Burning Man explores the unstoppable DAO experiment and the largest internet nation

This article is a Burning Man field note written by Bankless general partner David Hoffman. The author feels that there is a certain connection between cryptocurrencies and Burning Man burners. If you become the former, you may also become the latter. vice versa.

I just got back from Nevada's Black Rock Desert, where for a week every year thousands of people gather for the annual Burning Man festival.

After working in the cryptocurrency space for over 6 years, I have discovered a connection between cryptocurrencies and Burning Man burners. If you become the former, you may also become the latter. vice versa. Through these relationships, I was told there was a strong similarity between Cryptozoologists and Pyrozoologists, but I never specifically understood why.

So for ten years, even my own Burning Man father has been saying to me, “David, you have to go to Burning Man.” I later developed relationships with many crypto citizens who said the same thing to me – and this year, I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

**Bankless Nation – Like cryptocurrencies, Burning Man is a rabbit hole. **

Just like cryptocurrency, when you enter the world of Burning Man, you also leave the old world behind. You put on a new persona...you choose a new persona. You explore new territory. These things are connected! The connection between Burning Man and cryptocurrency is more than metaphorical. Burning Man and cryptocurrency are parallel movements with common goals and values.

So to all the crypto folks out there reading this, please open your mind as much as you ask others to be open to crypto. For those Burners who are new to Bankless, welcome! I don't expect us to be the same people, but I do hope we can understand each other because if one of our actions is successful, it will be easier for the other person to do the same thing.

**This post is quite long – there’s a lot to say! ** To set up the powerful punchlines I want to present here, we'll start with Burning Man 101 and introduce themes and concepts used frequently in the Bankless universe. By the end, you'll notice the focus shifts to common ground...

Bankless Nation, we know cryptocurrencies are the flavor of the future. You're here to get a head start on the opportunity—to prepare for the weird, wacky future we all know is inevitable. Same thing with Burning Man. Its culture and values will one day conflict with your life, and your life may already conflict in many ways. If you keep reading, you'll be ready. You'll know how to recognize it and want to accept it for what it is: an optimistic social movement that wants to change the world.

Burning Man 101

First, some groundwork.

Burning Man is an annual event held in the middle of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, United States. It is the largest** event held on public lands in the United States and continues to grow every year. **The event in 1987 started with just a few hundred attendees and has since grown to include approximately 75,000 attendees last year.

"Black Rock City" is a legally recognized city (*complete with post office!) that appears in the middle of the Black Rock Desert for only one week each year, and is removed soon after. To be clear, Black Rock City is not close to the towns around Black Rock Desert. **The nearest international airport is in Reno, a 3-hour drive away.

Black Rock City has a radial shape, and "people" are located at the absolute center of the circle. The innermost street, A, is about 2 miles in diameter, leaving a vast expanse of completely flat, dusty desert for the residents of Black Rock City to roam. The streets are coordinated like a clock, running every 30 minutes and every 15 degrees from the center outward. You can communicate your location to other Black Rock citizens by saying "I'm at 8:30 and C." The structure of this organization was very conducive to the emerging nature of Burning Man, which I will discuss later.

A 100-foot-tall wooden sculpture of "The Man" stands at the center of the clock in the middle of the beach. As you may have guessed, the end of Burning Man each year is marked by the burning of humans.

"Why are you burning this man?" "So we can build him again!"

Black Rock City’s central plan should also tell readers that Burning Man is not anarchy. While TradSociety may look at Burning Man and think of rule-less anarchy, that couldn't be further from the truth. Burning Man is a highly coordinated phenomenon driven by more than 200 year-round staff, thousands of volunteers, and a set of minimum viable rules that embody the culture and preserve the peace.

Burning Man staff play a subtle but important role in relocating Burning Man "camps" during the event to help sustain and expand Burning Man's power in preparation for next year's expansion. I will describe this further.

camp aka DAO

Burning Man "camps" are set up and a group of people come to Burning Man regularly every year. With over 1,500 established camps, the consistency of this stalwart Burners base provides the foundation and stability for the Burners movement to grow.

Each camp is unique, with its origin story, camp members and what it brings to the beach. While camp members and camp leaders can come and go, the camp itself still exists. Like all living things, camps adapt over time. They grow, shrink, change and respond to their environment. Campsites vary in size from significant, sophisticated living and entertainment structures to a circle of RVs.

As a camp grows to a certain size, centralized resource sharing becomes critical and economically sound. Larger campsites have physical possessions that are maintained year-round, waiting for the next burn - generators, refrigerators, freezers, stoves, ovens, showers and umbrellas are all physical items that medium and large campsites often own and operate, making individual campsites Members are able to use challenging logistics in exchange for an annual camp fee.

Camps often begin centrally, usually after a proactive leader gathers their friends and family to "come to Burning Man." As the camp grows and grows, so does their leadership team . Often the camp leader leaves and the camp prolongs its life. Even as camp leadership changes, camp property is maintained by an ever-changing camp membership.

**Anyone in the DAO should be familiar with the fact that a small group of DAO staff members hold the entire organization together, and camp fees are often charged to all participating members to help maintain the integrity and resources of the camp. **

This bottom-up organization of Burning Man is one of its greatest strengths. Each camp is an autonomous management area. Each faction has free reign over its own internal operations, social contracts, codes of conduct, and membership. Camps have the option to pay wages or not. They may or may not evict disrespectful members. Camps can do whatever they want, and this freedom allows camps to grow, improve, and adapt over time. Each year when Burning Man rolls around, the individual improvements made by each camp contribute to Burning Man’s net total energy and are one of the core drivers of the logarithmic growth of the Burning Man movement.

Services and entertainment provided at camp

Not every campground, but most campgrounds offer Burners in Black Rock City some reason to visit. It's completely open to what incentives each camp brings. This is one of the most prominent and fun parts of Burning Man – walking from campground to campground and discovering what they offer, who you can meet and what you can do. It’s a core part of the Burning Man experience.

A typical campsite has a bar where any burner can walk down and grab a drink, but it only gets weirder from there.

1. I attended a Wine Tasting Camp and the sommelier took me and my friends to taste 3 different types of Greek wines.
2. There is a Grilled Cheese Camp where you can sit at a table and enjoy 3 different grilled cheeses.
3. There is a "Cereal Thriller" camp, which is a bar that you can sit in and serve about 20 different breakfast cereals, and you can eat while listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller and background music.
4. Tacos, pickles and pickle juice, oil wrestling, clubs, music venues, mini putt, yoga, educational lectures, trampolines, bike repairs...the campground has a little bit to offer.

Burning Man Campground offers you an experience in the middle of the Black Rock Desert. There are too many campsites at Burning Man to experience them all – again, there are over 1,500 campsites!

CAMP REORGANIZATION

This is where things get interesting. Each year, while Burning Man is in progress, Burning Man staff travel around and visit the camps to see first-hand what each camp has to offer and to evaluate the camp’s positioning within Black Rock City.

Like all cities, real estate in Black Rock Desert has its pros and cons. **Aspirational campsites want maximum foot traffic. Who doesn’t want to have the best party? ** The innermost streets and center of the radial are Burning Man's busiest thoroughfares, while the streets further out are the more secluded suburbs.

Depending on the quality of the camp, the value and nature of the services provided, and the overall atmosphere, the central Burning Man organization will "favor" or "disapprove" the positioning of your camp.

Have you committed to attending a series of camp-coordinated social events throughout the week, only to only complete half of them? **Further delays are expected next year. **Do you host popular events or provide valuable services every week? **You will be promoted! **Do you offer any services at all, or are you not a campground at all? It doesn't matter! You'll live on the edges, letting the established camps move toward the center.

In addition to some common-sense trade-offs (locating music venues in suburbia, setting up bike repair camps, etc.), the annual realignment of campgrounds allows Burning Man to continually optimize, making the event an adaptable, flexible organism that can react to its conditions. This simple protocol, combined with the organically growing complexity of each camp, allows a natural chaotic organization to emerge and strengthen over time.

DAO An antifragile DAO

Camp development is why Burning Man is growing 5-10% each year. This attribute makes Burning Man’s structure naturally resilient.

Camps may disappear and be replaced. Excessive camp size may lead to fragmentation into smaller, more harmonious social groups. A camp with strong leadership, coordination, and sophistication can grow as it pleases. The largest campground minimizes campground fees and provides more infrastructure for its residents, while also improving services for the general population of Black Rock.

Workers take advantage of this burgeoning property at Burning Man, rewarding stronger camps with better Burning Man real estate and thanking them for their service by providing them with more exposure.

But we have to ask: **Why does the camp want exposure? What is the motivation for providing the service? Is more foot traffic really an incentive? **

An extremely important rule and principle of Burning Man is no money and no commercialization. The only thing money is good for at Burning Man is ice. You can buy ice to keep your food cool and prevent food from spoiling. Beyond that, if you want something, you have to barter. And if you want something, people will probably give it to you. Within reason, of course.

Maybe having the public consume your food, alcohol, and products isn't a rational incentive for Trad Society, but Burning Man is not Trad Society. Burning Man follows the principles of giving and service. Of course, not everyone is willing to spend resources on others, but the fact that Burning Man has grown to over 70,000 people shows that there are enough people willing to provide enough value and service to support 70,000 people for a sustained period of 7 Hell, **even when it doesn't make financial sense to do so. **

This element of Burning Man gives it so much power. From an economic and capitalist perspective, Burning Man makes no sense. Everyone leaves Burning Man with less money and resources than when they entered. Burning Man is unsustainable. **But it does work. **More people come back every year. More and better service every time. The city is growing!

So, if Burning Man is not founded on economic rationality, but is instead a growing, functioning city, what supports it? What are the roots of Burning Man? The energy at Burning Man is growing, but why? What is the basis of Burning Man if not capitalism?

I can't answer this question for you. The answer comes in the form of experiences people have at the event. I have mine, but you need to get yours. That’s why everyone you know who goes to Burning Man will probably tell you, “You need to go at least once.”

Night Burning Man

For 51 weeks of the year, the Black Rock Desert is a dark scene, with the stars being the brightest light source. But for one week a year, the beaches come alive with millions of LED lights attached to people's bodies, bikes, campsites and art cars.

After dinner, as the sun sets, Burning Man residents pick up their LED bikes, turn on their art cars, and head to Central Beach, the arena of Burning Man.

While these players are present during the day as well, at night the whole of the playa is greater than the sum of its parts.

Burning Man Art Cars are mobile art installations built around the chassis of a car. They're drivable, rideable, illuminated pieces of art, each one as unique as the last. Some can only accommodate a single driver, like the roaming Roomba art cart I saw this year, while others can accommodate an entire stage, with people dancing behind the DJ and performing for the surrounding environment.

Artists come to Burning Man and erect permanent art structures for all Burners to enjoy. If these art installations don't have built-in lights and LEDs, they have external floodlights pointed at them to ensure no one bumps into them in the dark of night.

Each sculpture is lit in some way.

Some artists choose to burn their creations at Burning Man, spending months creating the art, then deconstructing it, transporting it to the beach, rebuilding it for Burning Man, and then setting it on fire.

I don't quite understand why, but I guess it's easier than taking it home.

Everyone has a bike at Burning Man. everyone. Playa is too big to experience on foot!

Everyone decorates their bikes with LED lights! In fact, not doing so is downright dangerous. While this is primarily for safety, it's not the only reason this social protocol exists. As thousands of people dressed in LED clothing, rode LED bicycles, cruised Black Rock Beach, dodged LED-decorated art cars, and stopped to look at the shiny LED art installations, something amazing happened.

So much for LEDs. One of the principles of Burning Man is participation. Wearing LED lights and jumping up and down on the beach at night is one of the most basic and simplest forms of participation at Burning Man. Just by attending the festival wearing LED clothing, you contribute to the Festival of Lights in Praia.

**** Greater than the sum of its parts ****

When over 10,000 agents run around an open desert beach with other friendly and open-minded humans, with LEDs, live music, and fun art, a certain magic happens.

Time is forgotten. The here and now has been elevated. Friendships can be cultivated, even if they last only a few hours or minutes. Nowhere else in the world can you navigate a never-ending forest of LEDs while being so far away from TradSociety that the concept of doing any work, chores, or errands never enters your brain. You are allowed to be present and have the perfect environment to do so.

This backdrop is present both at night and during the day, because everything at Burning Man is Schelling Point.

There is no forcing at Burning Man. You are not forced to do anything. While one of the tenets of Burning Man is "get involved," that is, you should do something, what that thing is is entirely up to you. Whether you're biking around Playa at night, looking for art installations to catch your eye, or strolling around the city during the day, looking for a campground with something to do, everything at Burning Man is vying to capture your attention. **

Everyone at Burning Man is a moth and flame. **

Where and how Burning Man's moths choose to come together depends on the fate of the universe, and ultimately how the experience of Burning Man itself manifests itself.

Since you are not forced to do anything, the activities and behaviors that occur at Burning Man occur voluntarily. Who and what matters at Burning Man depends on how attractive each thing is. As the centrality of Burning Man's strongest Schelling point adjusts slightly each year, Burning Man's total brightness increases each year, and so does its significance. The purpose and purpose of the Burning Man movement found its rudder organically.

House of Commons Festival

During my first experience with LED lights on the beach, I was reminded of Andreas Antonopolous's concept of "Festival of the Commons," an idea that is antithetical to the tragedy of the commons.

Burning Man is a public place, and like all public places, it needs attention and care. But because Burning Man is not based on capitalism, the nature of its commons is expressed differently. While TradSociety's commons require government protection from exploitation, Burning Man's commons naturally find itself growing every year without any military-enforced protection. The principles and social protocols that guide the Burning Man community benefit Andreas Antonopoulos’s “Festival of the Commons,” where the more people participate, the quality and provision of the commons will naturally grow and improve.

When day turns to night, just visit the beach under LED lights and your presence will contribute to a large light festival in the heart of the city. Seeing tens of thousands of LED objects moving randomly across the desert is a spectacular sight, and just by being there, you're contributing to it all.

By growing your campsite from a group of tents to a structure with a bar or activities, you can increase the total value of what Burning Man offers.

In my opinion, this is the most significant overlap between cryptocurrencies and Burning Man. A minimum viable set of rules that enables the emergence of unpredictable behaviors and activities that naturally and organically point in the same direction of expanding the quantity and quality of the base supporting the movement.

New Social Structure

**Burning Man is not a society. **

Burning Man is a portal. You walk in and come out the other side. You enter a new plane of existence where economics are irrational, organizations are emergent, and expressiveness is limitless. The restrictions that modern society places on ordinary people are nowhere to be found at Burning Man.

Just like cryptocurrencies, Burning Man is the Wild West.

When you get into cryptocurrencies, you choose a new life. You choose a new character. You settle in a new landscape. You'll do the same thing when entering Black Rock City.

Burning Man is an alternative society whose new culture is based on specific principles that serve to amplify the values on which it was founded. Who will you become when the constraints and pressures of society are lifted? How will you choose to act? what will you do?

There is more to do at Burning Man than one can ever experience in a lifetime, which is probably why so many burners come back like clockwork every year, and why many choose to spend the rest of the year Time is still spent living with, around, and around other Burners.

Unstoppable Movement

Burning Man is by far the largest online nation in the world. I'm using the definition of network state very broadly here, but since it's not officially defined yet I think I'm perfectly within the rules here.

The main centerpiece of Burning Man is the 70,000-seat event held in the Black Rock Desert during the last week of August. But with hundreds of regional spin-off events taking place around the world, the Burning Man movement can take place when and where citizens choose. The nation of Burning Man knows no boundaries and is one of the fastest growing emerging markets in existence…

People come together to create camps. Encampments were grouped together to form streets, and the streets of Black Rock City were grouped together to form Burning Man. But now, individual Burning Man spin-offs are part of a larger, decentralized social movement based on amplifying the culture and values of Burning Man.

The exponential growth of Burning Man cannot be underestimated. In cryptocurrencies, we are lucky enough to only have to worry about moving bits. Cryptocurrencies exist on the Internet, and the success of cryptocurrencies has nothing to do with atomic states. This is one of the most optimistic things about cryptocurrencies: Bits are easier to manipulate than atoms.

Burning Man is the movement of atoms. This is a campaign on hard mode, but it's still a win. The Burning Man movement convinces hundreds of thousands of people every year to spend resources, transfer their bodies, cars, and lives to participate in society's alternative rule set, and it works.

It's unclear how big the Burning Man movement will reach, but after 36 years of at least 10% year-over-year growth, Burning Man has yet to find its limits. Eventually, Burning Man will likely find its way into your life, whether you know it or not. In many ways, it probably already did.

In cryptocurrency we say, “There’s something for everyone,” and the same is true at Burning Man. Like cryptocurrencies, Burning Man's early days were defined by social activists who didn't fit into the TradSociety. Like cryptocurrencies, Burning Man is becoming more mainstream. Cryptocurrency and Burning Man are adapting to become more tame, while society is growing...a little wild?

Like cryptocurrencies, Burning Man is a foray into the future. In the future neurodivergence will be normalized and aging institutions will be ignored. Both Burning Man and cryptocurrencies say, “Let’s rebuild society from the ground up and see what happens.” We are both organic, antifragile, decentralized experiments in social structure and coordination. Burning Man and cryptocurrencies are unstoppable movements that transcend nation-states. We are all ideas. We are all genies in a bottle. Our society shares the values we believe in and is made up of motivated doers who will die trying to live up to the principles we stand for.

in conclusion

I don't know if I will be a lifelong Burner. While attending Burning Man in 2023 is an eye-opening, life-changing event, I'm not sure it's the right time for me every year. But I now understand why everyone says “you need to go at least once”, especially my own dad who finally convinced me to go with him this year.

But I do know that I wrote this post to send it to my friends so they could understand the magic of Burning Man. Instead of saying “Guys, trust me… we need to go,” I’m writing this article to help convince them they need to go to Burning Man… at least once.

For those of you who agree, I will volunteer as a camp leader to coordinate our camps. Maybe this is where it all started.

See you at Burning Man 2024