about the Burning Man “vandalism” post that linked to a story in the Telegraph.
A befits an article in the “Tory”-graph, it’s wrong from the opening sentence. Burning Man has its own Ten Principles, none of which are about “a utopian vision of peace and love.” [*]
The poor reporting continues: "In recent years it has become popular with Silicon Valley millionaires, and billionaires. " This sentence is true only if, by recent years, the authors meant “the late 90s.” [**]
and so on. But on to the point of the article.
Paul Oakenfeld is bad news. He has clearly been trying to “sell” the Burning Man experience, which runs directly against the “decommodification” principle. Sadly, the “experience” Paul does sell violates at least four other principles, so he is swindling his customers as well.
Let’s take the camp’s own words;
A band of hooligans raided our camp, stole from us, pulled and sliced all of our electrical lines leaving us with no refrigeration and wasting our food, and glued our trailer doors shut.
Burning Man values pranks and especially performance art. Indeed, “glu[ing] our trailer door shuts” references a famous Burning Man prank and strongly suggests that a vital and hard-core group of Burners known as
“DPW” was involved. Depending on how the camp was generating power, the power interruption would have been closer to a “civic action” then “vandalism.” Indeed, I once did something similar (with the support of my community). One person’s “hooligan” is another person’s “prankster” or “performance artist” or even “practicer of civil dis-obedience.”
While Vandalism is wrong, if these reports on what happened are at all correct, I would have happily of joined the “hooligans.”
[*] Since the average Telegraph editor can’t to distinguish between “not whole-heartedly embracing capitalism” and “utopianism”, the sentence probably seemed “Fair and Balanced” to the staff.
[**] One famous example: as part of hiring process Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to evaluate Eric Schmidt to be CEO of Google was Larry and Sergey taking Eric to the 2001 Burn.