In 2003, my first burn, I camped next to embassy around 7:30 and esplanade. One of the guys in my camp brought a VoIP phone and connected it to whatever internet was available at the time. The phone was a lifeline for many people, back in the days when communicating from the playa was incredibly hard.
Your version is way cooler. Thanks for bringing a little magic to the playa.
Can you update the "did not answer" flow to, instead of six busy signals and hanging up, be the dialog to end of the Matrix (1999)? The film concludes with Neo talking into a phone booth phone to the audience and I think it would be fitting here as an Easter egg.
I saw your Reddit post and decided to post it here (my first HN post). Didn't think it would end up front page, but love to see that people here are calling it and having nice chats with burners. My apologies if this blew up more than intended on your end.
How has it evolved over the years? Certainly internet access on the playa has gotten easier than when you first launched it. What was the first connectivity solution?
Is the phone more used for inbound or outbound? Calling the phone seems fun, but I wouldn't want to get in the way of a bunch of people standing in line to make a call, or use it for emergencies.
This is amazing and has me wishing we had pay phones again.
Maybe they could come back and offer "free" service in high-density areas and fund via pre-roll ads or something. But perhaps the culture of remembering phone numbers is too far gone and it's easy enough to find charging.
Our first time out on the playa together, my girlfriend and I stopped by this phone booth and made a couple of calls. And because we stopped, we saw the FSM camp next door, and a giant sign saying "Weddings Here", so we inquired. They offered us free rings and then announced our wedding over a loudspeaker. In 2 minutes we had an entire wedding party, complete with best man, an elder to give away the bride, 25+ guests, and an officiant. My newly-minted best man even gave me one of my favorite playa gifts ever as a wedding gift. We opted not to "make it official", though they offered. It was a truly incredible experience. Thanks FSM!
This is a great project! I've been to Burning Man 10x and interactive projects are my favorite part.
Also, if I may, for folks that might appreciate more phone-based spontaneity, I've built an app to revive the social phone call. It works like a bat signal. Light your beacon and it reaches all your friends at once. The first friend to answer connects 1-1 and every other signal quietly drops. Check it out at trybeacon.chat
I'm not sure why, but my ISP blocked this page and sent a push notification saying, "This device tried to visit a website that may compromise it or contain dangerous content."
Tech, finance, and political people definitely don't make up close to the majority. You'd get sort of laughed at if you tried networking earnestly about like tech stocks or LLMs. Generally I don't prefer socializing with techie types from SF, the folks I met at Burning Man were nothing of the sort.
It's mostly just adults who really like dressing up, building stuff, and staying up really late dancing and partying.
I've been a dozen or so times, dating back to 1994.
It's changed over the years - price has gone up, scale has gone up, and rules have become more strict. Not surprising when there are 70k people instead of 3k. Some people (fairly) don't like these changes. And some people like to badmouth things they've never experienced.
It's still the best party going on anywhere in the world that week. Most people you meet are not in tech. The crazy art pieces (most of which are interactive) are like nothing you will find anywhere else. It's definitely fun.
I stopped going regularly because it's a big expense and time commitment and I wanted to allocate my limited budget of both to other adventures. But if you haven't been, you should go.
The last time I went, there was this dude in a camp next to where I was camped. The entire week I was there, I only saw him sitting and drinking; he was totally hammered the entire 7 days and didn't go anwhere (AFAICT). That really saddened me: he could have done the same back home wherever he had come from; what's the point of coming to BM if you're going to just sit in one place and get drunk?
I really wanted to take it all in, so I stayed away from drinking or smoking, and had a great time! There is so much to see, so many creative people to interact with. You can end up having a deep conversation on just about any topic under the sky with random people. I ended up chatting with this Physics graduate student about, of all things, quarks (an area of specialty for him). He ended up patiently explaining various things to me, as if we were long-lost friends.
My recommendation: jump in with both feet in the spirit of contribution and cooperation. Have fun, respect boundaries, contribute however you can.
Haven't went myself either, but I've heard from some people that the smaller Burning Man spin-offs retain more of the original vibe and are often cheaper even when you include costs of travel. A lot of people come to AfrikaBurn from all over the world, for example.
That being said, the very nature of the event involves spending thousands of dollars to live in the desert for a week. So the audience is obviously mostly people who have the money to do so.
For what it’s worth one of my coworkers has been going for over 20 years and he still loves it. Most people giving you an opinion formed it by reading comments on social media.
I’d encourage you to talk to people that have actually been if you want to have an informed opinion. I don’t know shit about it since my n=1 sample size, but he’s someone who’s opinion I trust so I’d personally probably check it out if I was inclined.
My son goes to small Burning Man events in New York and has a great time, these are really affordable in terms of admission, travel, etc. I've met the campers on the last day when my son was packing up and it seemed like a great scene.
I was at a different kind of retreat which in some sense opened a portal to "another world" for a week and I'd say the regional Burning Man events were controversial in that circle. Like some people went to them and thought they were great, other people went to them and picketed the access road to protest their perception that the events were a wasteful use of fossil fuels. Here's an article about similar protests at the main event
> Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.
Why not both?
Well off tech people can have fun too. In fact, the wealthier, the more fun the event can be, because it means more ability to do cool stuff, be generous, and avoid trouble. As for tech people, an event that attracts tech people does not make it a tech event. For instance, tech people tend to enjoy metal music, and you are going to find a lot of tech people in metal festivals, but there, music is what bring people together, not tech.
Techies/wealthy people remain a minority, not a majority. In fact, if you tell someone you're in tech, expect to be booed/slightly shamed; as it's the type of people a lot of regular burners have a judgment against.
But again, nobody's gonna ask you what you do at Burning Man. And if they do, just say "I'm alive." That's gonna fit the culture.
What I'll say is you'll definitely see an influx of more superficial/wealthy people coming for the last 3 days. Rich shallow people who don't care about the Burning Man spirit and just want to come for the final party, they don't bother to come for the whole week, they just rent an expensive RV for the last few days.
If you do go, go for the whole week, and you'll get to experience the real burning man in the first few days.
yes, being rich makes being self sufficient much much easier :) But there a lots of less well of people and it depends on your definition of "fun". But with right crew and right mood enchanters it can be a blast. But mostly you get what you put in. If you expect to be entertained so this is not the right place.
It’s what you make of it and who you surround yourself with.
Some people treat it like a music festival and chase DJs the whole week. Some people immerse themselves in the rest of the culture.
The demographics have definitely been skewing wealthier over time, but it’s still around 50% under $100k income and 10% over $300,000 according to the (admittedly unscientific) census.
My friend went in order to network with tech people and now has met some people pretty high up, some of whom are funding his angel round for his startup. Make of that what you will.
I don't think we can divide things into clean 'fun' and 'not fun' buckets. It totally depends on what things you find fun.
There are SO MANY THINGS that other people love that I find miserable, and I know there are things that I find are amazing that other people would never want to do.
I’ve been going for a decade. There are some of those because they have the disposable income and job freedom to go but it’s not something you think about because no one talks about work or networking there
I haven't been in about 10 years, but yes it's incredibly fun. What you see on social medial is not a representation of the majority of attendees, but it is expensive to attend, especially if you need to travel for it.
It is fun, but in a miserable (hot, dusty, muddy) kind of way. You hear a lot about such rich/out of touch folks, but with 60 thousand people there, they can't all be do-nothing rich people. Someone has to set up all the art and volunteer to help burn down the buildings, and those folks are the most interesting by far. Go there to see all the cool fire art and ask the folks who make it how they did it, what was difficult, other projects they've worked on, etc. better yet, bring your own art or volunteer your labor on another art project. You'll have an amazing time, and see plenty of genuinely interesting folks, as well as contraptions you've never imagined. But beware it takes a lot of effort to participate.
My buddy called me yesterday just before he got into the playa so I could cover a sound tech gig for him. He's not "wealthy" by most folks' standards.
He is a tech guy, though.
But he keeps having to go to oil production facilities on site in Wyoming to maintain IT infra. It pays okay but it's not the kind of stuff I would do now that I'm mostly able to retire into audio/music work and the minimal amount of festival EMT/ free clinic volunteer stuff I do.
He's a genuine and kind person and has spent a lot of time doing nice things for folks because he likes doing those things. For instance, he was running the makerlab here in the sticks for a couple of years. He got the American legion hall setup so there is now a space for local artists to play.
That's how I know him, at least.
There are a lot of folks in this world who've gotten to some degree of comfortability some way or other, usually some combination of "the old fashioned way" (my parents passed on and left me their IRA) or the more usual way of working for several decades at some tedious skill that pays well in some circumstances.
Folks like my buddy have made a rational decision to just "kind of do whatever"; he has what he needs, he's not super old, and if you've managed to secure a spot out in the middle of nowhere and figure out not-too-annoying-but-inexpensive ways of maintaining that lifestyle, then a lot of options open up.
According to him, he brings a lot of generator equipment and tools (including a welder) and spends his time out there fixing stuff for folks or maintaining stuff like the poorly-configured mesh network equipment other, similarly minded nerds bring out. He troubleshoots folks' generators or vehicles.
Does that sound fun?
It sounds fun to me, to just go somewhere and help folks when I can.
Even if a lot of those folks are spun, or dumb, or party people trying to social climb or whatever. I am certain that given the fame and the proxemity to SF-style wealth there are plenty of well off folks trying to party with folks while networking, but I am equally certain that there are a whole rainbow of other ways that folks are being out there.
I don't like being at events that large, so that rules it out for me, in the same way that I have spent a lot of time at Kerrville Folk Fest but have avoided the Rainbow Gathering.
And to be clear, he's going to a party and it's an easy place to find "unique" substances or people to have fun with.
But I do see how there has to be some amount of community there, given how many folks are going to be with people and not just be tourists.
I am likely projecting to a small degree, but my impression is that largely that's the vibe out there, folks enjoying doing things because they find them satisfying rather than because they can monetize the behavior somehow.
Maybe that satisfaction is dressing up fancy and doing many days worth of drugs. Maybe that is running a bar for strangers, maybe that's making art for other folks to enjoy, maybe it's fixing busted bicycles, maybe it's getting a generator running again.
Having been "involved" with a certain amount of off grid raves and other kinds of gatherings, that's my general understanding of that culture. I'd assume it is in play out there as well.
It is what you make of it, you can just consume or take a creative role, but once the price/attendance ballooned ~20 yrs ago, they kinda changed their audience. You might have a local group that does similar things if you want to get a taste without such a large commitment.
>Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.
not sure what answer you expect to get here, on the forum hosted by the most noteworthy VC firm in silicon valley. the people why say burning man sucks now will usually say it sucks because of the ycombinator types
Definitely not fun. I discourage everyone from going. There is absolutely no weird hijinks or chicanery, mind-altering substances, colorful costumes, or gigantic interactive sculptures. Some people claim you can join communal camps and work on a project together but I've never seen it. Don't know where people got the idea that there's random free food and booze. Nobody interesting to talk to, nothing to do, and worst of all, the view is terrible. I don't know why people keep going.
I'm not sure why people really really really want it to be that so they can have a simple reason to hate on it. I'm sure there are fancy people there having a fancy time... but it's 80,000 people and probably 79,000 of them are not millionaires and billionaires. Just friendly weirdos being living in the desert for a week.
They're the fringes, along with the increasingly large contingent of tourists/festies/sparkle ponies. The majority are actual burners and they are a wild and unorthodox bunch. Look up the 10 Principles if you want to understand the actual culture
https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/ -- "Decommodification" is the most important one to keep in mind, particularly with this audience, as I imagine some here would have trouble not trying to productify/commodify everything
the other perspective is that its the crowd that has gotten all their dopamine and serotonin fixes all around the world and choose to do this
people don’t generally say what they do for capitalism there, so it doesn’t matter about the performative social standings after disclosing, its fun af
there are no guard rails, at least compared to other events. it is only strict compared to its former self.
I never thought I'd be the sort of person to go to Burning Man, and this is my first year off since I started going nearly a decade ago.
I started by going to a regional burn (or what some people call a "ten principles event") because a girlfriend had a bunch of friends that wanted to go. I had always been a bit in awe of the art and such from BM itself, but weary of the drugs/party culture (I was a nerd that made the annual trip to San Diego Comic-Con, PAX, etc) and didn't think it'd be my scene.
Without going down an entire rabbit hole: it changed the entire trajectory of my life. I've made the best friends I've ever had and now spend a good chunk of my time working on large art projects, helping run a theme camp, and being involved in this group of weirdos year round.
A few years of being involved locally made the desert seem like an inevitability, and when I finally went, it wasn't the life changing experience everyone told me it'd be: because it already was, even without me being there. But it did quickly become one of my favorite places in world.
My honest advice? If you're anywhere near a Burning Man regional event, find a way to get involved and check that out first. I think that's a great way to see if you vibe with the culture around the event, and it'll give you a sense of whether trekking out to the desert is a good fit.
Also, as an aside on the wealthy tech/finance front: one of the first camps I shacked up with was mostly a bunch of blue collar types who liked to work hard, with two retired grandmother-type figures who helped run camp logistics. Tech money (including mine) certainly helps fund things (because the city is expensive to build), but at least in the scene I run in, the tech types are not the majority, and sure don't act like your typical tech bros.
It has always been a challenging but highly rewarding experience for me. It is what you make of it - if you choose to be cynical about "very well off tech people", that's all you'll see. But Burning Man is multitudes. For me, it's about witnessing pure human creativity and playfulness. Your first time out on the playa at night will likely be one of those lifetime memories you'll appreciate having.
Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.
You're not far off.
Burning Man is like Coachella, SxSW, and San Francisco, itself.
It used to be cool, and interesting, and counter-culture.
But then it got overrun by tech people and grifters and assorted wannabes who think they can buy their way to coolness, when that's something that can only come from within.
I called. Talked to a perfectly decent guy who was there for the first time. He was there with his wife, but didn’t bring his younger children. Pleasant conversation. And there was a line of people waiting.
There's a bunch of neat public payphone art projects out there. A friend of mine runs Futel, which has some fairly elaborate voice menus and several phones installed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futel
In Australia, Telstra is required to keep the payphone network up and running. You can make free outgoing calls to landlines and mobile phones. And I just read that you can call inbound as well (which I did not know). Now the fun begins.
I always wanted to build a local mesh network of pay phones on the playa and call it Black Rock Telecom. Maybe 12 or more phones set on plazas. Geographically not being located in the US made this project tricky to realise.
The real-time stats on the website are fascinating. Did you set those up to satisfy your own curiosity, or to give remote callers a sense of "presence" at the playa?
A little of both. It was popular enough off of a Reddit post last year that people were hearing a lot of busy signals. I thought it might entertain some folks to see just how busy the phone has been in the last hour.
Stoned burner picks up, mumbles "Uhhh, hullo, who dis?" into the horn while eyeing two giant wasp-colored octopi overhead making love
"Hello sir and or madameperson. I won't take up much of your time. See, your number was posted to the pre-eminent forum for everything that goes fast and breaks things."
"Uhhh, yeah whatever man"
"I'll cut right to it, seeing that you're an important, busy man like myself. I will just take one short minute to talk to you about our lord and saviour, *VC Money*."
"You already have impressive event experience going, but do you know if AIs are recommending it? I will set up llms.txt for free for you, no pressure, not trying to pitch anything. If not interested, just reply 'not interested'".
It has changed a bit in recent years, but there's still only very spotty cell service at Burning Man. Enough people can figure out how to look up a phone number that this phone still dials out thousands of times during the week.
The bigger problem for this project is because of phone spam, fewer people will answer calls from unknown numbers, so a lot of those calls go to voice mail.
Is it possible that people don’t realize you can make free calls? Perhaps they think you need coins, which they don’t have on them.
Similar to interactive installations in museums. People are afraid to touch things in museums. You really need a big sign to tell them it is the purpose to play with it.
I ripped the coin-aware guts out of a pay phone I bought from Craigslist, and replaced them with a basic touch-tone board, then hooked that up to a voice-over-IP adapter so it can make calls over the Internet. All of that is powered via power-over-ethernet, including the light in the sign above the phone.
It used to get a little bit of Internet directly from Burning Man itself via a 20 foot tower pointed near center camp, but now it just uses Starlink, which is easier for my campmates to set up without me and much more reliable.
For power, it is now plugged into a solar generator that is occasionally recharged from a gas generator.
The live status dashboard at the bottom is a fantastic touch. Reminds me of the best kind of hacker projects that combine physical retro hardware with modern web telemetry.
One of my favorites is to ask the person what's the most amazing thing they've seen that day, and you'll likely get widely varying answers given where they are.
But you could also call and try to sell someone an extended warranty for their couch without breaking. It doesn't matter as long as you (and hopefully they) have fun with it.
I had an idea like this years ago, only my idea was to put two of these on the playa and have them only call each other. Do you could pick one up, the other would ring, and you could talk to a random person.
An old injury, but I'm always devastated to see BRC stuff on HN. It's like watching Elon snap a Nazi salute at inauguration: an unwelcome but undeniable admission that something (or someone) admirable can shift smoothly to moral horror without losing (or perhaps even burnishing) its reputation.
BRC was an artistic rebellion, and now it's where people like me go to network.
I bet the dataset of who is calling who is pretty valuable. It's people related to others who were willing to drop a bunch of money to go to the desert, so you know they likely have some disposable income. If this operator isn't collecting this, it may be a good business opportunity for a competitor.
The only data I collect is my phone bill, and the only thing I do with it show hourly stats on the site and a summary of calls at the end of the event.
So happy to see that the comments so far are just Burning Man hate. I appreciate SomaFM's impact on my appreciation for electronic music and alternative music streaming services back in the '90s, but outside of that I'm pretty sure it's mostly been a net negative from a cultural standpoint in total.
I have the DroneZone playing on a dedicated SomaFM web radio in my living room right now. This makes up for a lot of negatives in the world. As a genuine question are the specific net negatives of Burningman? (The classic burner who is better than you because he goes to burning man sucks and all but I'm pretty sure that guy would suck just as much if he made his whole personality about anything else).
This phone is my project. I'm happy to answer questions.
In 2003, my first burn, I camped next to embassy around 7:30 and esplanade. One of the guys in my camp brought a VoIP phone and connected it to whatever internet was available at the time. The phone was a lifeline for many people, back in the days when communicating from the playa was incredibly hard.
Your version is way cooler. Thanks for bringing a little magic to the playa.
Can you update the "did not answer" flow to, instead of six busy signals and hanging up, be the dialog to end of the Matrix (1999)? The film concludes with Neo talking into a phone booth phone to the audience and I think it would be fitting here as an Easter egg.
I saw your Reddit post and decided to post it here (my first HN post). Didn't think it would end up front page, but love to see that people here are calling it and having nice chats with burners. My apologies if this blew up more than intended on your end.
How has it evolved over the years? Certainly internet access on the playa has gotten easier than when you first launched it. What was the first connectivity solution?
I like your idea and I was really impressed by the film The Matrix, but how can we know that it’s not another voice agent?
I've told you this before, but I'll tell you again - thank you for running this, has been delightful in my experience!
Very cool project; thanks for making it.
Nice. I'm curious how it works? I don't know much about VoIP, I remember being amazed by Skype back in the day, that it could call landlines.
So nice to see such projects! Thank you for doing that.
such a cool project! does it show somewhere if the phone is busy? I can see it shows when the last call ended...
Nice dude, thanks for building it
Is the phone more used for inbound or outbound? Calling the phone seems fun, but I wouldn't want to get in the way of a bunch of people standing in line to make a call, or use it for emergencies.
This is amazing and has me wishing we had pay phones again.
Maybe they could come back and offer "free" service in high-density areas and fund via pre-roll ads or something. But perhaps the culture of remembering phone numbers is too far gone and it's easy enough to find charging.
Thank you for making and posting about this!
Our first time out on the playa together, my girlfriend and I stopped by this phone booth and made a couple of calls. And because we stopped, we saw the FSM camp next door, and a giant sign saying "Weddings Here", so we inquired. They offered us free rings and then announced our wedding over a loudspeaker. In 2 minutes we had an entire wedding party, complete with best man, an elder to give away the bride, 25+ guests, and an officiant. My newly-minted best man even gave me one of my favorite playa gifts ever as a wedding gift. We opted not to "make it official", though they offered. It was a truly incredible experience. Thanks FSM!
Did you make it official later?
Blessed be his noodly appendages!
Flying Spaghetti Monster?
What was the gift?
What's the point if not to make it official? Otherwise there are no stakes, no benefit, and the whole thing would amount to cosplay, right?
That's awesome, congrats!!! Amazing things happen on the playa.
This is a great project! I've been to Burning Man 10x and interactive projects are my favorite part.
Also, if I may, for folks that might appreciate more phone-based spontaneity, I've built an app to revive the social phone call. It works like a bat signal. Light your beacon and it reaches all your friends at once. The first friend to answer connects 1-1 and every other signal quietly drops. Check it out at trybeacon.chat
That... is a great idea. Does the audio call go through your app? Or the regular network?
I'm not sure why, but my ISP blocked this page and sent a push notification saying, "This device tried to visit a website that may compromise it or contain dangerous content."
Brad Templeton did this 20 years ago, https://www.templetons.com/pq/build.html
My phone booth is definitely not the first out there. Brad's was there at least 2004-2006, and this one's been out most years since 2013.
Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.
Not trying to be flippant, genuinely curious if my impression is based on reality or am I making things up.
I've been twice and I really enjoyed myself.
Tech, finance, and political people definitely don't make up close to the majority. You'd get sort of laughed at if you tried networking earnestly about like tech stocks or LLMs. Generally I don't prefer socializing with techie types from SF, the folks I met at Burning Man were nothing of the sort.
It's mostly just adults who really like dressing up, building stuff, and staying up really late dancing and partying.
I've been a dozen or so times, dating back to 1994.
It's changed over the years - price has gone up, scale has gone up, and rules have become more strict. Not surprising when there are 70k people instead of 3k. Some people (fairly) don't like these changes. And some people like to badmouth things they've never experienced.
It's still the best party going on anywhere in the world that week. Most people you meet are not in tech. The crazy art pieces (most of which are interactive) are like nothing you will find anywhere else. It's definitely fun.
I stopped going regularly because it's a big expense and time commitment and I wanted to allocate my limited budget of both to other adventures. But if you haven't been, you should go.
Burning Man is ...... what you make of it.
The last time I went, there was this dude in a camp next to where I was camped. The entire week I was there, I only saw him sitting and drinking; he was totally hammered the entire 7 days and didn't go anwhere (AFAICT). That really saddened me: he could have done the same back home wherever he had come from; what's the point of coming to BM if you're going to just sit in one place and get drunk?
I really wanted to take it all in, so I stayed away from drinking or smoking, and had a great time! There is so much to see, so many creative people to interact with. You can end up having a deep conversation on just about any topic under the sky with random people. I ended up chatting with this Physics graduate student about, of all things, quarks (an area of specialty for him). He ended up patiently explaining various things to me, as if we were long-lost friends.
My recommendation: jump in with both feet in the spirit of contribution and cooperation. Have fun, respect boundaries, contribute however you can.
Haven't went myself either, but I've heard from some people that the smaller Burning Man spin-offs retain more of the original vibe and are often cheaper even when you include costs of travel. A lot of people come to AfrikaBurn from all over the world, for example.
That being said, the very nature of the event involves spending thousands of dollars to live in the desert for a week. So the audience is obviously mostly people who have the money to do so.
For what it’s worth one of my coworkers has been going for over 20 years and he still loves it. Most people giving you an opinion formed it by reading comments on social media.
I’d encourage you to talk to people that have actually been if you want to have an informed opinion. I don’t know shit about it since my n=1 sample size, but he’s someone who’s opinion I trust so I’d personally probably check it out if I was inclined.
My son goes to small Burning Man events in New York and has a great time, these are really affordable in terms of admission, travel, etc. I've met the campers on the last day when my son was packing up and it seemed like a great scene.
I was at a different kind of retreat which in some sense opened a portal to "another world" for a week and I'd say the regional Burning Man events were controversial in that circle. Like some people went to them and thought they were great, other people went to them and picketed the access road to protest their perception that the events were a wasteful use of fossil fuels. Here's an article about similar protests at the main event
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/28/burning-man-...
No don’t go, it sucks! It’s dusty and hot!
> Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.
Why not both?
Well off tech people can have fun too. In fact, the wealthier, the more fun the event can be, because it means more ability to do cool stuff, be generous, and avoid trouble. As for tech people, an event that attracts tech people does not make it a tech event. For instance, tech people tend to enjoy metal music, and you are going to find a lot of tech people in metal festivals, but there, music is what bring people together, not tech.
Techies/wealthy people remain a minority, not a majority. In fact, if you tell someone you're in tech, expect to be booed/slightly shamed; as it's the type of people a lot of regular burners have a judgment against. But again, nobody's gonna ask you what you do at Burning Man. And if they do, just say "I'm alive." That's gonna fit the culture.
What I'll say is you'll definitely see an influx of more superficial/wealthy people coming for the last 3 days. Rich shallow people who don't care about the Burning Man spirit and just want to come for the final party, they don't bother to come for the whole week, they just rent an expensive RV for the last few days.
If you do go, go for the whole week, and you'll get to experience the real burning man in the first few days.
yes, being rich makes being self sufficient much much easier :) But there a lots of less well of people and it depends on your definition of "fun". But with right crew and right mood enchanters it can be a blast. But mostly you get what you put in. If you expect to be entertained so this is not the right place.
If you can make it to Burning Man, then your life is what you make it. And if that's true, then it could be fun.
It’s what you make of it and who you surround yourself with.
Some people treat it like a music festival and chase DJs the whole week. Some people immerse themselves in the rest of the culture.
The demographics have definitely been skewing wealthier over time, but it’s still around 50% under $100k income and 10% over $300,000 according to the (admittedly unscientific) census.
https://blackrockcitycensus.org/sociodemo
My friend went in order to network with tech people and now has met some people pretty high up, some of whom are funding his angel round for his startup. Make of that what you will.
I don't think we can divide things into clean 'fun' and 'not fun' buckets. It totally depends on what things you find fun.
There are SO MANY THINGS that other people love that I find miserable, and I know there are things that I find are amazing that other people would never want to do.
>it's mostly very well off tech people
well you're here at hacker news
If your impression is from social media, you will mainly be seeing those who love posting themselves on social media.
Fun is what you make it, and fun is often a personality based thing. The fun people have a blast and the boring people stay bored.
I’ve been going for a decade. There are some of those because they have the disposable income and job freedom to go but it’s not something you think about because no one talks about work or networking there
Related:
I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494151
I haven't been in about 10 years, but yes it's incredibly fun. What you see on social medial is not a representation of the majority of attendees, but it is expensive to attend, especially if you need to travel for it.
It is fun, but in a miserable (hot, dusty, muddy) kind of way. You hear a lot about such rich/out of touch folks, but with 60 thousand people there, they can't all be do-nothing rich people. Someone has to set up all the art and volunteer to help burn down the buildings, and those folks are the most interesting by far. Go there to see all the cool fire art and ask the folks who make it how they did it, what was difficult, other projects they've worked on, etc. better yet, bring your own art or volunteer your labor on another art project. You'll have an amazing time, and see plenty of genuinely interesting folks, as well as contraptions you've never imagined. But beware it takes a lot of effort to participate.
My buddy called me yesterday just before he got into the playa so I could cover a sound tech gig for him. He's not "wealthy" by most folks' standards.
He is a tech guy, though.
But he keeps having to go to oil production facilities on site in Wyoming to maintain IT infra. It pays okay but it's not the kind of stuff I would do now that I'm mostly able to retire into audio/music work and the minimal amount of festival EMT/ free clinic volunteer stuff I do.
He's a genuine and kind person and has spent a lot of time doing nice things for folks because he likes doing those things. For instance, he was running the makerlab here in the sticks for a couple of years. He got the American legion hall setup so there is now a space for local artists to play.
That's how I know him, at least.
There are a lot of folks in this world who've gotten to some degree of comfortability some way or other, usually some combination of "the old fashioned way" (my parents passed on and left me their IRA) or the more usual way of working for several decades at some tedious skill that pays well in some circumstances.
Folks like my buddy have made a rational decision to just "kind of do whatever"; he has what he needs, he's not super old, and if you've managed to secure a spot out in the middle of nowhere and figure out not-too-annoying-but-inexpensive ways of maintaining that lifestyle, then a lot of options open up.
According to him, he brings a lot of generator equipment and tools (including a welder) and spends his time out there fixing stuff for folks or maintaining stuff like the poorly-configured mesh network equipment other, similarly minded nerds bring out. He troubleshoots folks' generators or vehicles.
Does that sound fun?
It sounds fun to me, to just go somewhere and help folks when I can.
Even if a lot of those folks are spun, or dumb, or party people trying to social climb or whatever. I am certain that given the fame and the proxemity to SF-style wealth there are plenty of well off folks trying to party with folks while networking, but I am equally certain that there are a whole rainbow of other ways that folks are being out there.
I don't like being at events that large, so that rules it out for me, in the same way that I have spent a lot of time at Kerrville Folk Fest but have avoided the Rainbow Gathering.
And to be clear, he's going to a party and it's an easy place to find "unique" substances or people to have fun with.
But I do see how there has to be some amount of community there, given how many folks are going to be with people and not just be tourists.
I am likely projecting to a small degree, but my impression is that largely that's the vibe out there, folks enjoying doing things because they find them satisfying rather than because they can monetize the behavior somehow.
Maybe that satisfaction is dressing up fancy and doing many days worth of drugs. Maybe that is running a bar for strangers, maybe that's making art for other folks to enjoy, maybe it's fixing busted bicycles, maybe it's getting a generator running again.
Having been "involved" with a certain amount of off grid raves and other kinds of gatherings, that's my general understanding of that culture. I'd assume it is in play out there as well.
It is what you make of it, you can just consume or take a creative role, but once the price/attendance ballooned ~20 yrs ago, they kinda changed their audience. You might have a local group that does similar things if you want to get a taste without such a large commitment.
>Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.
not sure what answer you expect to get here, on the forum hosted by the most noteworthy VC firm in silicon valley. the people why say burning man sucks now will usually say it sucks because of the ycombinator types
Definitely not fun. I discourage everyone from going. There is absolutely no weird hijinks or chicanery, mind-altering substances, colorful costumes, or gigantic interactive sculptures. Some people claim you can join communal camps and work on a project together but I've never seen it. Don't know where people got the idea that there's random free food and booze. Nobody interesting to talk to, nothing to do, and worst of all, the view is terrible. I don't know why people keep going.
I heard The Man is smaller this year.
I'm not sure why people really really really want it to be that so they can have a simple reason to hate on it. I'm sure there are fancy people there having a fancy time... but it's 80,000 people and probably 79,000 of them are not millionaires and billionaires. Just friendly weirdos being living in the desert for a week.
I can confidently say that burning man is fun.
What type of fun it ends up being for you is the question - the fun scale: https://kellycordes.com/2009/11/02/the-fun-scale/
They're the fringes, along with the increasingly large contingent of tourists/festies/sparkle ponies. The majority are actual burners and they are a wild and unorthodox bunch. Look up the 10 Principles if you want to understand the actual culture
https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/ -- "Decommodification" is the most important one to keep in mind, particularly with this audience, as I imagine some here would have trouble not trying to productify/commodify everything
the other perspective is that its the crowd that has gotten all their dopamine and serotonin fixes all around the world and choose to do this
people don’t generally say what they do for capitalism there, so it doesn’t matter about the performative social standings after disclosing, its fun af
there are no guard rails, at least compared to other events. it is only strict compared to its former self.
I never thought I'd be the sort of person to go to Burning Man, and this is my first year off since I started going nearly a decade ago.
I started by going to a regional burn (or what some people call a "ten principles event") because a girlfriend had a bunch of friends that wanted to go. I had always been a bit in awe of the art and such from BM itself, but weary of the drugs/party culture (I was a nerd that made the annual trip to San Diego Comic-Con, PAX, etc) and didn't think it'd be my scene.
Without going down an entire rabbit hole: it changed the entire trajectory of my life. I've made the best friends I've ever had and now spend a good chunk of my time working on large art projects, helping run a theme camp, and being involved in this group of weirdos year round.
A few years of being involved locally made the desert seem like an inevitability, and when I finally went, it wasn't the life changing experience everyone told me it'd be: because it already was, even without me being there. But it did quickly become one of my favorite places in world.
My honest advice? If you're anywhere near a Burning Man regional event, find a way to get involved and check that out first. I think that's a great way to see if you vibe with the culture around the event, and it'll give you a sense of whether trekking out to the desert is a good fit.
Also, as an aside on the wealthy tech/finance front: one of the first camps I shacked up with was mostly a bunch of blue collar types who liked to work hard, with two retired grandmother-type figures who helped run camp logistics. Tech money (including mine) certainly helps fund things (because the city is expensive to build), but at least in the scene I run in, the tech types are not the majority, and sure don't act like your typical tech bros.
I've had a great experience every time I've gone.
It has always been a challenging but highly rewarding experience for me. It is what you make of it - if you choose to be cynical about "very well off tech people", that's all you'll see. But Burning Man is multitudes. For me, it's about witnessing pure human creativity and playfulness. Your first time out on the playa at night will likely be one of those lifetime memories you'll appreciate having.
It’s a bunch of tech bros pretending to be counterculture while hanging out with Grover Norquist, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt.
If you want to hang out with those people it will be fun for you, but be honest with yourself about what it really is.
Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.
You're not far off.
Burning Man is like Coachella, SxSW, and San Francisco, itself.
It used to be cool, and interesting, and counter-culture.
But then it got overrun by tech people and grifters and assorted wannabes who think they can buy their way to coolness, when that's something that can only come from within.
I called. Talked to a perfectly decent guy who was there for the first time. He was there with his wife, but didn’t bring his younger children. Pleasant conversation. And there was a line of people waiting.
Burning man livestream here, still early and setting up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BgytKvsORM
Page says it's on "Chomolungma" but it's "Ceiba" on the maps, just in case you can spot the phone on the stream.
Looks like the link has changed from when you posted - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYltJN7n6NQ
Thanks for the report. Fixed.
Just gave it a go, but I'm getting "That number is no longer in service", so there might be power/connectivity issues?
There's a bunch of neat public payphone art projects out there. A friend of mine runs Futel, which has some fairly elaborate voice menus and several phones installed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futel
For a moment I thought this would be related to 2600's payphones of the world [1]
1. https://www.2600.com/payphones#0/19/8
In Australia, Telstra is required to keep the payphone network up and running. You can make free outgoing calls to landlines and mobile phones. And I just read that you can call inbound as well (which I did not know). Now the fun begins.
Wish I was on playa right now… thank you for your gift! Hope I’ll be home again soon
)’(
Brings whole new meaning to "Burner Phone." Nice.
I just had a great chat with Michael, who was having a hard time because his girlfriend didn’t come with him to Burning man. Great chat!
I always wanted to build a local mesh network of pay phones on the playa and call it Black Rock Telecom. Maybe 12 or more phones set on plazas. Geographically not being located in the US made this project tricky to realise.
called and got through after three attempts, had a pleasant conversation and it uplifted my mood. thanks!
This is great. I have a COCOT myself with an ATA adapter. So so much fun, great job!
The real-time stats on the website are fascinating. Did you set those up to satisfy your own curiosity, or to give remote callers a sense of "presence" at the playa?
A little of both. It was popular enough off of a Reddit post last year that people were hearing a lot of busy signals. I thought it might entertain some folks to see just how busy the phone has been in the last hour.
phone rings
"You already have impressive event experience going, but do you know if AIs are recommending it? I will set up llms.txt for free for you, no pressure, not trying to pitch anything. If not interested, just reply 'not interested'".
"Have you accepted the Living Musk into your life?"
"Hello sir/madam, I'm calling about the extended warranty for your car!" /s
0 outgoing, nobody knows numbers anymore and even if you could look it up you won't punch numbers like its 1992.
With that said, amazing project. super cool that people can call in
It has changed a bit in recent years, but there's still only very spotty cell service at Burning Man. Enough people can figure out how to look up a phone number that this phone still dials out thousands of times during the week.
The bigger problem for this project is because of phone spam, fewer people will answer calls from unknown numbers, so a lot of those calls go to voice mail.
Is it possible that people don’t realize you can make free calls? Perhaps they think you need coins, which they don’t have on them.
Similar to interactive installations in museums. People are afraid to touch things in museums. You really need a big sign to tell them it is the purpose to play with it.
This is a beautiful example of hacking, making something useful!
Would be fun to read if the calls were recorded and transcribed.
Or leave them as private, ephemeral experiences for the two involved parties.
That seems like it would destroy the “vibe” of the entire concept. Would you use a pay phone if the recording and transcript was publicly available?
I looked but I don't see how it works. How does it get power? I suppose it uses a some single board computer and VOIP.
I ripped the coin-aware guts out of a pay phone I bought from Craigslist, and replaced them with a basic touch-tone board, then hooked that up to a voice-over-IP adapter so it can make calls over the Internet. All of that is powered via power-over-ethernet, including the light in the sign above the phone.
It used to get a little bit of Internet directly from Burning Man itself via a 20 foot tower pointed near center camp, but now it just uses Starlink, which is easier for my campmates to set up without me and much more reliable.
For power, it is now plugged into a solar generator that is occasionally recharged from a gas generator.
there are a lot of gas generators powering people's camps.
The live status dashboard at the bottom is a fantastic touch. Reminds me of the best kind of hacker projects that combine physical retro hardware with modern web telemetry.
Phun and wholesome project. What service do you use for VoIP?
voip.ms. They were the cheapest I could find when I built this in 2013, and they’ve worked just fine since.
No phonebooks there. Just a map. Oper-a-tor?
Dammit I left my acoustic coupler at home.
Dude this is a amazing idea...
What do you even talk about on a phone call like this?
I have both intense social anxiety and FOMO. Knowing that this thing exists for a week and then no more is torture.
Anything or nothing.
One of my favorites is to ask the person what's the most amazing thing they've seen that day, and you'll likely get widely varying answers given where they are.
But you could also call and try to sell someone an extended warranty for their couch without breaking. It doesn't matter as long as you (and hopefully they) have fun with it.
I had an idea like this years ago, only my idea was to put two of these on the playa and have them only call each other. Do you could pick one up, the other would ring, and you could talk to a random person.
Would be fun to see how the calls went lol
Fun! Just wished someone a happy burn.
An old injury, but I'm always devastated to see BRC stuff on HN. It's like watching Elon snap a Nazi salute at inauguration: an unwelcome but undeniable admission that something (or someone) admirable can shift smoothly to moral horror without losing (or perhaps even burnishing) its reputation.
BRC was an artistic rebellion, and now it's where people like me go to network.
I can't take me anywhere.
I bet the dataset of who is calling who is pretty valuable. It's people related to others who were willing to drop a bunch of money to go to the desert, so you know they likely have some disposable income. If this operator isn't collecting this, it may be a good business opportunity for a competitor.
Slow your roll, not everything is a startup, some things are just for fun
The only data I collect is my phone bill, and the only thing I do with it show hourly stats on the site and a summary of calls at the end of the event.
Did the original founders intend burning Man to be a parody on the trash heap that is 21st century human civilization?
No.
If you are genuinely curious, here are the original ten principles of Burning Man that were established when the event was still in San Francisco:
https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/
No. But some of it was certainly a parody of the trash heap that was 20th century human civilization. Those groups are still around.
So happy to see that the comments so far are just Burning Man hate. I appreciate SomaFM's impact on my appreciation for electronic music and alternative music streaming services back in the '90s, but outside of that I'm pretty sure it's mostly been a net negative from a cultural standpoint in total.
I have the DroneZone playing on a dedicated SomaFM web radio in my living room right now. This makes up for a lot of negatives in the world. As a genuine question are the specific net negatives of Burningman? (The classic burner who is better than you because he goes to burning man sucks and all but I'm pretty sure that guy would suck just as much if he made his whole personality about anything else).
Can you give reasons?
I never was there, but it seems a place where people do creative things, with bringing people together - like this simple project here.
Love to see Burning Man hate.