Burners and Makers: Splitting the Civic Atom
“We’re cracking the civic atom.”
The late Senator Harris Wofford was instrumental in both the Peace Corps and later led AmeriCorps. He compared civic power to the atom: a single force of American unity that must be cracked to produce positive energy.
Peter Hirshberg: This is a remarkable time for the maker movement and the Burning Man community as examples of a self-organizing civic response to COVID-19. The pandemic is the greatest challenge most of us have ever faced. And we have more powerful tools of networking, making and community building than we’ve ever had before.
Dale Dougherty: Let me explain what I’ve seen developing over the last month. I saw a bottoms-up movement of makers rising to respond to the shortage of medical equipment and supplies. Anyone from anywhere could design a solution and share it openly and freely. Others selected designs, often modified them, and then produced them locally using tools and networks associated with makerspaces that have developed over the last 10 years.
I called it Plan C. If the government’s response to the crisis is Plan A and industry’s response is Plan B, Plan C is the backup plan for the backup plan. I understood it as a civic response, a model for engaged citizens to respond to needs in their local communities. This civic response can also be seen as public service, and I called for a Civic Response Corps that was inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a government program that responded to massive unemployment brought on by the Great Depression. I saw a need for coordination among the self-organizing groups and also a way to train more people in the skills they need to participate effectively as civic responders.
I also thought that the civic response was going unnoticed by the media, which also looks to government and industry. By recognizing Plan C efforts, we speak to a need in all of us to contribute and do something useful. What is amazing about this kind of civic response is how distributed it is and how rapidly the organizations are being built up — in days or weeks.
I made this Civic Response Corps proposal with Congressman Tim Ryan (D. OH) whose district in Youngstown, Ohio, has experienced manufacturing decline but also has invested in building capacity for advanced manufacturing and understands makers as well as anyone in national government.
Here is a clip from Peter’s streaming news magazine show Quarantime! last week. This civic response is a call to public service. In the show, presidential historian Jonathan Alter remarked that America’s public service “was a muscle that had atrophied.”
Peter: Another key characterization is that there’s kind of unanimity of purpose in this crisis response. Nick Farr, a member of Burners without Borders, published an article, “The Long Disaster,” in which he pointed out that we appear to be entering a period in which disaster response is becoming the new normal, whether it’s extreme climate events or pandemic events. It’s a period of instability for economic systems, health systems or weather systems. It’s important to have the ability to self organize, have a surge response, have highly distributed mechanisms that learn and then share knowledge and apply it. This has always been a part of the self-organizing maker movement. Both your and Congressman Ryan’s proposal for a Civic Response Corps and Nick’s call to work within existing networks to foster communal efforts that prepare for durable challenges on the horizon show us the strategic importance of these forms of service. These have to work in concert with larger mechanisms like the government.
Dale: This is especially true if we think of disaster response as being a multi-year strategy, not just in this moment. It’s not just the rescue and relief efforts; it’s really the rebuilding and recovery ahead. How can our society be rebuilt a little better than it was?
We have to work against the rather large inertia of government and business to return to what it once was. Looking at Burning Man or the maker communities and these self organizing movements, the question is how are they fundamentally different from the institutions that we have today and how could they be seen as more responsive models that infuse our public institutions with new life and new purpose? We should want to help transform the public institutions in our community and our nation, not just work outside them.
Peter: We’re talking about structures whose mechanisms mirror what we see in Burning Man. Everybody’s participating. Not a lot of observers. A panoply of tribes, but able to collaborate with the lightest scaffolding of government.
So the question is how do we then deploy these in our communities? How do we keep local businesses and wealth within the community, an economy that is less extractive? This form of sustainable localism suggests a blueprint for what the economy and our systems might look like on the other side of this crisis. As cities recover, this is a moment to consciously deploy new economic and community mechanisms, as Amsterdam is doing with applying British economist Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Model’’ for a more balanced economy.
Today much of the global politics looks in the rear view mirror and sees 20th century centralized, statist ideas such as xenophobic authoritarianism or redistributive socialism. But the freshest ideas are local, adaptive, less fragile interconnected systems.
This points to the crux of the matter — moving from siloed good efforts that individuals or non-profits can do on their own, to structural changes that involve significant trade-offs in governance to unleash this civic power.
Dale: But I have to say it does start with individual action and responsibility, which I see as strong connection between the Burning Man and maker communities. Enabling action is an important thing not to lose sight of. People want to act and they also want to act in concert with others and they want their efforts to be meaningful.
I wrote a story about the design, development and distribution of the IC3D Budmen Face Shield. Two creative professionals, Isaac Budmen and Stephanie Keefe, outside of Syracuse New York, designed 3D printed components for a face shield, recognizing that their local healthcare facilities were running low on personal protective equipment. They called up the local hospital and asked if they could donate 50 face shields that they had made in two days. The hospital asked them if they could make 300. Two weeks later, they were making 1000 a day from a makeshift facility in an unused soundstage in town. Volunteers showed up to help make the face shields, including a 72-year old Vietnam vet who knew nothing about 3D printing but learned quickly to operate the machines.
Peter: What we see right now is an enormous outpouring of the desire to act. One of the most hopeful things today are the staggering number of groups that have formed, the Zoom meetings about implementing physical distancing, providing support and connection mechanisms to combat isolation, organizing for grief, sorting out PPEs, thinking through mechanisms to support local businesses. It raises the question: there’s so much of this, how does it scale and become the basis for how we’re organized for change.
Dale: There is a need for some centralization. Even at Burning Man, there’s coordination, let’s call it that. There are some things that have to be done on behalf of everyone. There are some rules. There are some guidelines. There’s a process that allows us to play and work well together.
I’m sure Burning Man has evolved and adapted that process. That’s what I want to learn more about. You don’t want a central group taking responsibility away from the self-organizing groups that create the most value. but those groups on their own don’t always know how to talk to each other.
In the maker community, some of the makerspaces involved in the COVID-19 efforts are having difficulty getting supplies and materials, just as an example. If they could coordinate efforts around purchasing, perhaps they could solve for it collectively.
Peter: Burning Man accomplishes it both because there’s a light organizing structure, but also a very strong culture.
Dale: That’s a really good point. That is another similarity between Burning Man and the maker community, and we share many of the same cultural values. These values allow us to build special-purpose networks to accomplish things really quickly. The culture values the useful and creative work of individuals and groups.
Peter: Burning Man is seizing this pivotal moment where its defining event at Black Rock City has been cancelled this year. But now this enormous community is unleashed from the enormous effort of building something in a few square miles of harsh desert and can now express itself globally, in a multiverse of its own imagining.
Dale: Maker Faires have been cancelled through the first half of the year and I expect that to continue for most of the year. Not having the physical event does cause us to think, what are other ways we could accomplish what we do by bringing the community together to share their work? There is something magical about being all together. It’s the way we’ve learned to do it but it’s not the only way possible.
Peter: This year is an existential test for Burning Man, but also an enormous opportunity to perhaps realize its finest hour when it comes to global influence and contribution. Given that there won’t be a physical event this year, think of all the creativity and experimentation that camps can bring by creating joy, trust, engagement in the virtual world. And at a time when our cities globally must reimagine their economies, and draw on the strengths of all their citizens, who better than Burners steeped in principles of community building, self-reliance, and making to be a critical resource and cultural influence. In the multiverse we’re not restricted to the 70,000 people who drive to the playa. This year can just as easily be an experiment in reaching and helping set a future for 700,000 or 7,000,000, or 70,00,000 people. A 10-minute DJ set by Marshmello reached a live audience of 10 million on the gaming platform Fortnite in February 2019. Imagine what can happen when the Burner community with its whimsy, service capacity and maker prowess is unleashed on the multiverse. Larry Harvey is probably looking down on us, having a smoke and thinking — “Do the work. Build communities. Don’t blow this opportunity!”
Dale: Perhaps we could re-invent the Internet while we’re at it. Not the Internet as it has become, an efficient engine for commerce, but what it could be: a place where creative communities thrive and a place that cultivates civic engagement as much as it encourages playfulness and experimentation in everyone.
Dale and Peter are co-authors with Marcia Kadanoff of The Maker City, A Practical Guide to Reinventing American Cities. Dale is founder of Maker Faire and Make Magazine and President of Make: Community (make.co). Hirshberg is a long-time Burner and Silicon Valley executive who led Enterprise Marketing at Apple, and is founder and Chairman of San Francisco Gray Area Art and Technology Center.
