Off the grid

My brother got married at Burning Man this last Thursday to a wonderful woman. It was a beautiful ceremony, next to fragmented metallic heart and a 150 foot elegantly posed naked metallic woman in 100 F heat with thumping EDM pumping from a double decker art car with a tattooed female DJ who refused to turn the volume down so that the newlyweds could say their vows. It was exactly the wedding my brother wanted: participatory, organic, and epic.

There’s a lot I could say about Burning Man as a first timer, but that’s for another blog. This is a blog about an academic perspective on software and behavior, and so I’m going to focus on the fact that I was entirely off the grid for four straight days.

There aren’t many places in the world that you can truly disconnect, with no possibility of communication through any medium other than speech and sight. There are a few: ten minutes on takeoff and landing, remote regions in third world countries, and perhaps a few harrowing places such as the top of mountains and deep under the ocean. But Burning Man is one of the few places with no access to communication media where one can feel safe and still have access to all of the abundance of modern society.

Burning Man is also one of the few places where there’s also nothing to accomplish. There’s no work that’s really necessary, no one to call, no one to coordinate with, and no schedule, and to be truly in line with the cultural norms of a burn, one shouldn’t even seek these things. And so communication media really have no purpose during a burn. The point is to simply be, and do so around whoever happens to be around.

I’ve never been in such a setting. Especially after an incredibly intense week of 14 hour days of paper writing for conference deadlines, product development for my startup, and a seemingly infinite list of things to prep for living in the desert for four days. It taught me a few things:

• You’ve heard this before, but social media really is pointless. We use it to both create purpose and fulfill it, but not to satisfy some essential need that couldn’t be satisfied in some other way. I didn’t miss all of the fleeting conversations I have on Twitter and Facebook while on the playa; in fact, not having them made me eagerly anticipate reconnecting with friends face to face, and not through social media, to share my stories in high fidelity, in real life. It didn’t help that after leaving Burning Man and getting a signal, my phone screamed at me with 500 emails and hundreds of notifications: the rich interpersonal interactions I had on the desert made my phone feel like a facsimile of real life. Liking someone’s post on Facebook now feels dishonest in a way.
• The intense drive that I usually have at work, the one that fuels my 10 hour work days and endless stream of email replies, was completely extinguished by four days on the desert. There’s something about the minimalism of Burning Man life — where every basic need is satisfied, but nothing more — that clarifies the fleeting nature of most of the purpose we create in our lives. My job is important, but it is just a job. The visions for the future of computing I pursue in my research are valuable, but they ultimately twiddle the less significant bits. This first day back at work is really hard: I feel like I’m having to reconstruct a motivation that took years erect but days to demolish.
• I’ve always believed this to some extent, but Burning Man reinforced it: computation is rarely, if ever, the important part of software; it’s the information that flows through it and the communication it enables that are significant. I saw this everywhere on the playa, as nearly everything had software in it. Art cars used software to bring automobiles to life, DJs used software to express emotion to hot and thirsty thousands, nightriders used digital lights to say to wayfarers, “I’m here and this is who I am”. In a city stripped down, software is truly only a tool. A holistic education of computer scientists would make it clear that as much as computing is an end in itself for the computer scientist, it is almost almost always a means.
• Burning Man reminded me that it’s only been about a century since humanity has measured time and dislocated communication through ICTs. It was pleasing to see that when you take them both away, not only do people thrive, but they actually seem more human (just as when we do measure time and dislocate communication, we seem less so).

Of course, this was just my experience. I actually brought my daughter along too. She’s recently become addicted to texting and Instagram, as in any young middle schooler’s life, friends are everything, and so with respect to being off the grid, Ellen was miserable. She enjoyed herself in other ways, but I do think that being disconnected, whether through face to face encounters or photo sharing, was a major loss for her. Had her friends been in the desert with her, I think she would have had a very different experience.

I don’t know if this means anything in particular for the future of software. I do think that as we continue to digitize every aspect of human experience, however, the hunger for material experience, face to face interaction, and off the grid experiences will grow, which will eventually shift culture back to a more balanced use of communication media, and in turn, create new types of software systems that accommodate being disconnected without living in the desert for a week.