If you’ve ever wanted to go to Burning Man, hurry up those plans.

Because somebody just did a Dumb Thing…

One of Burning Man’s luxury camps was ransacked by vandals on Wednesday night, according to a post on the camp’s Facebook page.

[snip]

Sometime during or after the group’s famous “white party,” where ravers dress in all white, vandals entered the camp. They allegedly pulled and cut electric lines, causing food to spoil, stole personal belongings, glued trailer doors shut, and flooded the camp with 200 gallons of potable water, the Facebook post from Thursday reported.

Which isn’t Burning Man’s fault. Seriously. But this is:

White Ocean wrote on Facebook that after notifying Burning Man organisers of the incident, they were told, “it makes sense that you have been sabotaged as you are a closed camp and not welcoming.”

Look. When somebody calls up and tells you that they’ve just had their camp attacked, vandalized, sabotaged, and a bunch of other stuff which are in fact crimes under Nevada state law, the only smart response to that is “Damn. That’s wrong. We will, of course, cooperate fully with the authorities in their investigation.  Who should we be talking to, over there?” Even if you secretly think that the camp is, oh, made up of a bunch of hyper-rich poseurs who are doing a particularly obnoxious form of hipster tourism while ignoring everything that makes the event they’re touring actually fun.  ESPECIALLY if you think that, actually.  There’s a difference between personal opinion, and your group’s official opinion. And if you mix that up the way that this may have been mixed up here, then you may end up getting the group sued for the stupid things that you say.

I got no real dog in this fight, but I gotta say: when a group gets to be a certain size, it needs to develop certain PR skills and methodologies. This has not happened here. At the very least, Burning Man needs to teach its staffers to direct all inquiries and official responses to a duly-designated spokesperson. I know that this is difficult; I am a paid member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, after all. But if we can learn to do it, so can the pyromaniac desert hippies*.

Via @GregStolze.

Moe Lane

*I can say that, actually. I’m just as much part of the counterculture as they are. I’m allowed.

5 thoughts on “If you’ve ever wanted to go to Burning Man, hurry up those plans.”

  2. Heh. Hippies vs. Hipsters is an *old* fight, Moe.
    .
    That’s what this really is, which is why the Hippie (Burning Man) response to Hipster (White Ocean) was on point, even if legally stupid.
    .
    Two things to note –
    .
    The burning man statement did appear to indicate that the sheriff’s department has got this ..
    .
    White Ocean is the group with lots of money .. most burning man rigs are .. what you’d expect pyromaniac hippies to drive into the desert. What are White Ocean going to do with a wide variety of mid-90s Ford SUVs and decade-old RVs?
    .
    Oh, you think White Ocean is going to go after the Burning Man organization? Nah, they’re just as broke as the hippies .. they’ve been organized as a non-profit and giving money away (the term “slush fund” comes to mind..) to the towns the burners travel through – including lots of solar projects for the Payute tribe.
    .
    White Ocean may not like being called out .. but their options are limited. Get the event permit pulled? The hippies will just show up somewhere else, under a different banner, and set something else on fire. (“Burning Hipster” has a nice ring to it)
    .
    The big losers in the deal will be the towns that have benefited .. the angriest losers will be the media types who, instead of getting to go to a well-run *sane* event, will have to go to whatever insane thing the dirty hippies come up with next.
    .
    The early days of Burning Man featured a “drive by shooting range”, after all. Yes, literally, “drive your car over there, shoot at the objects – some of them moving – downrange .. try not to hit anybody else.
    .
    Mew

  3. I hates to pick nits, but, Burning Man was more a Dadaist concept…the founders and early adopters (most of whom were Gen-Xers in the tech & graphic arts industry) had more in common with the Beats than hippies. We started going in ’91 and stopped in ’96 when it left the open playa and lost it’s cool.

Comments are closed.