You wouldn't need to look much further than the evolution of the BRC DMV

My friends who went in the late 90s recounted shooting at propane tanks from moving vehicles and having to camp inside of a ring of parked cars to protect your camp (from vehicular traffic)

After 2000 you had to show some decent design (not just a golf cart with dingleberries) and that was about it, they passed our moon car and shark van without much question, and the shark van was a giant sharp thing without lights.

Others will have to fill in the regs now, I understand things have gotten progressively more rigorous.

My understanding is that anything built on the playa, including the art (eg. temple of gravity) has an engineer's stamp just like would in Reno. Or just a bit more dusty.

Yeah that would be a really interesting read, either as an article or full length book

I would read that book

After being made aware of Pauline Borsook and her pioneering critique of cyberlibertarianism in Cyberselfish (published 2000) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866903), I followed some hyperlinks and searched some stuff referenced in the article and found this rather relevant analysis:

https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/

Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.

This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.

It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative.

When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.

So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at.

It's not insane, and it was just explained how it happens. You don't need streets when you have 10 people. Or 100 people. But there comes a threshold where you do need them. The question remains, how do you recognize or determine this threshold? A lot of the times, a death is the wake up call.

IIRC they did have streets, but people were allowed to camp 'off the grid'.

"Regulations are written in blood."

The funny thing is that in spite of reinventing so much of it, the event still feels dangerous and leaves you to make your own decisions.

Burning Man still enables and allows dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on. The organization has an interesting take on this: they allow dangerous art, so long as it looks as dangerous as it is. They don't want participants to be surprised that something was dangerous, because they want you to be able to do your own reasonable risk assessment.

(Though, I think the really impressive installations are the ones that look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.)

For what it's worth, I think this is a great exercise that should be undertaken now and again: you may not realize the ways in which a system is good or bad until you endeavor to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.

In the case of Burning Man, there's structure that let's people be mostly safe by default, while supporting some reasonable risk taking. In the case of crypto, I think we've seen use cases where there's value in having a means of storing and transferring wealth outside of government control, which we saw the benefits of early on as governments tried to financially wall off groups like Wikileaks.

Does that mean we want all of the safe guards gone? No. Does that necessarily mean society and its structures are perfect and should never change? I think obviously, also no.

With the important difference that the cryptocurrency financial systems are backed by something with limited supply

so the comparison is pointless by their own admission

Not really. Around 50% of attendees have graduate or doctorate degrees. It selects for people that are smart, curious, wealthy, and not risk-adverse. This is very obvious if you’ve ever been.

The similarity is precisely what would make it an interesting comparator.

I don't have time to research this fully, but the first few papers that popped up showed that a lot of the casualty events from music festivals are due to incidents like mass stampedes or even motor vehicles, which I suspect would be much lower at Burning Man. On the other hand, deaths from drug overdose or "structural collapse" are probably higher at Burning Man.

Comparing like-for-like, or as close as you can get, is what enables these interesting comparisons. Pointing out that you're less likely to die of cancer or car crashes while attending burning is not helpful when you compare against population level statistics.

Article mentions age demographics and "selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors" right at the top.

Oblivious in such a painful? I'm still open to hearing a sound argument to back that up. Your arguments are more dismissive and did not address anything specific in the article you disagreed with.

Did you bother to read the article? This is covered.

This year of the 3 deaths, 1 was just a heart attack in someone around 60 yrs old (a ranger who was working, so not drug related most likely). The other fell from an installation. Some of these are literally just scaffolding with a couch on top or something - I climbed one and was terrified and even said "wow, I will be surprised if someone doesn't fall off this intoxicated at night".

Some people see that as a feature though - they want the danger and lack of regulation and safety. It's part of why they attend I guess.

note: it was my first time - i'm not a "burner", just wanted to finally see what all the hype was about

Not sure about that after it rains. After the last few years the death rate to quicksand may have increased a few billion percent.

This was just one web search away: https://www.aol.com/articles/burning-man-deaths-look-every-1...