Burning Man is a culture of co-creation

At Burning Man last week, I attended a talk by a geographer who claimed that what makes the temporary city so special is the location: that the Black Rock desert, with its particular difficulties and affordances, is what shapes how we build Black Rock City, and thus, shapes Burning Man.

I disagree. Burning Man is not a place, it is an act of co-creation; it is the periodic coalescence of a living, shifting community. Sure, the petri dish in which we cultivated it was this particular desert. But by now we’ve achieved a self-perpetuating culture that can survive and thrive in new environments.

The center of the Burning Man culture is the 10 Principles. The Principles weren’t there at the beginning — the founder, Larry Harvey, added them later — but they do serve as a kind of “constitution” by which the culture both propagates and remains self-similar over time and space. (In case you’re interested, they are: radical inclusion; radical self-reliance; radical self-expression; gifting; decommodification; communal effort; civic responsibility; leave no trace; participation; and immediacy.)

I’ve been to Burning Man 6 times, but I started burning on the East Coast. My first burn was Transformus, the North Carolina regional. It took place in a setting almost completely the opposite of Black Rock City: on a verdant orchard, in a temperate rainforest just outside of Asheville. To my first Transformus, I arrived understanding almost nothing, feeling like a clueless outsider. By the second day, I knew I…