AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

Speaking of tools and Burning Man – wasn't the project of Stewart Brand and various alt-tech hippies exactly that, trying to transform the very concept of tool use into something more humane?

I think it's a mistake to take Hakim Bey too literally. They say Burning Man is a TAZ, and far be it from me to say otherwise, but it's not one which does me much good. Burning Man is hard to get to, and while it might have been pure anarchy in its early days, it has become unavoidably institutionalized, a place of rules and regularities.

So I՚m not going to Burning Man this year, for various lame reasons. But I feel myself pulled towards it nonetheless, in a weird way that is not exactly wanting in the normal sense. I guess I do want to go again, but I՚m not completely sure why – sure, it՚s a hell of a fun party, but I՚m not that much of a party person. The art is spectactular, but art is not usually capable of motivating me to travel so far from the comforts of home. The political aspect of it – the gifting economy, the sense of collectively building a workable temporary utopia – has a lot of appeal, but it՚s hard to see what it has to do with the power structures of the default world, and politics without real stakes is an unredeemable waste of time. There are a ton of interesting weirdos to meet there, but those connections too don՚t seem to travel back into the default world. I certainly had some worthwhile and unique experiences, but for the most part felt kind of out of it – too old, too asocial, too square, too intellectual, and without access to the right kinds of creative power that would enable me to go beyond spectator status. And it really is not a place for spectators.

His best-known concept was the Temporary Autonomous Zone, a sort of short-lived bubble of alternative reality where humans could live as they were supposed to, free of oppression. Burning Man is a TAZ, or was thought to be, it may have accumulated too much structure by now. A party is a TAZ, partly because (as Prince sang) they aren't meant to last.

Burning Man

30 Oct 2021 - 28 Aug 2025

I've been to Burning Man exactly once, but it made a deep impression on me, although like so many countercultural things I couldn't manage to really get with the program despite longing to belong.

Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production, Fred Turner is a good exploration of the relationship between Burning Man and silicon valley tech culture.

One fascinating thing about Burning Man is that it is on one level this amazing chaotic party, but also highly highly organized, in a particularly hippie-inflected way. This is a very large handbook for DPW workers which gives some sense of the organizing methodolgy.

Burning Man aggressively extends the tradition of hedonic ecstasy...[Wild] visuals, disorienting sonics, and a self-conscious excess of sensory stimulation . . . all help undermine stabilized frames. . . . [It’s a] full-sensorium brain machine designed to bring us in tune with our mind’s ongoing construction of real-time on the fly.

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