who used the used oil from their camp kitchen for fuel for biodiesel.

STUART:

Nice. 

Okay, what else should we talk about? You got the ear of the community here, Chef Juke, what do you want to tell them?

JUKE: 

Bringing a mutant vehicle to Burning Man is not all fun and games. It’s work. Whoever’s driving your vehicle, they really need to be sober. They need to be alert. They need to be focusing on the operation of the vehicle. You have 80,000-some people out there, not all of them are going to be, how shall we say, unaltered, especially at night. It is an extremely distracting environment. 

There’s always a number of online discussions about what we call ‘Darkwads’ and whether or not somebody has the right to go unlit out on the playa. But when you talk to mutant vehicle owners, almost every mutant vehicle owner I know has a story of cruising slowly at four miles an hour with their large mutant vehicle, and somebody on a bicycle without lights rides right in front of them. And even at four miles an hour, if you slam on the brakes of a bus-sized vehicle, people can get hurt! So it’s really important that the drivers are alert and take that responsibility seriously.

If your vehicle is larger, it needs walkers, people walking in the front and to the sides and the rear of the vehicle to make sure people don’t run into them, and/or spotters on the vehicle making sure that if there’s a dangerous situation, that the driver may not be able to see, that they can alert them to it.

We have had injuries, and we have had deaths out there, and we have the names of the folks kind of emblazoned in our brains, and we don’t want that list to ever grow again.

STUART: 

Yeah, from my experience, nighttime is considerably more dangerous than daytime because of the Darkwad factor. 

JUKE: 

Absolutely.   

STUART: 

I have burned into my brain in the evening when we came within literally three inches of rolling over a completely unlit cuddle puddle out in deep playa with a very large dually-based zeppelin: The HindenBurke. 

Anything else you want to throw down, Chef Juke?

JUKE: 

Our whole goal is to help facilitate people bringing these great pieces of art. We have 130 volunteers who love working at the DMV. They love communing with the mutant vehicle owners. And it really is a joy.

STUART: 

All right, I think that’s great. I really appreciate you showing up. Thanks, Juke.

JUKE: 

Always happy to engage. Always happy to see your smiling face, Mr. Mangrum.

STUART: 

And pick up old people. I’m just saying.

 

STUART: 

Okay, Charlie. I was a little bit surprised to see that “delivered housing,” which went away, is coming back. It could be a blessing for some people who really need that kind of support. It could be seen as backsliding on our efforts to decommodify Black Rock City. That must have been kind of a tough decision, but where does it get us?

CHARLIE: 

I don’t think it was a tough decision. I’m going to be honest with you. I think one of the glorious things about Black Rock City is that it is an experiment, and we can change things. People can write in and tell us stuff, and we can take that feedback and run with it. We made this decision years ago because we didn’t want plug-and-play camps to be able to just rent 30 RVs and set up their, you know, hotel convenience camp. And like you say, sadly, what we did was we threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and ended up impacting, you know, the grandma who’s renting an RV and wants to camp at the back with her kids, or whatever it is, all those little moments and the bona fide use of camps where people had international campers, or they’re flying in, or like whatever it is. And so, yes, we don’t want to go backward. So we are introducing the ability to have “delivered housing” again but putting some criteria around it. 

STUART: 

Oh yeah?

CHARLIE: 

If you are a camp not in good standing then you cannot have housing delivered to you. And just for a sense of scale, that’s probably 20 to 30 camps out of the 1,500. It is a small number of camps who have operational or cultural challenges that are going to be the ones that can’t use this. The camps that people perceive to be plug-and-play camps that we are in a constant conversation with, really in an attempt to educate them and bring them more in line with the culture, those camps are not going to be able to use this function.

STUART: 

And, of course, the shady operator who wants to sell a package tour to Burning Man and parks himself out in open camping is not going to be able to use it either, yeah? 

CHARLIE: 

He’s not going to ever use it. You can be able to get deliveries to open camping, but it’s going to be limited to like five or six units. No one bothers to run that kind of operation for five RVs. It just doesn’t make financial sense.

It’s also worth saying that there are people who want to take advantage of Burning Man and want to capitalize on it, and some of them want to be more reliant than others, but depending on how motivated those humans are, there is a limited amount that we could do. We need to be vigilant. We need to do our best to look after the culture and preserve it from those that would try to gain from it, but it’s hard. And they do exist, these humans do exist.

STUART: 

Yeah. I mean, when we start talking about Decommodification and creating clearer policies for that, it’s easier said than done, right? Are you doing anything in that regard to make that clearer, easier, easier to understand?

CHARLIE: 

Yes. We are looking at Decommodification. As things that have been born at Burning Man or come to the playa have started to spill out into the outside world, which I love, people taking inspiration from the thing that they do on the playa and then taking that home and doing that in the world. I think that’s fantastic. I love that we can share some of that wonder with folks out in the world. But as that has happened more and more, some of it has veered into the land of maybe commodifying Black Rock City or using it as marketing tools. 

I mean, I think we all know that the influencers on Instagram is trying to sell a coat that they were given by a designer, and they took photos of themselves at Black Rock City. And, you know, this is supporting this designer’s shop, right? So some of that stuff is a very obvious no-no. But a lot of it is more gray because, as you point out, maybe someone’s running something that’s a fundraiser, but maybe it’s a fundraiser with sponsors at the fundraiser, or maybe it’s not a fundraiser, but it uses an asset like a car or a sound system or something that’s identifiable as something that’s been in Black Rock City… and 9 million other variations of that. And so it is hard. 

So we started with a group of mutant vehicle owners, and we’re continuing with a group of theme camp owners and a group of artists to sit down to see if we can create a clearly understandable set of guidelines that address at least the most common scenarios that come up. I don’t imagine that we are going to come up with something that’s going to answer every question because there are too many nuances in this area, but my hope is if we can eliminate or at least make the route to, you know, answering the question for, you know, 50 or 60% of these scenarios, it’s actually going to make the difficult ones that aren’t included in this scenarios easy to understand because at least we’re all working from the same shared baseline understanding of the most common stuff. 

So that’s a work in process right now. And it’s fascinating having these conversations because they’re really hard because of all of the different opinions and perspectives.

STUART: 

Well, to me, it just always goes back to motivation. Why is somebody doing what they’re doing? Is it to feed back into the culture? That’s one thing. Is it to exploit the culture and make your own profit? That’s another thing. Is it because you’re new and you just don’t get it yet? That’s the third thing, right? So, I’ve found it difficult to come up with blanket policies because every case really depends on the motivation of the individual.

CHARLIE: 

And add to that, everyone has a different perspective on what your motivation is. You may think your motivation is X, but from the outside it might look completely different to people from where they stand, right? 

And so, just understanding someone’s intrinsic motivation is part of it. But also how do you prove that? If it’s just about intrinsic motivation and someone is determined to take advantage of us, they will lie until they’re blue in the face. “I’m doing everything right,” and we all know that they’re not. What do you do with that?

STUART: 

Alright, so I know firsthand that over the years, the process of getting your camp placed has gotten increasingly complex. The first year I was placed, it was just, Harley tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, I want you to put your camp over there this year.” And I was like, “Okay, cool.” 

The last time I checked, that Placement questionnaire is up to 36 pages. Do we need all those pages, Charlie?

CHARLIE: 

A lot of that is education. So, each question comes with context. If you were to condense the questions down, it’s not 36 pages. And there’s some context there that’s kind of helpful. That aside, we are cutting a bunch of questions out of the Placement questionnaire this year.

We’re also recognizing that if you’re returning, if you’re bringing the same thing that you did last year, there are fields in the form that we can just pre-populate. This year, roughly 50% of the camps are going to be eligible for this fast-track process, which is having forms’ fields pre-populated, and just being able to kind of scoot through and submit it.

STUART: 

We wanted to find out more about that, so we had a little conversation with Level Placerman.

 

STUART: 

So, Level Placerman, the whole ops division of Black Rock City, is kind of on a charm offensive to help make things even more awesomer for more people. What’s your part in that?

LEVEL:

We’re constantly taking feedback. So, I just also want to acknowledge that every year, we try to dial things even better, try to make things more efficient. So this isn’t a new thing, but I think we’re like kind of pressing fast forward a little bit on some ideas that have been out there for a while. So with the placement process, people have felt like it’s a little bit onerous at times, the forms that we have are too long, and that is basically to help the flow of information work better for us. But we also recognize that it’s a lot for people. Some people are spending hours trying to figure out how to answer all the questions. 

So what we’ve tried to do is a couple of major things. One is if you are a returning camp that’s been to Black Rock City, and the last three times have been good years, and you’re in good standing, we created a fast-track process, and that fast-track process looks like a shorter form because we know who you are, we know what your camp is about, and we trust you because you’ve been doing that for a while. 

We’ve parsed out, taken out some questions overall for everyone, and we also are trying to pre-populate a good number of questions that took the most time to answer. So if you’re spending, you know, two hours on the form, maybe you’ll spend under an hour this year. 

The other major thing that we’re doing, part of the reason we do ask camps to submit new things every year is camps are adding and improving on what they do. And so you’ll have the chance to edit that response. You know, if you’re building a new dome, if you’re adding another happy hour, or if you’re taking away a happy hour. You can make those adjustments. So those are the probably two big headlines around the forms process.

STUART: 

I’ve watched the growth of Placement and the way that you’ve expanded the organization and built it out. But there was a time I remember when it was very, very few people. It’s almost like a siege mentality. A former director of the group once told me, “If I know the name of your camp, that’s bad because you did something wrong.”

Today, I see a very different situation where you are really trying to humanize, create more human connections between the fabulous places. And I know it’s still a numbers game. There’s only a few dozen of you, and there’s thousands of them. But I heard about the office hours thing. Tell me about that.

LEVEL:

Part of the magic I think of Burning Man is that you don’t always see, you know, all the people and all the levers happening, so that you can just have a magical experience, but it does take a lot of people to make it happen. And I think especially in a department and role like Placement, we’re a major community connector for a lot of people to what they think of as “The Org.” And so it’s been really important for me to make sure that we can get enough people in place to have a face-to-face with camps. When we talk about office hours, they are virtual, but you get to come on, I’m there, several of my volunteers are there, and we’re really there to answer any question people have. 

It was sort of an adaptation from we now have a Placement office on playa, and people can come up and ask us questions all the time. We’re really happy to help them on playa. We’re also really happy to help them during the rest of the year. And so, you know, we started these monthly office hours so that people could just come in, ask a quick question, pop out, or stay and hear kind of all of it because there’s questions that one camp asks that really pertain to many. We have an open door. 

Part of I think the challenge of trying to manage over 1,600 placed camps and the communication around that is: it’s faster sometimes to do over email and easier to track. And I’m doing my best to kind of crack that open so that, you know, we can call people when we need to and just talk like real people. 

Having phone calls, having these open office hours all helps to make it real and make people see that there’s real, passionate, caring people behind this work, and not just a bunch of bureaucrats that are just trying to push paper around.

STUART: 

And we’re doing another camp symposium this year, right?

LEVEL: 

Yeah. It’s an annual thing. This year it’s going to be March 22nd. It’s free of charge. Just check Burning Man’s website. You’ll be able to find it. 

Every year we bring together 500 or 600 camp organizers. We talk a little bit about kind of themes for the year. So you’ll probably be hearing this theme around trying to make things easier for the theme camp community.

And then we have a lot of workshops where people can come in, again, we’re pulling panels together of experienced theme camp organizers. And they share all the best information they have about how to build a really awesome camp frontage, or how to think about leadership and delegation in your camp, or how to manage conflict within camps.

So it’s really meant as a resource and a way to network and realize a lot of theme camp organizers often feel lonely because they’re like, what kind of masochist decides to plan this thing in the desert? They realize there’s a lot of them. And there at the camp symposium.

STUART: 

Yeah, I’m not the only person in spreadsheet hell! Okay.

LEVEL: 

Yeah, exactly.

STUART: 

So lots of resources. No excuse for not going at least asking the questions. I encourage people to set up their own camps. I think personally, there are too many big camps and not enough camps where everybody knows everybody. So find some of your friends. Pile into the truck together. Go get it.

I look at our purpose in building the city as being to create environments of surprise and delight and awe. And for me, that means mixing it up a little bit. So I like to do everything I can to encourage my friends who are theme camp organizers to not do the same goddamn thing you’ve done every year, right? You can have a tradition, but what are you going to do that I haven’t seen before? Because that’s what I go to Burning Man for.

LEVEL: 

Yeah, 100%. You should join the Placement team, Stuart. That’s what we’re looking for, too.

STUART: 

I’d be thrilled to come and present at the symposium again. I really always enjoy supporting that event. And there’s a place for me. I’d be happy to speak. Maybe I can do a little thing about change.

LEVEL: 

Yeah, I like that.

STUART: 

Thanks, Level. You’re great, as always. I love having you on the program. And I love everything you do, man.

LEVEL: 

It’s a labor of love.

 

STUART: 

So, I really do want to think about this, a philosophical approach to this. So like I said, for a long time, the golden rule of Burning Man was “Don’t make too many rules.” But over time, we know the rulebook has grown bit by bit, little by little, both the rules imposed on us and those we’ve made up on our own. How do we navigate between the necessary oversight, the things that we have to keep our finger on, and the unnecessary bureaucracy? How do you even tell the difference, Charlie?

CHARLIE: 

I mean, that’s the rub. Everybody sees the world differently, right? So you might present something as what you think is a very obvious like A and B leads to C, but when you look at it from the other side, or you look at it through the eyes of someone who’s just had a really terrible day, or the eyes of someone who’s had a really joyful day, it could look completely different. That is always something that ends up making life difficult. 

We try to consider everything from a cultural as well as an operational as well as a legal as well as a financial perspective. All of those components have to balance. The cultural component will always come first. Ultimately, at the top of the list, Burning Man Project is in service of the community, and you know, this amazing culture has spawned out of Black Rock City, and we need to understand that our priority is to preserve that and help that thrive. 

That must be balanced with the needs of the 15, or however many it is, government agencies that currently regulate Black Rock City. It is an astonishing number of agencies that have decided they want to give us a piece of paper with a list of things to do on it.

Yeah. The way that you get to the answer, like, what is the right priority to put into something? How do you balance culture and operations? And the answer is you just have to do it delicately, bit by bit by bit by bit. And it takes a long time and a lot of thought.

I’m very lucky. You know this, Stuart. We work with an incredibly intense and dedicated bunch of people who love Burning Man, the humans who are the ones who do this considering love Burning Man, and you know, many of them change their lives to come help make this thing happen. That is a really positive asset.

And I will also acknowledge that in the past few years, maybe what we haven’t done is engage the community enough in some of those decisions. Things like the housing decisions that we made a few years ago, it was made for very good reason, but if we’d engaged the community more at that time, then maybe we would have come up with a more nuanced approach that we’re now getting to. So, it’s not easy to have these conversations, and they take a lot of time, but it is worth it in the end.

STUART: 

It is so much faster just to make up a rule.

CHARLIE: 

It really is, but it doesn’t work because Black Rock City is many things to many people, and that’s one of the beautiful things about it, but it also means that everybody sees things slightly differently.

STUART: 

So what you have the ear of the community right now, or at least our little sliver of it. What are three things you want everybody who is coming to Black Rock City this year to know?

CHARLIE: 

First of all that, the weather’s going to be great! Uh…

STUART: 

Woo-hoo!

CHARLIE: 

I want people to know a few things. 

One, that we are working hard to try to make the experience in Black Rock City as smooth and seamless and enjoyable as possible. You know, we’ve been talking about the best burn ever on the Town Hall, and various other emails and bits and pieces have gone out, and our hearts and souls and all of our time and effort is really going on to thinking about that, and how do we actualize that? Imagine if everybody embodied that in their own way, and all of the groups of humans that were busy loading trucks and building art and kind of fixing the broken bit on the art car to bring it back, like, imagine all of those humans deciding that this is going to be the best Burn ever, and then bringing that energy into the city, that would be pretty cool. 

STUART: 

Great. 

CHARLIE:

The second thing that I would like people to know is that you don’t need to go big. It’s okay to bring a small thing to Black Rock City. And in fact, if you’re coming for the first time, it’s okay not to really bring anything! I’m going to go out on a limb there. It’s okay to come and experience and then maybe learn from that experience and probably decide you want to bring something in the future. You can participate by engaging in all the other activities that people bring and supporting theme camps and all of their weird activity. 

What I’m trying to communicate is that it’s not a giant hurdle to come to Black Rock City. You don’t need to be part of a huge theme camp. You don’t need to have the most shiny art car, or be the most aesthetically pleasing human in the universe. You can be you in all of your beautiful glory, and you will be welcomed inside Black Rock City.

STUART: 

Bam! Yep.

CHARLIE: 

And then the third piece that I would like people to know is… I don’t know. That’s a good question. I’m going to put that one on hold and think about it later. Right!

STUART: 

It’s a mystery. We should always leave some mystery in the equation, Charlie.

CHARLIE: 

There ya go. Yeah, we’ll come back to that one in a few months.

STUART: 

If I knew what was going to happen at Burning Man, I wouldn’t bother going because I’d already know, right?

CHARLIE: 

Yeah. There’s inevitably going to be surprises, and that’s one of the glorious things about it.

STUART: 

Okay, that’s the third thing: Prepare to be surprised on your best Burning Man ever.

CHARLIE: 

Prepare to be surprised at the best Burning Man ever!

STUART: 

Could you say that enthusiastically, please!?!

CHARLIE: 

The best. Ahhhh, the best Burning Man ever, Stuart!!!

STUART: 

Thank you very much, Charlie Dorman, Operations Director for Black Rock City. And, my friend, so good to have you on the program. Thank you for showing up, man.

CHARLIE: 

You’re welcome. Thank you, a pleasure to speak to you. 

 

STUART: 

You have been listening to Burning Man Live, the one and only official podcast of the Philosophical Center of Burning Man Project. I’m Stuart Mangrum, and I want to thank each and every one of you for, well, for all the things you do; for listening to the program, for sharing it with your friends, for writing us a good review, for sending us an email at live@burningman.org, or for maybe slipping a few of your hard-earned dollars into the money slot at donate@burningman.org. Thank you all so very much. 

Thanks also to all the people who helped make this particular episode happen. My guests Louder Charlie, Chef Juke, Level Placerman, and all the unusual suspects on the podcast crew: Vav Michael Vav, kbot, Actiongrrl, Lotus Position, DJ Toil… I can’t do it without you folks, either. 

That’s it. Stay tuned. We’ll do it again. Thanks, Larry.

 

 

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