Green Year

What is Burning Man, when you get down to it? Alt world escapism?  Incubator for new social constructs? Just a fine place in the middle of nowhere to fuck some shit up with friends? Does it, to put a point on it, mean anything, and if so, what?

I’ll not even think of presuming to answer, but I invite you to read the following:

Burning Man is a uniquely evolving experiment - the only event in the world of its size/kind that is entirely created by its participants. The organizers and volunteers that help produce the event are an equal part of that creative process, and after long reflection, the Man Base team has decided to reach out to people that are presenting innovative, realworld solutions to the environmental crisis we’re all facing, and ask them to participate in creating the Green Man pavilion.This is one of the bigger chunks of the machinery that’ll make the Green Man either fly, or crater.

It is a dicey prospect, fraught with risk, inviting these folks and trying to figure out how to showcase the ideas without the branding. Are we selling out, inviting the Trojans into our citadel? Will this, as some have already suggested, be the crack in the wall of lawyers and money we’ve created around outselves that has thusfar kept the big bad marketing world out? Is burning man getting too serious for it’s own good?

Dunno. Hope not. I’m not even sure we know what it is we’re doing yet. We’re calling it a world’s fair or expo because that’s the language we have available. Before someone mashed up the words “theme” and “camp” we didn’t even have the concept of a theme camp. So world’s fair, expo-that may not be what this turns out to be.

We’re going to put a whole lot of smart people and good ideas in the middle of the playa and see what happens.

Could be nothing.

Could be something great.

We’ll see.  Your comments and thoughts invited.

By now you’ve likely seen or heard of the Obama1984 mashup ad, pairing pro-Barack sympathies with the old Apple 1984 ad, with Hillary Clinton standing in for Big Brother. Well done, I must say. Notice–the woman is wearing an iPod, nice touch. North of 1 million views, and counting.
This repurposing of content for political ends reminded me of what happened when GM had the idea of letting customers at the content for their new Chevy Tahoe campaign ( chronicled by Wired Magazine ); they ended up with heaps of clever customer generated ads, many lambasting their gaz guzzling ways.
(For a great analysis, shot by shot as well as historical/social context, of the brilliant, original spot ( directed by Ridley Scott, of Alien and Blade Runner fame) check out this story by Sarah Stein.)

This story is interesting for two reasons. One, to see just how out of touch the mainstream media is with open source content generation ( read how the New York Time refers to it has having “gone viral,” like it’s a disease or something, yet fails to drill down at all on the substantive implications of this kind of new media. Yawn, NYT. You can do better.)
And two, and more germane to our purposes, because it’s one of the first widespread uses of advertising content rejiggered for political aims. My hope: people see this, and start creating more mashups that take the carefully crafted messaging of the corporate consumption overlords, and use them instead to create opportunities to reflect on just what we’re doing to our little world, and how we might yet save it.