I won't pretend I grok the underlying spirit of Burning Man. But I find it deeply fascinating to see the interaction between desires for counterculture, anarchy, free spirit, etc. and the benefit and ultimate necessity of organization, planning, rules... governance, essentially. And where there's those things, there's always maps and data.
It’s fun to read everyone's preconceptions about Burning Man. Its ten principles are published [1] and include stuff like “radical inclusion” and “civic responsibility” and “gifting” (the latter of which is taken very literally, there is almost no currency use on the playa and everything is gifted except ice and coffee at center camp).
Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists, but it’s hardly representative, especially when you include the family zone and all the specialized camps.
[1] https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/
A friend introduced my to CouchSurfing in ~2009.
The idea that a stranger would effectively be a free Airbnb host (back when Airbnb actually had hosts) was baffling. Turns out:
1. Travel is expensive in time and money. Hosting someone gives you a travel-adjacent experience without having to leave home.
2. People who are willing to host strangers tend to be cool/open/interesting/friendly people. Opting-in to CouchSurfing is a good filter for someone you might enjoy spending time with.
Burning Man is similar.
One of the mainstays of Burning Man is the Hug Deli. It's like a lemonade stand, but instead of sugary beverages, they serve affection. You can order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server. Want an extra pep in your step? Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment.
The staff at the Hug Deli are all volunteers. You just roll up, toss on an apron, and start serving. (The guy who started it isn't particularly affectionate. He's a performer from LA who wanted a way to get strangers to try on characters.)
You would never stand in Golden Gate Park offering kisses to anyone who asked. Burning Man is a container that allows experiences like that to flourish, because opting-in to Burning Man is a good filter for the kind of people you might be willing to try stuff with.
One of my sluttier female friends made a habit of seducing her male CouchSurfing hosts.
As she tells it, a lot of people had a great time!
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That might be the worst take I've ever read on this website.
It's just free hugs, but more theatrical.
Your post literally suggests that a customer spontaneously should kiss the employee. That kind of behavior is goes far beyond an innocent facade of "free hugs."
Consent is involved, everyone is a volunteer and willing participant. If you don’t want a hug or kiss or whatever you don’t get one. I fail to understand how this makes it anything but “free hugs”
Doesn't the post read that it's the server who would give you the kiss, if you compliment them three times?
Also, volunteer is not the same as employee. Especially important in this context.
I read it as if you pay 2 compliments and then proceed to kiss / spank the employee you would also get a compliment in addition to whatever you ordered. And that compliment would give you an extra pep in your step.
> order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server
Any one of these is either: 2 compliments from customer. So, it would be assumed that compliments are going from the customer, to the server, for the extras as well. Instead of the whole dynamic switching around halfway through.
> Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment
Customer can add a kiss or spanking to their order, if they give an additional compliment to the server. And the server then decides if they actually want to do it.
Are you somehow operating under the impression that volunteers are being held against their will and forced to give and/or receive free kisses to anyone who demands it?
Are you okay?
Would you think it would be okay if someone got raped as long as they weren't being held down against their will? Just because the person doesn't leave, that doesn't mean they consent.
You’ve already managed to completely ignore multiple people who’ve tried their best to clear up your colossal and frankly easily avoidable misunderstanding of this situation. So by all means, don’t let me stop you from crashing out over an entirely imagined series of circumstances.
Something's either literally stated or suggested. It can't be both, but it can be neither.
What is wrong with you. This isn’t a customer/employee thing at all. That’s, like, the entire point of Burning Man.
Feel free to mentally substitute your own words for the titles used of the two people when ordering and delivering services from another.
...you ask. Just like you would for the spanking.
Don't get me wrong, but on one side you have the gift culture, and on the other side the exception that one of the only things sold the the community in one of the hottest, most arid deserts in the world is ... ice ...
Got a chuckle out of me there.
There’s no in and out privileges to get ice elsewhere, so the organization coordinates huge ice shipments into the event. All the proceeds from the ice and coffee sales benefit the local schools and students, which is great because that area is doing pretty rough economically
They also sell fuel.
Not to any old so and so, only to mutant vehicle and art camps
I actually got to buy fuel there once. They were absolutely surly about it, too.
Why didn't you plan ahead and bring enough gas??!?
Well what happened was, we stopped at the gas station in Wadsworth where we usually fuel up the RV before heading to the burn. I put the gas nozzle into the RV and flipped the nozzle auto-shut-off thing up while I went inside to buy some last minute stuff. I came out, the auto-shut-off thing had popped and I thought the tank was full. But no, it wasn't. The scene there was a bit chaotic, I was distracted. So we only got about 4 or 5 gallons into the tank, and that's only enough to get the RV about 40 miles, so we roll into BRC with an almost empty tank. I did not notice this until we were actually inside the gate and the fuel tank was really low. Give me a break, I was driving for 14 hours, I just didn't notice the fuel level.
So we had some fuel for the art car, which I was hoarding, but when I heard they were selling gas for the first time ever at BM, I dumped all the art car gas into the RV and then got on the art car and headed over to the gas station with every available gas can we had.
It's mostly yuppie culture as far as I can tell with it's hangerons and other cleanup artists, whatever. There's no such purity, but it's definitely not a flat organization.
As it has become so large, naturally you're going to get the hangerons. You also get all of the people that think it is trendy and go for the likes. All of the rich people that go out with custom RVs and all of that type of experience are just going to exponentially increase the hangerons as they have way more followers that want to follow the trends.
Again though, any time you get such large numbers the "core" group will tend to get dwarfed. That's about time when people start noticing it more and think the hangerons are the event so the original culture is sort of lost to the zeitgeist.
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FYI - Coffee at center camp was canceled as of 2022
*people associated with counterculture and anarchists who also have thousands of dollars of discretionary income.
The people who hate Burning Man don't care about paltry things like the principles it's based on, they simply don't like the people that go for completely unrelated reasons.
> Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists
And Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt... you get the idea.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceos-founders-attended-...
Are you trying to imply that these people aren’t counterculture? Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
If whole top of Silicon Valley is "counterculture", that word has no meaning.
> Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
And from that you make the conclusion they are "counterculture"? I don't think it means what you think it means.
> a group whose values, norms, and behaviors actively oppose and reject those of mainstream society
Basically every name listed meets this definition
Are you trying to imply that Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukerberg are counterculture in some way? What?
Correct, but I wasn’t trying to imply it, I stated it outright.
So anyone that creates a new business that is successful is inherently counter cultural?
These people in fact are some of the principal figures dictating the dominant culture and status quo.
In what way? The dominant culture hates them.
No it doesn't. Fashionable people pretending to be counter-cultural love to talk about hating them, but look how many people are on Facebook, how many are using Amazon, how many are using Google products. Consider that "google" is now a verb and literally everyone knows what it means. The part of dominant culture is to show one's "independence" and "free-mindedness" by saying some words about how all those people are oh so awful - and then go and consume the products they make, exactly in the way the want you to use them, and pay a lot of money for it. That's no more "counter-culture" than a multi-millionaire Hollywood actor dressing in a six-figure dress and showing up at a six-figure-per-ticket gala to protest "the elites" is "counter-culture". It's just the elites' LARPing.
Either of the mentioned was at one point of their career someone who would have been considered at least belonging to "counterculture".
Unfortunately, money and power corrupts, and lo and behold, one day you wake up to find you have become the very thing you once swore to destroy.
Maybe, some of them were poor young iconoclasts some day. That's not when they joined the fashionable trend of Burning Man though. When they joined their trend, they were well into their power (or at least, in the case of somebody like Holmes, pretense of it). Because that's what is fashionable, of course, and they couldn't afford not to be part of "counter-culture" - it's so gauche not to be part of it!
Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals.
All of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
Millionaire is not some ultra privileged status in the United States, an upper middle class family with a paid off house in a somewhat decent area will have a net worth in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
Number of millionaires in the US: 23,831,00.
Yet again, different idea of “privilege”, I guess?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
Maybe wisdom gives another perspective on the ideals we had in our youth?
there's nothing wise about hoarding
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None of those people are your average citizen.
The idea that rich people are all right wing conformist republicans does not survive getting to know a few of them.
They may not be right wing conformist republicans but they are certainly not opposed to any aspect of current power structures in any meaningful way (unless, perhaps, it is restraining them).
Not sure how did you read "right wing conformist republicans" into my comment that had literally nothing about partisan politics.
I think the counter-intuitive examples of people who attend that you and others in the replies are pointing out are a demonstration of how many contradictions exist in these principals.
I am the type of person who thinks many, many things about the way the world currently exists need to change, but I am incredibly skeptical of the purported mission of the Burning Man Project to "extend the culture" of these principles to the wider world.
"Civic responsibility" is a ballsy claim from a bunch of first worlders exploiting child sweatshop labor, wasting resources on aura farming.
Burning Man is to the stated principles what Kraft singles is to cheese.
Just more empty American platitudes, advertising, marketing; watch! as rich capitalists role play rural community their capitalism tore apart!
The Party in 1984 is not just metaphor for a government but any group that puts its rhetoric before reality. Just some first world LARPers telling a story about themselves while the output is there for all to see.
Have you been? Or are you basing this on second-hand information?
Once. Was impressed by the human effort in general, little specifically stood out.
Worked in low voltage wiring through college. Have been a part of groups rallying behind large infrastructure projects; on farms, new office buildings, rapid response to weather related crisis (tornado alley). It's actually a very common human thing.
Been to many an art fair around the world and the minutiae of Burning Man blends right in.
Leave no trace while blowing fossil fuels into the air hauling tons of stuff to the desert. Nice loophole.
That's quite the straw man you've constructed, which I suppose is appropriate for a Burning Man thread.
Appeal to authority you don't have to dictate what is and isn't logical fallacy.
Easier to regurgitate some old philosophy you read than think. You look educated in philosophy if not intelligent in logic.
These are informal fallacies, so logic’s not at issue here. Though you whiffed on your accusation.
Whiffed on my accusation according to some random internet posters interpretations.
Oh no. Anyway.
Trashing the planet is mainstream. Taking care of it is counterculture.
I like this but doesn't Burning Man itself constitute a hugely inefficient use of fossil fuels and unsustainable material use? The name has "burning" right in it. The climax is a bonfire. What about the air pollution? Perhaps it would be better for the planet if Burning Man didn't exist at all.
The event produces a huge amount of trash too. Every year you can see videos on youtube of people taking their moop out of the playa and just dumping it wherever (shopping malls, parking lots, the side of the road) in Nevada and California. The ethos only happens at the event and then all bets are off. I say that as an ex-burner.
I doubt the amount of generators running constitute some sunstantial fossil fuel use, at least not more than 70,000 people sitting at home in air conditioning doing "nothing". I would welcome your math though.
I've run power for a 100-person theme camp in the past. According to the logs, we burned an average of 36.8 gallons per day, or 1.4 liters/person/day (we ran the generator for 9 days total) in 2025. The camp has air conditioners (iirc ~20 units), lighting, freezers, etc. although not everyone has all of the above.
The average household consumption of electricity per day in the US is about 28kWh, which would take around 7-9 liters/day of diesel. Assuming an average US household of 2.6 persons, that's about 3 liters/person/day for electricity alone - does not include gas/electricity spent driving. So, at least for this camp, the average person is using less electricity at the burn, than if we weren't at burning man.
The fossil fuels spent getting to and from the event are more substantial than those burned at the event, but this is a separate discussion I think as to whether or not people should be flying to conferences, events, or taking vacations. COVID was great for reducing travel-related fossil fuel consumption, so we have the data and the experience on how to reduce that, but probably not the will.
The power logs are pretty interesting to look at. On average the generator is lightly loaded, so a lot of energy is going towards idling the generator, but batteries are expensive and these generators are not made to be stopped and started repeatedly.
Thanks for the math. My mind was more on the transportation pollution (moving all the people and stuff into the desert and then back out again, every year). The amount of CO2 spent on flying people around for business and vacations blows my mind. Using jet engines should be something like 10x more expensive than they are to reflect the actual burden on future generations of humans and other species.
Then it’s somewhat intellectually dishonest to single out Burning Man vs any other kind of vacation travel.
I don't know anyone that goes to Burning Man that thinks it's some kind of conservation event. It was started on a beach in SF to mourn the loss of a relationship by a man with a broken heart. Then it got too big and moved to the desert. I think a lot of people have misconceptions about what Burning Man really is. The fact is, it's a lot of things to a lot of people, but one thing it is not is, is fuel efficiency or any kind of conservation.
The fact that it gets cleaned up is only due to the requirement to get a permit for the next year.
In 1997, BM was held on a private property, and the playa there was absolutely trashed, for as far as you could see. Bottles and cans littered everywhere. In the morning after the burn, I saw one woman was going around picking it all up. Others started to join in. It was not pretty. I think we made a dent in cleaning it up, but the trash was everywhere.
Unlike today, where people actually do make an attempt to clean up, but obviously some still do not give a single fuck about it.
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
The natural tension between chaos and order is one of the things that makes Burning Man so interesting.
More like the natural tension between what you say and what you do.
People that don't mind SF might want to look at these for some examples of anarchy in fictional action:
The Day Before The Revolution, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Before_the_Revolution
The Dispossessed, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
The Dispossessed has one of my favorite quotes, “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”
I love this quote. It reminded me of a quote I heard recently:
"what a privilege to be tired from the work you once begged the universe for"
I'm not sure about the intent of the quote and its provenance. But for me the meaning is: To have wanted meaningful purpose and to get to look back and see that you have achieved that.
It's actually pretty compatible with "capital a" Anarchy.
Right. "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
From: "Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!", David Graeber, 2009, https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-a...
That's one of those definitions that's so broad as to make the word being defined meaningless. It's always silly when one re-phrases their position into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
I agree 100%, but it makes a mildly interesting jumping off point.
My first question is: but what if they don't?
Exactly. Of course they're capable of it. That doesn't mean they will. They have a lot of incentives to behave badly, and there's no way to eliminate them all.
Even under our decidedly non-anarchic regime, people STILL find reasons to behave poorly. I can't imagine removing the disincentive of state punishment would benefit society very much.
> Even under our decidedly raging conflagration, people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
The argument—to which I'm quite sympathetic—is that these non-anarchic institutions perpetuate the environment which incentizes "bad behavior."
By "bad behavior," I mean robbing and murdering and the like, so no need for scare-quotes. Framing the average criminal as the victim of their own circumstances -- which seems to really be in vogue -- is entirely unconvincing to me.
> people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
You make it sound as if turning to crime is less the criminal's decision and moreso nature's.
While it doesn't explain 100% of crime, this is just true. You change people's circumstances such that crime isn't rational, and they're less likely to do it.
That would require a government to enforce such heavy lifestyle restrictions on people.
it's heavy lifestyle restrictions that lead to anti-social behavior in the first place. by far the most common crime is property crime, people usually commit it out of desperation and lack of opportunity. the degree of personal freedom in a capitalist state is defined by wealth, which creates a natural incentive to steal. then when they do, those people are put in prison, where they connect with other labeled criminals, all of whom face significantly lower chances of being hired, making sure that doing anything else in their life except crime will be as difficult as possible. aren't those heavy lifestyle restrictions enforced on people by government?
There is a reason that crime goes up a ton when existing tools for survival disappear (e.g. disaster scenarios). When people have paths to prosperity, the need to do crime goes down. When the marginal value of crime is low, people don't do it. You can get there with draconian punishments, but you can also get there with, like, a strong social safety net and general prosperity.
While not the only reason, one reason that my coworkers won't steal my wallet if I leave it somewhere is that the $20 is mostly irrelevant to them given the general level of prosperity at my office.
I'm willing to bet most burglars aren't motivated to do crime due to suffering from starvation-level poverty; there is hardly ever a "need" to do crime -- i.e., a scenario wherein doing something criminal is the only way to survive. You totally neglect the moral angle and reduce it to a barebones cost/benefit sort of judgement, which is reflective of this popular view of criminals as hapless victims of fate or of society, and who are almost righteous in their choice to do crime. Oh, and the only solution is more welfare.
> aren't motivated to do crime due to suffering
Good thing I never said that!
> Oh, and the only solution is more welfare
Nor that!
I said that for many people crime is a rational approach to more prosperity. That doesn't mean folks are near starvation and have no other choices, it just means that criminal options may be more appealing than other ones. If you create accessible, non criminal pathways to prosperity, crime decreases..if you remove them, it goes up.
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Yes, but not nature's—the built environment and socially constructed institutions of modern civilization.
Conservative political scientists like James Q. Wilson have historically argued that the root of crime is an essential moral and cultural failure, rather than just a byproduct of poverty. They maintain that social programs squander investments on those who will simply continue their destructive ways, and that society instead needs punitive mechanisms to regulate inherently destructive human urges.
On the other hand, sociologists and criminologists argue that while the decision to commit a crime belongs to the individual, the conditions that make that decision likely are structural.
Criminologists have long studied "social disorganization" as an engine for bad behavior, analyzing why certain neighborhoods suffer from persistent vandalism, street crime, and violence even as the specific individuals living there change over the decades. Critics of this theory often share your skepticism—arguing that high-crime neighborhoods might simply be the result of "birds of a feather flocking together," and that individual choices or family nurturing are far more important than neighborhood effects—but, ultimately, research demonstrates that people are profoundly motivated not only by their own choices, but by the circumstances and choices of those around them. When community social capital is high, networks of trust enforce positive standards and provide mentors and job contacts. When those adult networks and institutions break down, individuals are left to their own devices, making them far more likely to act on shortsighted or self-destructive impulses.
As the person who posted the quote, gonna be direct: no idea.
I have to say, I don't identify myself as a anarchist (maybe a bit of a sympathizer), yet I'm middle aged and finding myself a little dissatisfied by many things I see around me, so if I see people making the equation anarchist = degenerate, my immediate reaction is "yeah let's slow it down shall we."
Fair. But I think that statement isn't meant as a strict and precise definition (eg. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or whatever), more like a "gateway" description directed at those who associate anarchism only with utter chaos and "burn the house down" kinda attitudes.
Now, I'm aware that when you need to say something is "gateway" that's a bit of a red flag, i.e. "milk before meat" (describing something as friendly and innocent at first, then only later showing the more aggressive indoctrination) is exactly what cults do. Having said that, I'd grant that the late David Graeber is quite the straight shooter so I think he's in the clear here.
When I recognize this pattern (reducing one's beliefs to a line of common sense) in someone's writing, I usually take that to be evidence that they're not a quality thinker. I've skimmed the rest of the article you linked from Graeber, and I think my first impression holds up. Like, take this snippet:
> Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
Woah, mindblown! If you think about it, aren't you kind of a huge hypocrite and elitist for doubting that others can control themselves? Well, no! We know that plenty of people do, in fact, decide to act criminally and selfishly of their own accord. This line, and many others in Graeber's article, are goofy and I wouldn't take him seriously on this topic.
Isn’t that all political movements when described in general terms?
The same is true of all political movements when described dishonestly and over-simplistically, yes.
> into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
Start a topic on democracy here and at least a handful will argue against regular people governing society and their own lives.
That’s more than no-one.
> "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
If it were that simple, then every FOSS project would be considered to operate under Anarchists principles. After all, the license and software forkability made it so that no one is forced to conform to whatever social structure is used to maintain a given project. But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
There may be plenty of good reasons for them to argue that, but none of them are "very simple notions" as your definition would imply.
> But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
no they won't, FOSS project's governance model has no relevance to anarchist discussion. anarchists are against coercive authority, not leadership in general, and FOSS does operate under anarchist principles, which is why anarchist community is a strict subset of FOSS community.
If we define "leader" as "someone who commands by force or by some other means the obedience of a group of people" then Anarchy is a society without leaders. It doesn't mean a society without order, but it presupposes that people can behave reasonably and that that is enough to ensure order.
That’s a narrow definition of a leader. Seems to me that a leader can be someone who others _choose_ to follow.
That’s “other means”
Whats the difference, from an anarchist perspective, of a leader making a rule or a group voting on a rule?
Consent
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Your "Other means" could almost be an essay prompt.
There's distinctions between power and violence (see Hannah Arendt), between social and structural power (see The Tyranny of Structurelessness).
And then there's this ancient Chinese text that has been slopified for a million management manuals:
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist. The next best is a leader who is loved and praised. Next comes the one who is feared. The worst one is the leader that is despised.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly. When they have accomplished their task, the people say, "Amazing! We did it, all by ourselves!"
> The Tyranny of Structurelessness
To me this essay was an eye-opener, both because it's well argued and also because it's so obvious once you read it. Even outside the specific niche of feminist groups in the US, who hasn't witnessed this phenomenon in action? Those supposedly flat groups where everyone has a voice, yet it's always the same subset of people who are heard and ultimately influence or direct all decisions? And the unwritten rules who are both invisible and "the law".
It sounds great until you see what kind of actual people operate under the banner of anarchism. Then it might turn out their definition of reasonable fashion may be quite different from yours.
Here's another excellent piece. Ignore the site please.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/03/butler-shaffer/lx-what-i...
> almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation.
A core thing you should expect from anarchists is disagreement.
Some anarchists agree with Graeber's definition. A majority probably disagrees, in many different ways.
I expect this post will be met with disagreement. Wouldn't want it any other way!
But to bring it back to the topic at hand, the people doing this are forced to by the BLM, so not very Anarchistic.
Burning Man forces you to really think hard about social contracts.
For example - you won't get kicked out for leaving trash all of the ground but you will absolutely be shunned and shamed by everyone around you for doing so. That notion simply doesn't scale to a place like the US with 350M people with varying cultures, values, etc. because the social contracts are simply all over the place and inconsistent.
there’s an interesting side to this that better cell coverage, starlink, and others have made burning man more phone friendly. purists will say don’t bring a phone. or the event only works because no one has phones that work
but the event isn’t possible to run without internet. DPW has wifi at every station. internet has become a core planning and organization tool
It’s obviously possible to run without the internet. They did it for many years.
It's a week long party for rich people. I don't think it's that deep.
Honestly, that contrast is what draws me in. In the same way ultralight hiking forces you to think about and let go of extraneous weight, going to Burning Man and doing the whole camp thing and seeing the city work showcases the "dead weight" of "making things happen".
Yeah, well it's all fake really. Still filled with people that are terrible, from the organizers to the goers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0_u1ZvHOu4
Ah yeah I've seen that video. What blows me away is that in the end all the accused did to get suspected for sexual assault was somehow made contact with her thigh
Seeing stuff like that makes me glad I left the anglosphere
People think of anarchism as against organizations and rules, but its just against hierarchy. Western people in particular are so used to hierarchical thinking that its difficult to even imagine an organization that isn't hierarchical in nature.
And "eastern culture" is largely not hierarchical by heart?
Also, I have been to quite some anarchist places, but I did not found one without a hierachy. It is usually just informal. (But at times even formal and everyone pretends it is still not hierachy)
No comment on whether anarchists achieve this goal.
Hierarchy is “Western” now?
Western culture is hierarchical, hierarchy isn't inherently Western. Lots of cultures do it.